Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 1, 1998

The idea that democratic states have not fought and are not likely to fight interstate wars against each other runs counter to the realist and neorealist theoretical traditions that have dominated the field of international politics. Since the mid-1970s, the generation of new data and the development of superior analytical techniques have enabled evaluators of the idea to generate impressive empirical evidence in favor of the democratic peace proposition, which is reinforced by substantial theoretical elaboration. Some critics argue that common interests during the Cold War have been primarily responsible for peace among democracies, but both statistical evidence and intuitive arguments cast doubt on that contention. It has also been argued that transitions to democracy can make states war-prone, but that criticism too has been responded to persuasively. The diverse empirical evidence and developing theoretical bases that support the democratic peace proposition warrant confidence in its validity.

This review evaluates the most recent studies of social capital in political science and argues that they have strayed considerably from the original treatment of social capital, which casts it as endogenous. Recent treatments have recast social capital as a feature of political culture and thereby treat values as exogenous. These two approaches emanate from incompatible premises and have fundamentally different implications. Thus, efforts to combine the two approaches are rendered unproductive by inevitable inconsistencies of internal logic. Moreover, empirical tests of the exogenous social capital approach are deficient: They are selective in their use of data and employ ad hoc procedures at crucial junctures. We therefore urge a return to the treatment of social capital as endogenous.

The study of compliance with international agreements has gained momentum over the past few years. Since the conclusion of World War II, this research agenda had been marginalized by the predominance of realist approaches to the study of international relations. However, alternative perspectives have developed that suggest that international law and institutions are important influences on the conduct of international politics. This review examines four perspectives and assesses their contribution to understanding the conditions under which states comply with international agreements. Despite severe conceptual and methodological problems, this research has contributed significantly to our understanding of the relationship between international politics and international law and institutions.

Leo Strauss revitalized the potential of political philosophy, which had been buried by positivism and historicism. Strauss was both impressed by and dissatisfied with the contemporary criticism of rationalism. Studying the history of political philosophy, he discovered that classical rationalism is not open to the criticism of rationalism because it does not begin by assuming the goodness of philosophy. Classical political philosophy overcomes nihilism not by proving the existence of universal rules of conduct, but by seeing what is highest in man. Modern philosophers departed from the classical approach in an unsuccessful attempt to meet the challenge of revealed religion. This failure led them to engage in a political-scientific project whose ultimate purpose was to refute revealed religion. Although the project failed, it led to the concealment of the most fundamental problems of human beings. The recovery of those problems is Strauss's great legacy.

Political events in various parts of the world during the past decade have attracted new attention to the strengths and weaknesses of federal solutions as a means of resolving political problems. Conceptual distinctions have been drawn between “federalism” as a normative term, “federal political systems” as a descriptive term referring to a broad genus of federal arrangements, and “federation” as a particular species within that genus. The extensive literature on the design and operation of federal systems is reviewed, with particular attention to asymmetry among constituent units, degrees of noncentralization, financial relationships, the impact of federative institutions and the courts, and the development of multi-tiered federal systems. Federal processes illustrated by patterns of formation and evolution, the significance of the increasingly global economy, intergovernmental relations, the impact of cultural, ethnic and national diversities, and the pathology of federal systems are also considered.

I organize this review and assessment of the literature on the causes of war around a levels-of-analysis framework and focus primarily on balance of power theories, power transition theories, the relationship between economic interdependence and war, diversionary theories of conflict, domestic coalitional theories, and the nature of decision-making under risk and uncertainty. I analyze several trends in the study of war that cut across different theoretical perspectives. Although the field is characterized by enormous diversity and few lawlike propositions, it has made significant progress in the past decade or two: Its theories are more rigorously formulated and more attentive to the causal mechanisms that drive behavior, its research designs are more carefully constructed to match the tested theories, and its scholars are more methodologically self-conscious in the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods.

This chapter reviews the vast and sprawling literature that seeeks to illuminate and explain the effects of mass communication on American public opinion. Klapper's famous verdict of “minimal effects,” delivered some 40 years ago on this subject, was faithful to the evidence available to him at the time, but now seems quite mistaken. With sharp improvements in design, measurement, and analysis, and with keener understanding of human information processing, minimal effects have given way to an entire family of real effects: agenda-setting, priming, framing, and even, looking in the right places, persuasion.

A new reading is proposed for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by the late Thomas S. Kuhn, in which the sort of resistance to change he describes as integral to paradigm shifts is found to be less common in the contemporary hard sciences but useful and applicable in understanding political and social science.

Although the notion of the party family, with the various cross-national and cross-temporal similarities it implies, underlies much of the standard work on comparative party politics, it nevertheless remains one of the most under-theorized and least specified approaches to the general classification of parties. Four of the principal approaches that are used to identify party families are discussed: origins and sociology, transnational links, policy and ideology, and party name. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach are assessed, as are some of the more generic problems that may be associated with all four approaches. The two approaches that appear best suited to the specification and classification of party families are those based on the origin of parties and their ideology, but these should be developed in parallel rather than as alternatives. Both tap into what parties are rather than what parties do and hence are more likely to uncover core identities and shared political goals.

This review offers a synthesis and critical assessment of the reinvention movement in the United States. Focusing on the work of David Osborne, the National Performance Review, and the Winter Commission, it describes the key themes that define this movement and then assesses them from two major perspectives. The first perspective probes whether reinvention ideology provides a plausible prescription for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of public agencies. The second focuses on the implications of reinvention for accountability and related democratic concerns. The degree to which reinvention ideas appear to be taking root at the various levels of the federal system also receives attention. The authors conclude that the reinvention movement should not be dismissed as the latest fad, but rather as the fount of several plausible hypotheses that should be tested further. They also suggest that the American political system will place major, although not necessarily insurmountable, barriers in the way of sustaining reinvention.

