The contours of the school choice debate are by now familiar to public policy students, but a lack of agreement about the appropriate weights to be given to the variables affecting the subject continues to splinter their ranks. On the surface, there appears to be a consensus that the latest scores on standardized tests will resolve the uncertainty as to which type of education, public or private, is most effective, but a dip into the literature quickly dispels any such hope. The only thing clear is that nonpublic schools, even with one financial hand tied behind them, do not perform any more poorly than public ones. Consequently, Viteritti wisely gives short shrift to the byzantine methodological distinctions made by re- searchers and, instead, focuses on the normative questions.

Upon receiving Jerald Waltman's book, the first thing I read was the dedication to the author's "coworkers at A. & W. Root Beer, Ruston, Louisiana, 1963­67." I like root beer, but I wondered whether a mistake had been made in sending me this book to review. It did not take long to realize no mistake had been made. This is a book that treats minimum wage as symbolic politics, but, more important, it entirely reexamines public policy.

Darrell West argues that elections, rather than stimulate debate over ideas and policies, have degenerated into con- tests in which candidates try to raise more and more money. The cost of campaigns has skyrocketed, the level of cynicism and apathy among voters has increased, and the perceived accountability of elected officials has been placed at risk.

John F. Witte has been prominent in the academic discourse surrounding market-like reforms of public education. In the two-volume Choice and Control in American Education (1990), Witte and his coeditor, William S. Clune, assembled an impressive collection of analytical essays and literature reviews that highlighted relevant theoretical concerns and showcased the insights from practice available at the time. In September 1990, Witte was appointed the state's evaluator of the pioneering Milwaukee, Wisconsin, voucher program.

There is little doubt that an abiding feature of international relations in the current period is the struggle to extend the rule of law to crimes of state. The 1998 detention in Britain of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, in response to a request for extradition issued by a Spanish judge, gave prominence to this quest. This development was further reinforced by the campaign to establish a permanent inter- national criminal court, which eventuated in a treaty signed in Rome by about 120 countries two years ago and is on its way to securing the 60 ratifications needed to bring it into force. Organized international society is far from the end of this journey; powerful governments, including our own, are not ready to submit their citizens or leaders to international procedures of accountability.

After a decade of market reforms, it is obvious to most observers that something has gone wrong in Russia. Some economic indicators suggest modest successes in instituting a market economy, but most of the evidence is clear that the economic and social crisis has far exceeded what might be expected in terms of a "transformation recession." Industrial and agricultural output is down substantially, capital renewal is not keeping pace with the retirement of old machinery, the nation is deindustrializing, real living standards have plum- meted, and investment capital is fleeing the country. The authors of this book conclude that "the Russian privatization program was nothing but a grandiose failure" (p. 6).

These two books are about two powerful regional political forces in India-the Shiv Sena of Maharashtra (with a focus on the city of Mumbai) and the Dravidianist parties of Tamil Nadu. Many readers of this journal may know these places by their older names: Mumbai is Bombay, and the state of Tamil Nadu and its capital city were once known as Madras. Both books, not coincidentally, have much to say about the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, which is perhaps the most dramatic change in the Indian political landscape in recent years. That, indeed, is the central theme of Banerjee's book, which investigates the Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai in 1993. Banerjee argues that the politics of Hindu nationalism provides the context for the riots. In Mumbai, the major political force articulating a Hindu nationalist agenda is the Shiv Sena (literally, the warriors of Shivaji, a legendary Maharastrian Hindu hero).

The Japanese party system has been in flux in recent years. In 1993, two groups defected from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and joined with the opposition to form a broadly based coalition government. A year later, the LDP regained power by creating a coalition government with its ideological opponent, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP). Both events shocked virtually everyone at the time. The LDP had been in power for so long-almost 40 years-that it seemed almost inconceivable that it could lose power. For just as long, the JSP had been the main opposition. By the 2000 election, a dozen parties had come and gone, the JSP's strength dropped to a very small fraction of what it was a decade earlier, and the LDP had to turn to various coalition partners to maintain its control of government. All this is quite puzzling to even close watchers of Japanese politics, because party politics, especially the role of opposition parties, has been a relatively understudied area. For those who want to make sense of how these events came to pass, Ray Christensen's Ending the LDP Hegemony will be very helpful.

This is a thoroughly revisionist study, in the best sense of the word. Starting from the conviction that a close look at marriage and divorce in China can open "a wide window onto what might be called the `interface' between state and society" (p. 14), Diamant sets out to capture a better sense of the quality of "everyday interactions between citizen and state" (p. 15). He uses these observations to shed light on larger questions about the degree to which citizens in differ- ent social strata may have regarded the state as legitimate or illegitimate, as well as the extent to which state interventions designed to alter power relations in both rural and urban society were effective.

A decade after communism's collapse, what do we have to report? For one thing, some states certainly have it easier than others. A handful of the postcommunist states located in close proximity to the West have made admirable progress in constructing viable market economies and meaningful insti- tutions of democratic representation, but a much larger group has yet to taste the fruits of what Western politicians in the 1990s called "market democracy." Among this latter group, some retain at the time of this writing a formal commitment to democracy, but others have never moved very far from the authoritarian cronyism where they started.

As recently as a quarter-century ago, virtually no one knew or cared about French nationality law and policy. But in the wake of the May-June events of 1968 there was a prise de conscience about international migration and its effects upon French society and the immigrants themselves. New Order, the then quite obscure extreme rightist group, began to organize protest rallies against illegal immigration. In 1974, the post of Secretary of State for Immigration was created to symbolize the growing concern accorded international migra- tion by the French government. Successive governments, whether rightist or leftist in orientation, pledged to recover control over migration.

