Although Japan scholars have long been aware that media institutions facilitate state efforts to curtail the free flow of information within Japanese society, Closing the Shop is the first comprehensive treatment of this important topic. The book was well worth the wait.

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.

In this well-informed, theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, and highly innovative book, and in related articles that appeared recently in Political Research Quarterly (53 [March 2000]: 7-36) and World Development (28 [Octo- ber 2000]: 1821-35), Pierre Englebert proposes and tests the hypothesis that variations in vertical and horizontal state legitimacy account for variations in the developmental capac- ity and economic growth of African states and of Africa in comparison to other world regions. Developmental capacity, which combines an index of specific economic policies (em- phasizing a free market and human capital) and an index of good governance, is the crucial intervening variable between state legitimacy and growth.

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).

Comparative political economy has been transformed since the end of the 1970s. The explanatory value of class conflict, the power resources of social classes, and the social base of particular national models of political economy have been replaced by an emphasis upon the role of institutions in explaining both how contemporary political economies func- tion and their capacity to manage international economic integration. The fruits of this institutional turn have now emerged into a fully fledged new approach, as evidenced by the volume under review, by Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (edited by Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks, and John D. Stephens, 1999), and by a forthcoming volume, Varieties of Capitalism, edited by Peter Hall and David Soskice. These three books overlap to a great degree in both theoretical approach and list of contributors.

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.

Through an opening epigraph from Norman Maclean, Mar- garet Levi proposes a vivid analogy between the complexities of conscription and of fire: In both cases many causes intersect to produce particular events, yet the analyst's job is to tease truth from complexity. Seeking to clarify costly political consent in general, Levi astutely analyzes resistance to and compliance with calls to military service, a quintessen- tial case in which individuals face the choice of bearing large costs on behalf of benefits they will share little or not at all and to which their participation will make little difference. In the process, without ever quite saying so, she batters the postulate of universal self-interest that undergirds so much of rational choice argument in political science.

Gail Kligman analyzes the reproductive policies of the Ceausescu regime and the responses of experts and the population to those policies. Drawing on extensive interviews with ordinary men and women as well as experts and on archival research, the author provides a wealth of informa- tion about demographic trends and reproductive policies in Romania from the outset of the communist era to the violent overthrow of the Ceausescu regime in late 1989. Kligman traces the way in which communist leaders used legislation, measures to "protect" women in the workplace, propaganda, and control of the media and other sources of information to propagate their desired model of women and influence reproductive choices. She analyzes the role of key profession- als, such as demographic experts and, particularly, physicians and other medical personnel, in the making and implement- ing of reproductive policies. She also considers the role of international actors, including the United States, in perpet- uating the Ceausescu regime.

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.