We consider the relationships between the collective preference and non-cooperative game theory approaches to positive political theory. In particular, we show that an apparently decisive difference between the two approaches—that in sufficiently complex environments (e.g. high-dimensional choice spaces) direct preference aggregation models are incapable of generating any prediction at all, whereas non-cooperative game-theoretic models almost always generate prediction—is indeed only an apparent difference. More generally, we argue that when modeling collective decisions there is a fundamental tension between insuring existence of well-defined predictions, a criterion of minimal democracy, and general applicability to complex environments; while any two of the three are compatible under either approach, neither collective preference nor non-cooperative game theory can support models that simultaneously satisfy all three desiderata.

A significant and growing literature on international relations (IR) argues that domestic politics is typically an important part of the explanation for states' foreign policies, and seeks to understand its influence more precisely. I argue that what constitutes a “domestic-political” explanation of a state's foreign policy choices has not been clearly elaborated. What counts as a domestic-political explanation is defined by opposition to systemic or structural explanations. But these may be specified in several different ways—I spell out two—each of which implies a different concept of domestic-political explanations. If a systemic IR theory pictures states as unitary, rational actors, then a domestic-political explanation is one in which domestic-political interactions in at least one state yield a suboptimal foreign policy relative to some normative standard. Or, if a systemic IR theory pictures states as unitary, rational actors and also requires that attributes of particular states not enter the explanation, then a domestic-political explanation is any one that involves state characteristics other than relative power. Implications of each approach are developed, and examples from the literature are provided. I also address the question of whether there is a sharp distinction between a “systemic theory of international politics” and a “theory of foreign policy,” arguing that there is an important and natural sense in which they are the same.

Narratives—the stories people tell—provide a rich source of information about how people make sense of their lives, about how they construct disparate facts and weave them together cognitively to make sense of reality. Narrative analysis is particularly useful in providing insight on the cognitive process and on the role of culture in shaping any human universals.

We begin by defining narrative as a concept and as a methodological tool in social science. We provide intellectual background on how narrative developed in literary theory and how it has been applied in cognitive analysis. We then discuss narratives as sites of cultural contestation and the role of narrative in the construction of social theory. We conclude on a note of caution, suggesting the need for care when interpreting narratives.

The examination of feminist research on political representation, public policy, and political institutions indicates that a shift in emphasis from the dichotomous variable of sex to the concept of gender is taking place. The shift is incomplete partly because many feminists believe both concepts are necessary to good research design. While mainstream political scientists have become more willing to use sex as a background variable in their research, they have not come to terms with notions of gender, a reluctance that may cause them to make important mistakes in their analysis of politics. Gender is a concept that suggests another major reexamination of what we think about political life. Its implications are insistent and far-reaching, offering a productive means of understanding politics.

In recent years, volatility in the electoral fortunes of major political parties in Western democracies has invigorated scholarly debate over the roles that parties play in the political process and the positions that they occupy in the public mind. Data from national election surveys and inter-election public opinion polls reveal that parties have declined in the minds of citizens in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain over the past 40 years. Varying combinations of decreasing percentages of strong party identifiers, increasing percentages of independents and nonidentifiers, and increasing individual-level instability in party identifications indicate that the electorates of all three countries have experienced significant “dealignments of degree.” The three cases are not atypical; survey evidence indicates that partisan attachments have weakened in a wide variety of mature democracies.

The state of the academic study of the American presidency has been under constant review for the past 20 years. Attention was originally directed to deficiencies in the level of empirical knowledge about the presidency, but this was soon overtaken by greater concern with the methodological, conceptual, and theoretical underpinnings of presidency scholarship. Significant advances have now been made in the epistemology of presidency scholarship. This chapter returns to the earlier concern and identifies the structural constraints encountered by researchers in this field and the major areas of scholarly neglect. It seeks to shift further discussion about the state of presidency research to the fundamental causes of that neglect.

To understand protest in America, one must understand protest and one must understand America. More generally, the study of resistance against authority may adopt two foci: authority (structure) and resistance (action). The leading practitioners of the structuralist approach to contentious politics—McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly—have jointly systematized their ideas. This synthesis, which I call Synthetic Political Opportunity Theory (SPOT), exerts domination and hegemony over the field. Its upstart rational action challenger is the Collective Action Research Program (CARP). I outline the basic presuppositions of SPOT and CARP and describe their different approaches to the structure-action problem of constituting social order. I then explore the potential of a CARP-SPOT consortium. I conclude that synergisms of the perspectives are possible but that trade-offs are inevitable: strong on action, weak on structure and vice versa; strong on resistance, weak on authority and vice versa; and strong on protest, weak on America and vice versa. Hence, we need creative confrontations, which should include well-defined combinations rather than grand syntheses, of rationalist and structuralist approaches to contentious politics.

Justice is a concept at the core of many fundamental debates in political and ethical theory. In this essay I consider what is at stake in one important debate, the effort to divorce conceptions of justice from conceptions of the good. Focusing primarily on the work of John Rawls, I analyze the underlying logic of arguments based on the notion that principles of justice can be the product of “reasonable agreement” among people who hold conflicting conceptions of the good. In doing so I consider four primary criticisms of the argument: The project is a false one in that, while it purports to be neutral, it in fact gives primacy to a particular, liberal, individualistic conception of the good on which the project is grounded; the project is inadequate because its construction of the deliberation and decision-making process fails to take account of important social factors; the project is misguided in that it fails to take account of actual social practices and, thus, fails to capture the complexity of the demands on a theory of justice; and the project is destined to fail because a theory of justice adequate to the challenges of modern society cannot be constructed in an abstract, thought-experiment way.