Book Reviews : The French Democratic Left 1963-1969: Toward a Modern Party System. By FRANK L. WILSON. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971. Pp. 258. $8.95.)

• Date: 01 December 1972
• Published date: 01 December 1972
• DOI: 10.1177/106591297202500424
• Subject Matter: Articles

802
There is frequent reference to delays in the implementation of Italian measures to
aid the South, but no analysis of the political factors which lie behind these delays.
Patronage and clientelism receive only heavily veiled references, despite their obvious
importance in the reality of Italian regional development policy.
Dust-jacket claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the authors make little
effort to &dquo;analyze the factors which have influenced the choice of measures,&dquo; even
though their implicitly comparative framework should have facilitated such an
analysis. Finally, and most disturbing, Allen and MacLennan consistently adopt the
perspective of national policymakers, viewing the problems from Rome or Paris,
rather than from Calabria or Brittany. There is little discussion of divergent re-
gional interests (except as inimical to the national economic interest), of regional
power relations, of regional cultural loyalties, of regional initiatives. Surprisingly,
there is no mention at all of recent efforts in each country toward establishing
regional governments. All this makes the authors’ plea for the centralization of
regional planning suspect, since the centralist bias seems to have been built into
their analysis from the start. This will be a useful source-book for political scien-
tists interested in European regional problems, but it avoids many of the questions
that most students of comparative public policy will think important.
ROBERT D. PUTNAM
University of Michigan
The French Democratic Left 1963-1969: Toward a Modern Party System. By
FRANK L. WILSON. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971. Pp. 258.
$8.95.)
The author starts from an observation that modern party systems in the West
tend to develop catch-all parties and therefore a broad political consensus. The
alternative is a polarized multiparty system or a polarized dualism, the latter being
the more dangerous of the two. It is in this direction that he finds the French party
...