While interesting for its technique and conclusions, Frye's book is even more interesting for the general issues that its technique and conclusions raise about political science. He asks why the pace and consistency of economic reform vary from one postcommunist state to another. He distinguishes a) the transfer of economic property out of state into private ownership from b) the introduction of the institutions—laws, courts, agencies, banks, a stock market—needed to regulate a market economy. Postcommunist states vary both in how quickly they have introduced both kinds of reform (“pace”) and in whether institutions have kept pace with privatization (“consistency”).

Frye quotes Galileo's injunction to “measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so” (p. 48). He takes quantitative indices of economic reform from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, established in 1991 to finance projects that promote reform in postcommunist states. Experts consulted by the EBRD have scored each of 25 postcommunist states annually since 1990 on eight dimensions of economic reform. The EBRD readjusts these experts' scores on each dimension to a set of scores from 1.0 to 4.33 in increments of 0.33. A postcommunist state receives a score of 4.33 on some dimension when its reforms become “roughly equivalent to the level found in a developed market economy” (p. 72, esp. n. 4). In order to investigate the overall pace of reform, Frye subjects the annual scores on the eight dimensions to a principal component analysis. This analysis produces a combined reform score for each of the 25 states. The annual average combined score for 1990–2004 varies from 3.44 for Turkmenistan to 9.42 for Estonia (p. 75). With Estonia today resembling a “developed market economy” far more than Turkmenistan, the ranking does put the extremes in the right order.

Statistical analysis serves to test a hypothesis concerning pace by regressing the annual combined reform scores on a) democracy and b) a variable called “polarization.” Frye measures democracy by each postcommunist state's Freedom House score for political liberty, with states scoring 1–3 considered democracies and states scoring 4–7 considered autocracies. “Polarization” measures the percentage of seats in the legislature occupied by the largest opposition party in each state, modified by how much that party disagrees with the executive over whether to conduct economic reform. In other words, polarization means “strength of opposition to economic reform,” although opposition from very strong executives sometimes equates with quite minor opposition from legislatures that are often very weak. Repeated regression analyses varying how the measures of these three variables are treated and incorporating selected control variables generally concur that democracy accelerates the pace of economic reform and strength of opposition retards it. Neither should be any surprise, but the positive correlation of democracy with economic reform does contrast with some recent experience elsewhere, especially in Latin America (p. 9).

Frye then examines the effect of democracy and opposition on the consistency of reform. The dependent variable is the state's EBRD score for privatization of large enterprises minus its EBRD scores for competition reform, securities reform, corporate governance, and bank reform. Here, Frye notices something that is a real contribution to the ongoing disagreement between the advocates of immediate rapid privatization and those calling for first creating the institutional conditions for privatization to succeed, as if these were technical problems in economic theory rather than political issues. He notices that democracies facing strong opposition to privatization can buy off the opponents by delaying institutionalization. Delay in introduction of independent judiciaries, enactment of legal changes, empowerment of regulatory agencies, or establishment of transparent securities markets enables opponents of reform—seated in the ministries controlling production and funding their erstwhile patrons among holdover communist politicians—to reap excess profits by means of corrupt transactions, abuse of monopoly advantages, or exploitation of other market imperfections that new institutions would otherwise correct. Thus, delay in institutional reform compensates the opponents for the loss of state ownership inherent in privatization. Reforms are therefore consistent in postcommunist democracies where opponents' weakness makes buying them off unnecessary, inconsistent in favoring privatization over institutionalization in democracies where opponents are strong, and consistent in impeding both privatization and institutionalization in postcommunist autocracies where the opponents remain in power (p. 94).

While this empirical procedure is painstaking and produces one novel finding, its logic is questionable. To explain why a Freedom House score and a polarization score should covary with an index compiled from EBRD scores, Frye argues an electoral logic. He divides post-communist electorates into the political economist's conventional three groups, in this instance gainers from economic reforms, losers from economic reforms, and recipients of transfer payments (bureaucrats not assigned to economic ministries controlling state-owned enterprises, the unemployed, and pensioners). He introduces a simple assumption about how members of these groups vote: “[P]oliticians and citizens exchange transfers and rents for political support” (p. 26). While this formulation is too cryptic for its meaning to be sure, usually “rents” mean opportunities to earn from property rights that, in a postcommunist country, politicians establish by their reforms. “Transfers” usually mean subsidies determined by the politicians. Both of these are egocentric rewards to voters. “Political support” usually means a vote or anything that encourages a vote (e.g., donations, activism, demonstrating). If so, the citizens use their votes to buy egocentric rewards from the politicians.

