Roderic Camp has spent a career studying Mexican elites. In Mexico's Mandarins, he culminates three decades of research with a capstone volume that examines Mexico's “power elite” in five sectors of society: politicians, military officers, clergy, intellectuals, and capitalists. Having previously published separate volumes on each of these groups, he extends that work by focusing on the critical roles that mentoring and net-working play in the formation, linkages, and socialization of Mexican power elites, defined as a small set of people who control a power structure and who are linked to one another within, and sometimes between, their spheres of influence (paraphrased from p. 12).

Camp gives structure to ideas that Mexicanists have been familiar with for as long as they have been traveling to and studying the country. Drawing on an impressive array of widely varied literatures, he introduces such notions as political socialization, mentoring, and networking to make the complex, opaque, personalistic style of Mexican politics both more intelligible and comparable to other cases. It is one thing to say, as anyone who has tried to traverse the twisted trails of Mexican politics has, “you have to know the right people to get things done,” and quite another to delineate the manner in which individuals become power elites, the connections and relation-ships between them, their social backgrounds, the sources of their political socialization, and their impact on public policies. Drawing on background information on nearly four hundred individual power elites and extensive interviews, Camp gives us the most detailed and best account to date of Mexico's elites. I know of no other study that comes close to it in both breadth and depth of coverage.

The most important contribution this book makes is its focus on the related concepts of networking and mentoring. By examining the roles of education, family background, geography, and social class, among others, Camp is able both to trace and explain patterns of networking and mentoring in Mexico. This gives us insight into how Mexican power elites exercise influence and how they reproduce themselves socially and politically. Perhaps more critically, he shows how such informal power networks can restructure formal organizations and institutions, as occurred during the economic reform process of the 1980s and the transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s.

According to Camp, such informal means of gathering and exercising power are more important in countries with relatively weak institutions. Thus, though his analysis is focused primarily on the Mexican case, its lessons are relevant to a host of developing nations with similar institutional weaknesses. In fact, this is one area where the author could have got-ten greater conceptual mileage out of his analysis. He draws many contrasts to the United States, noting the essential differences in institutional strength, and therefore power elite politics, between the two countries. At several points, he also draws brief comparisons to other developing countries. Such comparisons raise as many questions as they answer, however. Do similar patterns of power elite recruitment, socialization, networking, and mentoring occur in other countries, with similar institutional endowments? If not, why not? A full comparison would require an inordinate amount of detailed data on other countries, such as that which Camp presents for Mexico, but more conceptual mileage could be gotten out of this study with some limited but carefully selected case comparisons.

This raises a related point. How can we explain patterns of power elite politics? Camp does an excellent job of explaining changes in power elite composition and values (through changes in education patterns, for example). But he pays less attention to questions of power politics raised by his elite analysis. Why does the relative power of different elite groups change over time? How does influence over policy shift from group to group and over time? Camp offers some suggestive hypotheses to explain such patterns (e.g., the debt crisis empowered technocrats in the Bank of Mexico over other elite groups and gave them control over economic policy), but he does not develop them fully. It is likely that institutional dynamics, material interests, and external factors help deter-mine the winners and losers within the power elite and their relative influence over policy. To understand the role that power elites play in Mexican politics, we need to know why different actors want what they want, how they fight to get it, and how their power relationships with each other and other social actors and institutions vary. Such factors come up frequently during the narrative, but typically in an ad hoc manner that contrasts with Camp's more systematic treatment of the factors of elite socialization, for example.

The data and interpretations in this book are solid. While one could argue with the agglomeration of politicians, military officers, clergy, intellectuals and capitalists into a single category, Camp brings a tremendous amount of information to bear on these five distinct groups of elites. One minor quibble is that some of the relationships he highlights, such as the impact of adult residence or foreign education on elite values, may suffer from circularity problems. It is plausible to argue, for example, that more internationally oriented elites will choose to study abroad, whereas Camp's analysis suggests that it is the study-abroad experience that gives such people an international orientation. In the same vein, there are some apparently minor contradictions in this book. For example, Camp argues that Mexican elites use mentoring and net-working because formal organizational channels of influence are weak, yet he explains the relative lack of mentoring and networking by intellectuals as a function of the lack of structure and institutionalization in that realm (pp. 19 and 22).

In sum, despite the issues raised here, this is an excellent book that makes a major contribution to the study of elites in its focus on networking and mentoring. It is likely to become the standard source on Mexican elites, and required reading for all scholars of Mexican politics.