Few scholarly observers of Chinese politics today would disagree with A. James Gregor's assessment that "little remains of the Marxism of Communist China" (p. 215) other than its use as an ideological subterfuge by the ruling party to bolster its claim to a monopoly on political power in that country. But few would agree with the central thesis of this book that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is best classified by scholars and responded to by Western policy- makers as "a variant of contemporary fascism" (p. 166).

Under an electoral system of single nontransferable vote (SNTV) with multiple-seat districts, each voter can cast only one vote and only for one candidate, surplus votes cannot be transferred between candidates, and seats go to those candi- dates with the plurality of votes. Initially crafted by Japanese oligarchs in 1900, this unique system was continuously em- ployed for Japan's lower house elections till 1995, with a brief interlude during the Allied occupation. The SNTV system has been in use in Taiwan since World War II and was adopted in Korea during the Fourth and the Fifth Republic (1973­88). It is ironic that academic interest in this electoral system should increase just when it is being abandoned in its birthplace, Japan, in a fin-de-siecle political act that also ended political dominance of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

In this important reappraisal of Africa's political evolution over an extended period, Jeffrey Herbst engages in a dialogue with scholars of comparative and African politics on the causes of state weakness and the possibilities for state redesign. Herbst argues that state consolidation in Africa has been complicated by the problem of extending authority over its distant territories. Low population densities have been a long-standing obstacle encountered by precolonial, colonial, and independent African rulers alike. It has proven expensive for leaders at the political center to project power over peoples and territories far from the capital city. As a result, rural areas have been neglected, particularly by colonial regimes, and urban areas have been favored in terms of public services and amenities.

Bibliography dealing with the armed conflict in Central America, aptly called crisis literature, was abundant until the latter part of the 1990s, although North American academi- cians paid little attention to Guatemala. Now two books have been published, both with titles that refer to the same phenomenon. The peace process that concerns Susanne Jonas corresponds to the termination of the violent revolu- tion in Rachel McCleary's work.

For communists, the "nationalities problem" has always been the major stumbling block to the realization of their social goals. Mao Zedong believed that it would take the longest to solve. "First, classes will be eliminated, then nations, and finally nationalities. Throughout the world it is the same" (p. 113). Inasmuch as policies on nationalities have been the Achilles' heel of the various Chinese communist experiments, it is surprising that it took so long for scholars, especially those in the West, to examine the mainland's largest ethnic minority, the Zhuang. Kaup's fine little book goes a long way to filling the void.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Ukraine's historic Declaration of Sovereignty, and the country will celebrate its first full decade of independence in August 2001. Yet, Ukraine's record as an independent state has been disap- pointing at best. Even after ten years, living standards for much of the population continue to fall. Development of civil society has been slow, if nonexistent. Political parties are very much nascent institutions. Opinion surveys indicate high levels of frustration among citizens, coupled with extremely low levels of perceived political efficacy. The economy re- mains dominated by large, inefficient state enterprises and collective farms, dinosaurs left over from the former regime. In many respects, Ukraine appears unable to move forward; the vision of its future has been shaped largely by its recent past.

In both these short volumes, Ruth Lane assumes an optimis- tic stance, generally within the mainstream of political sci- ence, and attempts to synthesize past and present trends in an effort to show progress. She argues in The Art of Comparative Politics that, despite the disparate approaches, real advances have occurred within the field. Her interpretative essay focuses on the recent history of the field, with an assessment of the behavioral movement during the 1960s and subsequent emphases on development, state, grassroots and peasant politics, and the new institutionalism. In Political Science in Theory and Practice she affirms that a core consensus has appeared in the independent investigations of prominent political scientists. Thus, a coherent working model of polit- ical behavior guides political scientists to understand political realities. She argues that this concrete model coincides with scientific realism and the current understanding of a philos- ophy of science.

Luigi Manzetti fills an important gap in the literature on market reforms in Latin America by providing a comparative analysis of privatization in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. He engages the literature on economic reform in developing countries by focusing on the implementation of this single policy and complements a burgeoning scholarship on the economics of privatization in the region. The main contribu- tion lies in underlining the relevance of political factors for explaining the success of privatization policies. The "South American" style, he suggests, reinforces the view of those who, like John Williamson and Stephen Haggard ("The Political Conditions of Economic Reform," in Williamson, ed. The Political Economy of Reform, 1994) and Guillermo O'Donnell ("Delegative Democracy," Journal of Democracy 5 [January 1994]: 53­69), associate the rapid implementation of market reforms with the concentration of executive au- thority at the expense of the checks and balances of liberal democracies.

Those who study the concept of representation are undoubt- edly familiar with the 1963 study by Warren Miller and Donald Stokes ("Constituency Influence in Congress," Amer- ican Political Science Review 57 [March 1963]: 45­56), which had a profound effect on scholars' understanding of the relationship or "congruence" between representatives and constituents. Others (see Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie, Participation in America: Political Democracy and Social Equality, 1972; Heinz Eulau and Paul D. Karps, "The Puzzle of Representation: Specifying Components of Responsive- ness," in Heinz Eulau and John C. Wahlk, eds., The Politics of Representation, 1978) have made their own distinguished contributions by venturing to conceptualize and measure representation in an effort to further our understanding of the relationship between the representative and the repre- sented. In the same mode, this collection of articles contrib- utes to the study of the mass-elite relationship by providing a variety of approaches, methods, and measures to broaden the literature.