Yet it is well established that citizens who decide whether to vote by considering egocentric rewards resolutely decide to abstain, at least if their cost–benefit calculus is accurate (Thomas R. Palfrey and Howard Rosenthal, “Voter Participation and Strategic Uncertainty,” American Political Science Review 79 [March, 1985]: 62–78; Aaron Edlin, Andrew Gelman, and Noah Kaplan, “Voting as a Rational Choice: Why and How People Vote to Improve the Well-Being of Others,” Rationality and Society 19 [August, 2007]: 293–314). Voting costs every postcommunist citizen too much for him or her to purchase the transfers and rents, because the probability is infinitesimal that any citizen's vote will determine which politician wins the election and therefore whether the citizen receives the reward. Accordingly, Frye's assumption seems to entail that postcommunist citizens vote for reasons known to induce them not to vote. Passing over the free-rider problem for voters in silence or haste is standard in the literature on political economy, but it is still an elementary violation of the “law of noncontradiction” described in any introductory textbook on logic. Violating the law of noncontradiction renders any argument invalid.

Frye then explores why politicians proposing economic reforms ever encounter strong opposition. By assumption, none of the three types of voters composes a majority of any postcommunist electorate, but any two always do (p. 27). Consequently, as long as private markets outperform state socialism, by Frye's logic politicians introducing reforms always receive increased tax revenues that they can use to buy the transfer recipients' votes, with the result that reformers always win a majority. Frye accordingly observes that two different proxies for transfers—pensions as a share of GDP and health spending per capita—are larger in the postcommunist democracies where the pace has been rapid because the opposition is weak (pp. 97–99). Hence, why opposition is ever strong requires explanation, and Frye turns to “two conditions” said to explain it. Polarization occurs “where both national identity pre-dated the arrival of communist rule and communist parties exercised relative autonomy in foreign policy” (p. 145). Opponents dominate reformers (and polarization is weak) in Central Asia and Azerbaijan because no one could call on preexisting national identity to gain support for economic reform against communist rulers, while in Albania, Romania, and Russia, communist opponents of economic reform could call upon their record of defending national sovereignty. (Frye's 25 cases exclude Serbia for reasons first mentioned on p. 153, n. 14, by inference—from comparing the vague text to the EBRD's archive—because the EBRD started scoring Serbia only in recent years.)

How this assumption that national identity motivates voters is reconcilable with Frye's previous assumption of egocentric voting, I cannot see. Both alleged conditions are also factually perplexing. Frye writes that “in the multiethnic states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, sovereign national communist parties ruled in the name of national groups occupying positions of primacy within the political system” (p. 153). Soviet and Yugoslav communists did claim to rule in the name of the people, but the peoples in question were Soviets and Yugoslavs, respectively, not Russians or Serbs, although there was always tension over how important Russians and Serbs were to the respective conceptions of a people. Postcommunist Russians, Romanians, Serbs, and Albanians are said to support communist opponents of privatization, despite the costs to putative majorities of inconsistent reform, because Leonid Brezhnev, Nicolae Ceausescu, Tito, and Enver Hoxha stood up for national sovereignty of the state, supposedly representing the dominant ethnic group. While Frye manages to find scholars whom he can quote in defense of these claims about Soviet-era politics (pp. 153–55)—for four states, seven scholars!—the whole issue is the subject of a huge, contentious literature that is, furthermore, so plagued by the general debility of Sovietological scholarship that it led no one, myself included, to anticipate the overthrow of communism. All four leaders can also be seen as having aimed to protect the clienteles that sustained their personal power, and in Romania, Yugoslavia, and Albania, what personal clienteles needed protection against was Brezhnev's interference as head of the Soviet party. Accordingly, the other three all objected to certain Soviet foreign policies, such as the 1968 assault on Czechoslovakia by which Brezhnev restored his veto over appointments there, although generally the Soviet Union received considerable support from them for its foreign policy as a whole. Frye supplies no evidence, nor am I aware of any in that huge literature, either that populaces at the time mistook their tyrants' monopoly over choice of appointees for defense of national sovereignty or that postcommunist voters' support for communist candidates is due to the resurgent popularity of Brezhnev, Ceausescu, Tito, or Hoxha.

