132 Book No~s

Margaret Scammell, Designer Politics: How Elections are Won, (MacMillan/St. Martin's Press, London, 1995), xvi + 342 pp. In recent years, political marketing has become a key concept in the planning of vote-winning strategies. The approach of political marketing seeks deliberately to adapt a party's message to the needs and desires of the 'market', i.e. the electorate. The increasing use of devices such as focus groups to determine the tailoring of the message is one example. The book attempts to throw light on the extent to which politics has been moulded to fit the implications of the marketing strategy and discusses the implications for democracy. The focus is on the British Conservative Party and particularly on the Thatcher era.

Michael W Traugott and Paul J Lavrakas, The Voter's Guide to Election Polls, (Chatham House, Chatham, NJ, 1996), xvi + 208 pp. This is a straightforward and informative primer for the user of political polls in USA. The book should help the non-specialist reader to understand and evaluate reports of election poll results in the media.

Stephen White, Richard Rose and lan McAllister, How Russia Votes, (Chatham House, Chatham, NJ, 1996), xx + 317 pp. With the focus on elections and electoral behaviour this book analyses the opinions and expectations of Russian citizens about their new political system. In addition, it provides an account of constitutional and political developments in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the course of this era of change, a system with competitive elections has been established but, as the authors point out, democracy has hardly been consolidated in Russia. Russia has not yet experienced an orderly transition of power as a result of an election. The party system lacks a stabilizing base in the form of party identification or any other form of long-standing affective ties between voters and parties. Distrust towards parties is the prevailing attitude amongst the voters and support for the new political system is weak. The all-powerful presidency leaves little room for parliamentary accountability. The student of election systems will also note that the party-list system with a 5 per cent threshold which is employed to elect half of the members of the Duma leads to perverted consequences: thus half of the party list votes in the 1995 election were cast for parties that failed to pass the threshold. This path-breaking study draws on a rich data base which comprises a series of nationwide 'New Russia Barometer' surveys.