Crossing the Industrial Divide: State, Society, and the Politics of Economic Transformation in Malaysia . By Alasdair Bowie. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 222p. $40.00.

draw upon two broad sets of variables to estimate political life spans. The first set of variables taps attributes of the leaders and the situations in which they found themselves. Here they recorded, for example, measures of age, temporal position in the leadership queue, whether the leader came to power by constitutional or nonconstitutional means, and whether they had a military or civilian background before coming to power. The second set is directed toward measuring characteristics of the leader's country and include, among other things, prior colonial rule, economic growth, income levels, the magnitude of ethnic conflict, and size of population. The fundamental finding emerging from this study is simple, important, and intriguing. The best predictor of continued political survival is prior survival. Just as the cold, impersonal statistics of actuarial tables say, those who have survived have the best chance of surviving longer. There are some small wrinkles to this finding across different regions, but the result is generally robust. Why is this the case? At least two possibilities present themselves. One is that those who manage to survive some minimal undetermined length of time successfully consolidate their power and use it to increase their tenure by suppressing the opposition and/or rewarding their supporters. The rival to this is a sort of Darwinian explanation in which "less clever leaders get winnowed out earlier" (p. 98). Although it is disappointing that Bienen and van de Walle do not pursue these two models of survival further, it is nonetheless encouraging that they are able to establish the basic accuracy of their empirical generalization across a broad spectrum of time and space. The second part of the book reports in considerable detail the main elements of the data analyzed in the first part of the book. The data they report (understandably more limited than the total data set collected for the entire study) identify the state, its geographic region, the leader, the length of time the leader held office, the year of entry, whether entry/exit was constitutional, whether the leader was a member of the military, and how many separate times the leader was in power. Although the data are extensive and carefully reported, they are not without their curiosities and problems. It is, for example, curious that although data for many Third World nations (particularly in Latin America) extend well back into the nineteenth century, the data for the developed nations typically begin in the early part of this century. Thus, O'Higgins' tenure in Chile is recorded beginning in 1817; but British prime ministers begin only with Balfour in 1905. No explanation is offered for this, nor is there any speculation on what effect such a gap might have on the findings. Doubtless, anyone who is familiar with history will find things with which to quibble in the data. For example, is it accurate to regard the reign of Haile Selassie (1930-74) to have been uninterrupted, considering that he was forced into exile in London by the Italian occupation (1936-41)? Or can we consider Stalin as actually being the leader of the Soviet Union as early as 1924? Or how can it be recorded that de Rosas left power constitutionally in Argentina in 1852 when he fled after losing the battle of Caseros to insurgents abetted by both Uruguay and Brazil? There are a few other points on which the data seem questionable, but a data set of this sweep is inevitably open to doubt on the part of those with different information or views. The limits of the analysis and a few problems with the data should not, however, obscure the fundamental contribution of this book to our understanding of political survival. Moreover, it points the way for further exploration of the data and the testing of a variety of models that may account for the differing fortunes of political leaders.