Transitions and Non Transitions from Communism: Regime Survival in China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam. By Steven Saxonberg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 364p. $125.00.
the more interesting ones. There is a useful chapter by Allison McCulloch that provides a clear analysis of the central claims of centripetalism, drawing on empirical evidence from Republika Srpska, Sri Lanka, and Fiji. She concludes that in deeply divided places, the centripetalists' electoral system of choice, the alternative vote, is not likely to promote moderation. This chapter is complemented by the next one by Philippe Van Parijs and Kris Deschouwer, which puts forward a modest proposal for making Belgium's federal and consociational system work better. The idea is to modify its electoral system by creating a multimember district of seats with a pan Belgian configuration but with internal quotas of speakers. Benjamin Braude provides a fascinating comparison of the Ottoman and Safavid empires, contrasting Sunni and Shiite Islam and analyzing how they built inclusive political institutions. There are a number of lacunae in the treatment of power sharing systems. First, I believe that there is a tendency by the editors to employ an overbroad definition of power sharing. We should heed Samuel Issacharoff's warning that "with any theory that expands too far comes the risk of losing the parsimony that lends itself to testing" (p. 216) Second, there are a number of well known criticisms of consociationalism. It tends to "freeze" in place cultural practices or ethnic and national identities, likely reinforcing the causes of conflict. It is also said that it threatens certain cherished liberal values: individualism, equality of opportunity, or democratic competition (p. 412) Also, "crystallizing conflict at one point in time limits the range of electoral outcomes" (p. 216) In particular with respect to the "freezing identities" criticism, I think that the volume would have benefited from having a number of authors who tackled head on this criticism, although O'Leary does cover some of this ground in the Introduction. The volume does this for some of the standard criticisms aimed at centripetalism (see chapter 3) but does not do so well enough for consociationalism. Third, in Lijphart's classic formulation, consociationalism has four main components, with the first two being the most important: executive power sharing, territorial or nonterritorial autonomy, proportionality, and veto rights. Of these four elements, a number of chapters discuss veto rights, electoral systems, power sharing institutions, and proportionality versus parity, and so on. Regarding the element of autonomy, only one author explicitly deals with this component, Alfred Stepan on federacies, although other authors partly address this component (Braude, Bieber, etc. Just as there are thematic chapters on electoral systems and the mutual veto, it would have been better to see more discussion of autonomy, in particular because the classic literature on consociationalism has failed to evenmake a clear distinction between autonomism and federalism, which are two very different paradigms. (See Jaime Lluch, "Autonomism and Federalism," Publius 42 [no. 1, 2011] 134 61. Moreover, the one chapter that deals squarely with the segmental autonomy component is somewhat unsatisfactory. The Stepan chapter is an elaboration of Juan Linz and Stepan's previous collaboration on this same topic. As O'Leary states, the concept of federacy was invented by Daniel Elazar and has generally lived an underground existence in comparative politics. In the world of real substate national movements and parties, the concepts used are autonomism and autonomy. The vexed concept of federacy is used only in the academic literature by political scientists. Stepan insists on citing David Rezvani's work on federacies, which wrongly classifies Puerto Rico, the Basque Country, and Catalonia as federacies, none of which fit Linz and Stepan's definition of federacy (see Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan, et al. Crafting State Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies, 2011, p. 210) The Stepan chapter would have benefited from a close reading of the scholarship on territorial autonomies by Markku Suksi (especially on the Aland Islands Finland relationship) Thomas Benedikter, Francesco Palermo, and so on. These are all minor lacunae. Overall, this is the best edited volume I have seen to date on the current state of cutting edge research on power sharing systems.
Perspectives on Politics