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.

nyone who watched Soviet television before 1985, the contrast between then and now could not be more striking. As with all Soviet media, television was centrally controlled and used by the Communist Party to communicate only the information deemed necessary by its leaders. The news was sanitized, dreadfully dull, and politically correct. The collapse of communist rule in Russia opened up space for alternative sources of political information to develop. News content today is certainly more lively and attractively packaged, but the emergence of autonomous, multiple sources of informa- tion has only partially been realized, as Ellen Mickiewicz makes clear. Furthermore, an unfortunate legacy of the Soviet period remains alive in contemporary Russian practice. It is the principal thesis of this remarkably well-informed and 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 critical mechanism for gaining and holding political power, and it is the 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.