While one might make a better case for Soviet, Yugoslav, and Albanian resistance—but not Romanian—against the Wehrmacht, connecting autonomous postwar clientelism before 1989 to postcommunist voting since 1989 seems very doubtful. Why would Tito's defense of Yugoslav sovereignty motivate support for communist opponents of privatization among voters in Macedonia, whose sovereignty Tito suppressed? Bulgaria and Ukraine, where communist rulers slavishly followed Moscow's foreign policy or exercised no foreign policy autonomy whatsoever, also are countries so polarized that communist candidates have even won elections. Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, and Moldova, none with any recent record of national statehood before the communist period, display polarization scores close to Russia's; by one of Frye's measures, the Kyrgyz and Macedonian scores exceed Russia's.

Frye's methodology encourages him to overlook a much simpler explanation for why democracy correlates with privatization and why both vary across postcommunist states. He writes, “Nature chooses a government” (p. 27). Of course this clause is not descriptive; it is the conventional opening move of a sequential game. Still, it deliberately writes off previous history. Postcommunist governments arose from mass protests in certain regions that left holdover dictators in other regions no alternative to secession or overthrow. The protesters wanted the opposite of state socialism; that is, they wanted democracy and the market. These were, however, institutions historically associated with Europe and lands of European settler colonialism (several of the latter occupy seats on the EBRD board), institutions that the originators of state socialism themselves were self-consciously rejecting when they monopolized economic activity in a dictatorship. Populations in the former communist states who have historically considered themselves European have embraced the twin European institutions despite their well-known divisive effects. Populations who have historically disputed whether they are Europeans (in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), or who have long found Russian patronage a protection against foreign threats (in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia), have been more divided over the European institutions. Among people who consider themselves Turco-Persians, European institutions find little resonance. National identity does indeed make the difference, but its roots run far deeper than recent foreign policy autonomy or previous independent statehood. And shared identities do what rents and transfers cannot: They motivate voting (e.g., Alexander A. Schuessler, A Logic of Expressive Choice, 2000).

While his book is thought provoking, occasionally insightful, and often well informed about developments after 1991 (especially in four case studies on Bulgaria, Poland, Russia, and Uzbekistan), quoting Galileo reaches far in excess of Frye's grasp. It is not that political science can consist of no more than “perspectives on politics.” It should be science. Yet contrary to Frye's claim that in their “strengths and weaknesses” the EBRD scores are “like all data” (p. 72), not all data are alike. Stopwatches resolve with near certainty the question of who sprints fastest, but panels of judges fail to resolve endless controversy over who skates best. Frye's data come from panels of judges. Relying on judges, what his regression equations test is a hypothesis that does not even concern postcommunist variation in economic reform. Instead, the equations test whether European judges' scoring of postcommunist reform agrees with New York judges' scoring of postcommunist political liberties and with one New Yorker's (his own) and two Bernese judges' scoring of postcommunist polarization. Relying on judges is not science; it is merely the judges' perspective. Regression of their perspectives can avoid tautology only if the judgments with different labels (reform, liberty, polarization) can avoid mutual contamination. But that remains very doubtful when all the judges are exposed to a shared scholarly discourse that itself is unreliable because based on no more than judgments. Mathematical manipulations designed for timing by stopwatches will, when applied to judges' scoring, produce overconfidence. Scientific procedure in political science would avoid these methods, not exalt them.

If there is an underlying uniformity in European and settler colonialist judges' perspective on various aspects of market democracy, the statistical association Frye finds is surprisingly weak, that is, exhibits a high degree of random error in judging. Error was why Galileo recommended replacing learned opinion with measurement.