For communists, the "nationalities problem" has always beenthe major stumbling block to the realization of their socialgoals. Mao Zedong believed that it would take the longest tosolve. "First, classes will be eliminated, then nations, andfinally nationalities. Throughout the world it is the same" (p.113). Inasmuch as policies on nationalities have been theAchilles' heel of the various Chinese communist experiments,it is surprising that it took so long for scholars, especiallythose in the West, to examine the mainland's largest ethnicminority, the Zhuang. Kaup's fine little book goes a long wayto filling the void.

nyone who watched Soviet television before 1985, thecontrast between then and now could not be more striking.As with all Soviet media, television was centrally controlledand used by the Communist Party to communicate only theinformation deemed necessary by its leaders. The news wassanitized, dreadfully dull, and politically correct. The collapseof communist rule in Russia opened up space for alternativesources of political information to develop. News contenttoday is certainly more lively and attractively packaged, butthe emergence of autonomous, multiple sources of informa-tion has only partially been realized, as Ellen Mickiewiczmakes clear. Furthermore, an unfortunate legacy of theSoviet period remains alive in contemporary Russian practice.It is the principal thesis of this remarkably well-informedand readable book that now, as then, television news is a"zero-sum" game: Whoever controls the news, wins. Consequently,control over television news remains the criticalmechanism for gaining and holding political power, and it isthe consuming goal of those who would do so.

The media have always been major players in transitions from authoritarian rule toward democracy. For all the dis- cussion of the media as actors in these transitions and as the objects of political tug-of-wars, little has actually been said about how the media work or how they have been managed. The Rational Politician is the first look at the media in the East European transitions from communism to democracy.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Ukraine's historicDeclaration of Sovereignty, and the country will celebrate itsfirst 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 formuch of the population continue to fall. Development of civilsociety has been slow, if nonexistent. Political parties are verymuch nascent institutions. Opinion surveys indicate highlevels of frustration among citizens, coupled with extremelylow levels of perceived political efficacy. The economy re-mains dominated by large, inefficient state enterprises andcollective 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 recentpast.

From time out of mind, people have killed, maimed, and oppressed one another in two sorts of conflicts: over material interests (real estate, slave labor, agricultural surplus, war booty, and so on) and over what Max Weber would have termed "ideal interests" (conflicts over ultimate meanings, salvation, principles of justice, definitions of social order). Barrington Moore's classical and landmark study, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), explored the first mode of conflict in the making of modern nation-states. All social scientists are forever in his debt for that effort. It ranks as one of the most important contributions to the fields of comparative and historical sociology.

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 aneffort to show progress. She argues in The Art of ComparativePolitics that, despite the disparate approaches, real advanceshave occurred within the field. Her interpretative essayfocuses on the recent history of the field, with an assessmentof the behavioral movement during the 1960s and subsequentemphases on development, state, grassroots and peasantpolitics, and the new institutionalism. In Political Science inTheory and Practice she affirms that a core consensus hasappeared in the independent investigations of prominentpolitical scientists. Thus, a coherent working model of polit-ical behavior guides political scientists to understand politicalrealities. She argues that this concrete model coincides withscientific realism and the current understanding of a philos-ophy of science.

Luigi Manzetti fills an important gap in the literature onmarket reforms in Latin America by providing a comparativeanalysis of privatization in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru. Heengages the literature on economic reform in developingcountries by focusing on the implementation of this singlepolicy and complements a burgeoning scholarship on theeconomics of privatization in the region. The main contribu-tion lies in underlining the relevance of political factors forexplaining the success of privatization policies. The "SouthAmerican" style, he suggests, reinforces the view of thosewho, like John Williamson and Stephen Haggard ("ThePolitical Conditions of Economic Reform," in Williamson,ed. The Political Economy of Reform, 1994) and GuillermoO'Donnell ("Delegative Democracy," Journal of Democracy 5[January 1994]: 53­69), associate the rapid implementationof market reforms with the concentration of executive au-thority at the expense of the checks and balances of liberaldemocracies.

This intriguing volume is a direct challenge to Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (1979); by inserting "ideology" into the title, Parsa claims that Skocpol left out something important. He makes good on his effort to dem- onstrate the importance of ideology in recent Third World revolutions, but the book offers far more than that. Several authors have compared the Iranian and Nicara- guan revolutions, which occurred in 1979, but to my knowl- edge this is the first book-length treatment to add the Philippines revolution against Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

Stephen Padgett is highly regarded for his scholarship on parties and other aspects of politics in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the present work he focuses on the "hesitant" emergence of associational activity in the postcommunist societies of eastern and central Europe, with particular emphasis on economic interest groups in eastern Germany. His tightly written book seeks to document and, above all, explain this state of affairs. The retarded growth of interest groups in the region is an important and relatively neglected topic, at both the theoretical and empirical levels aimed for here. It is also a development that has run counter to the once widely expected emergence of a vigorous pluralist civil society that would accompany the region's transition to market economics and democratic politics.

Those who study the concept of representation are undoubt-edly familiar with the 1963 study by Warren Miller andDonald Stokes ("Constituency Influence in Congress," Amer-ican Political Science Review 57 [March 1963]: 45­56), whichhad a profound effect on scholars' understanding of therelationship or "congruence" between representatives andconstituents. Others (see Sidney Verba and Norman H. Nie,Participation in America: Political Democracy and SocialEquality, 1972; Heinz Eulau and Paul D. Karps, "The Puzzleof Representation: Specifying Components of Responsive-ness," in Heinz Eulau and John C. Wahlk, eds., The Politicsof Representation, 1978) have made their own distinguishedcontributions by venturing to conceptualize and measurerepresentation in an effort to further our understanding ofthe 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 avariety of approaches, methods, and measures to broaden theliterature.