Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 10, 2007

State repression includes harassment, surveillance/spying, bans, arrests, torture, and mass killing by government agents and/or affiliates within their territorial jurisdiction. Over the past 40 years, the systematic study of state repression has grown considerably. The development of this work, however, has been uneven. Though unified in their focus on the problem of order (i.e., trying to ascertain how political authorities wield coercive power amid potential and actual domestic challengers), different scholars tend to emphasize distinct aspects of the topic. Consequently, a great deal of progress has been made in specific areas but others have lagged behind. In this review, I attempt to identify the dominant traditions in the repression literature, the core empirical findings, and some persisting puzzles.

Understanding the role of law and courts in American politics and policy making is inherently complex. The dominant response to this problem has been to specialize narrowly in Supreme Court decision making. The problem is that American politics and policy making are inherently interactive and thus cannot be easily parsed into component parts. Consistent with this observation, a growing literature assumes that courts must be studied from an interbranch perspective, which holds that American politics and policy making emanate from interaction among overlapping and diversely representative forums. The result is studies that analyze how law and courts fit into broader political and policy-making processes and reveal the political significance of seemingly technical legal matters. By redescribing courts and judicial decision making in political terms, interbranch analysis not only enriches the study of judicial behavior but also promises to bring law and courts back into the mainstream of the study of American politics and public administration—where they belong.

[N]o skill in the science of government has yet been able to discriminate and define, with sufficient certainty, its three great provinces—the legislative, executive, and judiciary. … Questions daily occur in the course of practice which prove the obscurity which reigns in these subjects, and which puzzle the greatest adepts in political science.

James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 37 (1788 [1987], p. 244)

Neopluralism is one of a class of research findings or social science models—such as elitism, pluralism, and corporatism—that refer to the structure of power and policy making in some domain of public policy. Originating from Robert Dahl's pluralism model in Who Governs? (1961), neopluralism evolved in the study of American politics through discarding or modifying some of Dahl's ideas, while adding new concerns about agenda building, the logic of collective action, special-interest subgovernments, social movements, advocacy coalitions, and the theory of political processes. Neopluralism is normally a finding of complex action in policy systems, but neopluralism does not assume that complexity implies fairness of representation, nor does it assume interest group elimination of autonomous action by governmental agencies.

Most European countries are examining how they have sought to integrate immigrants in the past and how they might change their policies to avoid some of the problems exhibited in immigrant and minority communities today. Discrimination and issues of racism, including the rise of anti-immigrant radical right parties, have become important, as evidenced in part by the passage of the European Union's Racial Equality Directive in 2000. This essay reviews comparative research in political science on immigrant integration in Western Europe. It discusses multiculturalism and assimilation, party politics, antidiscrimination policy, and policy at the European Union level.

Louis Hartz's “liberal tradition” thesis, which argued that the United States was born and has remained essentially “liberal,” has been the subject of vigorous and sustained criticism in recent years. Prominent among that criticism has been the charge that the thesis cannot explain “the politics of exclusion”: the process whereby members of particular social groups (especially racial groups) have been denied equal access to the rights enjoyed by other Americans. As such, many scholars have sought to replace the thesis with alternative accounts of the political identity of the United States. This review critically analyzes these new accounts. Three in particular stand out from the field: the “multiple traditions” thesis, the “liberalism as exclusion” thesis, and the “liberal multiplicity” thesis. I describe and criticize each in turn before concluding that the thesis closest to the original Hartzian view offers the most to future students of American politics.

We review the meaning of the concept of framing, approaches to studying framing, and the effects of framing on public opinion. After defining framing and framing effects, we articulate a method for identifying frames in communication and a psychological model for understanding how such frames affect public opinion. We also discuss the relationship between framing and priming, outline future research directions, and describe the normative implications of framing.

Political geography is one of the most exciting subdisciplines to emerge from the “spatial turn” in the social sciences. Arising largely within the discipline of geography, political geography has deep implications for political science, and yet these implications have not yet been widely recognized among political scientists. Conversely, political geographers have not yet profited enough from the rich field of political science. Political geography has the potential to dramatically transform many areas of established political science research. We focus on two: (a) the study of “contextual effects” on political behavior and (b) the study of governance by applying the “new institutionalism.” By spatializing the basic premises of these political science subfields, researchers can find new ways of looking at old questions. We conclude that political scientists should move beyond territorial questions of geography and begin thinking about the intrinsic spatiality of all political action, events, and institutions.

