Book reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 34 (2002) 343384 347

to participate and wages. They conclude that the adoption of HPWSs represents a win/win
situation for workers and employers, and that public policies that promote their adoption
might facilitate economy-wide adoption of these practices. Further, the decision of some U.S.
manufacturing firms to pursue cost-cutting, rather than performance-enhancing, strategies may
prove dangerous for the economy as a whole.
While I found the specificity of their study and their results important, I am left with one
major unanswered question. If performance-enhancing strategies are superior to cost-cutting
ones, why do cost-cutting strategies continue to be adopted? In particular, I was left won-
dering how to reconcile the win/win analysis of HPWSs presented in Manufacturing Advan-
tage with conflict-based theories of labor processes. Can these work systems be implemented
economy-wide, or are they dependent on some form of a segmented labor market? Are there
some competitive pressures that cannot be tackled with HPWSs? Nevertheless, I think the
book will provoke interesting and important discussions about the relationships among work
systems, worker participation, and firm and worker outcomes.

June Lapidus
Department of Economics
Roosevelt University
430 S. Michigan Avenue
60605-1394 Chicago, IL, USA
E-mail address: jlapidus@roosevelt.edu
PII: S0486-6134(02)00141-9

References

Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York:
Monthly Review Press.
Parker, M., & Slaughter, J. (1988). Choosing sides: Unions and the team concept. A labor notes book. Boston:
South End Press.

Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World

195090
Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando Limong;
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, xvii + 321 pp.

The wave of democratization in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the somewhat smaller back-
wash of multi-hued thermidorean reactions, has added a fresh urgency to an old debate re-
garding participation and prosperity. Is democracy the natural preserve of rich nations? Does
democracy help to secure material progress? And are democracies somehow more vulnera-
ble in the face of economic misfortune than autocracies? In Democracy and Development,
a panel of four authors, headed by Adam Przeworski, explores these fundamental questions
from a quantitative standpoint. Przeworski is Professor of politics at York University, and has
348 Book reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 34 (2002) 343384

published extensively on democratization and its relationship to the market. The co-authors,
Alvarez, Cheibub, and Limongi, are based at the universities of DePauw, Yale, and Sao Paolo,
respectively.
The authors commence the study by providing a detailed definition of what constitutes a
democracy. They are generally cynical about dominant party systems. However, a distinction
is drawn between countries such as Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party held power for
many years but readily yielded office on losing an election, and Malaysia, where there is some
evidence to suggest that paternalistic ruling styles would result in a great reluctance to give
up power. More problematic would be a case like Botswana, with little political oppression
and seemingly no electoral fraud, but where the ruling party has won every election since
independence, its willingness to yield power being untested. In the end, the authors choose to
err on the side of caution. They reiterate that democracy is a system where the incumbents
lose elections and leave office when the rules so dictate . . . . If a regime is not democratic, we
consider it to be a dictatorship of one stripe or the other (54).
Whilst it is a truism to state that democracies are more likely to be prosperous, the exact
nature of this relationship is rather more contentious. In chapter 2, the authors suggest that
democracies are rather more likely to survive in rich rather than poor societies. However, they
found no evidence to support the argument that there is a certain threshold of development,
which, once crossed, would make the observance of democracy predictable (137). They reit-
erate, however, that the currency of the relationship between democracy and development is
chance and probability, not certainty.
In the following chapter, the authors explore more closely the relationship between political
regimes and economic growth. This is of considerable interest, given that the perennial claim
to legitimacy by authoritarian regimes from Singapore to Chile has been on the grounds of
superior economic performance. The principal conclusion of their analysis is that there is no
relationship between democracy and development; there is no solid evidence to suggest that
dictators have a better track record than democratic governments or vice versa (178). In chapter
4 the authors reveal that dictators have a stronger track record than democratic governments in
one key respect: dictators seem far more adept at getting into wars (211). Indeed, democracies
generally do not wage war with each other. Although socio-political unrest is more common
in democracies, such unrest is only likely to retard growth in dictatorships.
Returning to some of the themes raised in chapter 2, in chapter 5 the authors explore the
relative prosperity of dictatorships versus democracies. Here the evidence is overwhelming: in
dictatorships, life is relatively short, but is over-compensated for by high fertility rates (265).
A more general conclusion reached is that democracies are more likely to survive in countries
with higher per capita incomes. As global per capita incomes are gradually rising, there is more
chance that democracies will survive; this is particularly good news as the ranks of dictators,
for a variety of reasons, is rapidly thinning. Based on the patterns of the past, the authors
thus predict that democratization will prove increasingly sustainable. Unfortunately, the less
prosperous areas of the world may not benefit from this. The authors predict that dictatorship,
and its grim bedfellows war and poverty, are likely to persist in large areas of Africa for the
foreseeable future.
Inevitably, many of the volumes findings are open to contestation. Particularly contentious
is the very definition of democracy; when does a dominant but multi-party system cease to be
 Book reviews / Review of Radical Political Economics 34 (2002) 343384 349

democratic? The authors propose a rule of alternation. A country is defined as a dictatorship

if the ruling incumbents have held office for more than two terms, or have held office without
being elected for at least part of their tenure of office (29), where there is evidence to suggest
that the rulers would not yield power should they finally lose an election. Moreover, the authors
suggest that dominant party systems are unlikely to be democratic (28). A different definition
would probably yield conflicting results; the same could be the case if different weightings
were assigned to the various variables analyzed. This is, of course, a problem that besets
quantitative studies of this nature. Nonetheless, despite these limitations, the methodology
does provide critical general insights that would not be attainable from a more qualitative
approach.
In contrast to the sweeping claims on the relationship between democracy and develop-
ment made by a disparate army of ideologues, both armchair and practitioner, mostly on the
right wing of the political spectrum, this study is both scholarly and measured. It is extremely
broad ranging in its scope and depth of coverage. If its ambition makes some of the find-
ings more open to contestation than would otherwise be the case, this is not necessarily a
drawback. Hopefully, this will serve to encourage further debate, the refinement of the quan-
titative tools employed, and lead to more detailed insights into the prosperity-participation
nexus. The fact that many countries, and indeed a large part of an entire continent, seemingly
remain locked in a grim cycle of misrule and poverty underscores the failure of neoliberal
macroeconomic policy prescriptions, and adds a fresh urgency to the need to develop progres-
sive alternatives, areas that go beyond the scope of this volume. Unfortunately, identifying
the scale of a problem is but one step towards a solution. The Przeworski et al. volume un-
derscores the close relationship between economic performance, the nature of governmental
structures, and the sustainability of democracy, and as such provides vital ammunition to
those within the broad neo-institutionalist camp in their struggle against the hegemony of
neoliberalism.

Geoffrey Wood
Coventry University
Priory St., CV1 5FB Coventry, UK
Tel.: +44-1784-268113; fax: +44-2676-888810
E-mail address: bsx182@coventry.ac.uk
PII: S0486-6134(02)00142-0

Corporate Predators: the Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman; Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999, 213
pp., $14.95 pb

In Corporate Predators: the Hunt For Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy, authors
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, respectively of the Washington, D.C. based Corporate
Crime Reporter and Multinational Monitor, explore a representative breadth of issues directly
and indirectly related to corporate malfeasance in the United States and abroad.