Avenues of Participation Family, Politics, and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo by Diane Singerman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, 272 pp.

Abstract

Singerman's work calls for the field of political science to redefine its notions of political participation in the context of developing societies. Determining the efficacy of the state's distribution of public goods and measuring the degree of popular participation in politicaJ activity are two of the five components of political development in the literature on which young political scientists have cut their teeth for several decades (Almond and Verba, 1963 ). Singerman is not challenging these notions, but rather marking the territory opened for her research on the informal economy and the so-called household politics since the earlier works of development theory gained ascendance.
Arguments regarding the importance of the informaJ economy have been made earlier with regard to Egypt, notably by such scholars as Mah­moud Abdel-Fadil ( 1975, 1980), John Waterbury (1983), Robert Mabro (1974), Abdel Khalak and Tignor (1982), and Ibrahim Oweiss (1990). Other research examining the household level of the economy has been done by Homa Hoodfar (1988, 1990), with whom Singerman bas collab­orated, and by such CEDEJ participants as Nadia Khouri-Dagher, Ragui Assaad, and others (Egypte Recompositions 1988) ...