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Who Gets What? The New Politics of Insecurity. Edited by Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Margaret Weir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 320p. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Basta’s empirically based conversion to sociological institutionalism or his emphasis on the symbolic dimensions of nationalist mobilization. Likewise, his advocacy of meaningful small-n comparisons and recognition of the role of agency within the structural parameters set by earlier accommodationist outcomes, seems compelling to this student of Yugoslavia’s dissolution where it could be argued that a long history of center-periphery relations, medium-term institutional outcomes, critical junctures, and political entrepreneurship all played a role in the escalation spiral that led to the state’s denouement. The creation of a subfield of comparative politics devoted to the study of multinational states seems reasonable, even if Basta’s methodological reasoning implies that comparative cases in this subset would need to be grouped according to historical or developmental affinities. The last point leads me to the first criticism.While there is nothing wrong with the term “multinational states,” Basta neglects the state-nation concept developed by Stepan, Linz, and Yadav. For those authors, cases like Canada and Spain in which peripheral nationalists hold tenuous allegiance to a democratic state are different from the “pure multinationalism” of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, where ethnic heterogeneity was institutionalized, and socialist republics behaved like states. Secondly, does regime type make a difference? As Basta recognizes, Yugoslavia was the only case in which secessionist crisis occurred in the context of communist authoritarianism. Are Canada and Spain able to hold together better because they are democratic? Thirdly, does rule of lawmake a difference? In the case of Yugoslavia, constitutional clauses on the right to national self-determination played a critical role in legitimizing secessionism once the communist party lost its function of extraconstitutional power broker. By contrast, in Spain courts stopped the Catalan secessionist drive, and it is not clear how peripheral nationalists can overcome this legal obstacle. Finally, can strategies of accommodation be compared across the capitalist/communist divide? In Yugoslavia, the state remained redistributive by ideological fiat (“socialist solidarity” with undeveloped regions) while the lack of a unified market made ethnically based socialist republics into quasisovereign political-economic blocs. By contrast, in Spain labor migration to more developed Catalonia could dilute peripheral nationalism, while the interests of business elites in cooperation with Madrid rested on stronger economic incentives. In other words, while markets and democratic politics produce cross-cutting cleavages, the rule of law inhibits secession. As these examples show, while Basta’s pioneering study of multinational states may not offer conclusive answers, it stimulates the reader to formulate questions and propose hypotheses that could become part of a new research program in comparative politics. Who Gets What? The New Politics of Insecurity. Edited by Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Margaret Weir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 320p. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper. doi:10.1017/S1537592722001852