With a focus on Latin America, this literature review considers the extent to which electoral systems affect different aspects of parties and party systems. We find that standard electoral system variables fail many empirical tests that try to tie them to any facet of parties or party systems. Still, methodological considerations regarding interactions with party strategies, party organization, and many contextual variables loom large, so we cannot reject the hypothesis that electoral systems are influential. Analyses, therefore, must go far beyond formal electoral rules generally or a simple focus on single aspects of electoral rules (such as the district magnitude) when trying to explain political behaviors.

Among advanced democracies, the United States has traditionally been unique owing to the absence of ideological mass political parties. American parties’ scholars have nevertheless traditionally viewed stronger and more ideologically distinct national parties as essential to improve the quality of the American democratic process, a view reflected in the 1950 APSA report, Toward a More Responsible Party System. In the following decades the American parties appeared to weaken still further in all aspects, but this apparent party decline in fact signified a transition to a contemporary American party system with more polarized parties similar to those envisaged by the 1950 report. It remains doubtful, however, that American democracy has been enhanced by these developments. Ironically, the advent of more ideologically coherent parties has also made party scholars more aware of the potentially unhealthy side effects that may attend such a development in a separated governing system.

This article reviews efforts to study the impact of money in politics in democracies outside of the United States. In recent years, democracies around the world have begun to publish increasing amounts of data on candidate and party finance. Although much of this information is partial, and some of it is even deliberately misleading, it has nevertheless opened up many new opportunities for researchers to systematically examine the role of money in politics. The development of theories about the origins and impact of political finance regimes and regulations has not kept pace with the newly emerging data. As a result, the field offers increasing scope for researchers to make policy-relevant contributions. Much of the recent research in this area asks how much, and in what ways, the amounts and sources of funding matter. Do either or both of these influence elections or other political outcomes? This article begins by reviewing attempts to answer these questions, then considers some of the promising new areas of investigation in this field.

I review recent efforts by political scientists and economists to explain cross-national variation in corruption using subjective ratings, and examine the robustness of reported findings. Quite strong evidence suggests that highly developed, long-established liberal democracies, with a free and widely read press, a high share of women in government, and a history of openness to trade, are perceived as less corrupt. Countries that depend on fuel exports or have intrusive business regulations and unpredictable inflation are judged more corrupt. Although the causal direction is usually unclear, instrumenting with income as of 1700 suggests higher development does cause lower perceived corruption. However, controlling for income, most factors that predict perceived corruption do not correlate with recently available measures of actual corruption experiences (based on surveys of business people and citizens that ask whether they have been expected to pay bribes recently). Reported corruption experiences correlate with lower development, and possibly with dependence on fuel exports, lower trade openness, and more intrusive regulations. The subjective data may reflect opinion rather than experience, and future research could usefully focus on experience-based indicators.

This article surveys the rationales for and effects of legislative bicameralism. At heart, second chambers facilitate representation for groups or interests that otherwise might be ignored. They do so not only by making more legislative seats available to legislators elected from different districts and possibly by different rules, but more importantly by giving more legislators a voice in the legislative process. Traditional views of bicameralism hold that second chambers can matter because their members have the authority to veto or at least delay bills, so that whether they do in fact affect legislative content depends on whether and to what extent majority preferences differ across chambers. A new current of legislative research focuses on how the existence of a second chamber provides a forum for bargaining over policy and, in the process, creates a need for policy bargains within parties as well as across chamber majorities that would be unnecessary in a unicameral legislature.

The predominant normative justification for research on economic voting has been its essential role in shaping democratic accountability. A systematic examination of this literature reveals, however, that economic voting is highly contingent on two critical moderating factors: voters themselves and the political context in which they make judgments. The trend toward a better and more realistic understanding of economic voting produced by almost four decades of empirical research has created what I label “contingency dilemmas” for the field's normative foundations because economic voting does not function as envisioned by advocates of democratic accountability. This essay reviews these empirical findings and critically examines how they affect the economic voting paradigm. It argues that, when viewed from a normative perspective, contingent accountability is clearly problematic, and it calls for a reconsideration of the normative underpinnings of the economic voting paradigm in light of the current state of knowledge.

Both economists and political scientists have made important contributions to the field of public policy analysis. Economists have stressed the roles of competition, natural monopolies, information asymmetries, externalities, incentives, and federalism in promoting or undermining efficiency. Political scientists, in contrast, have focused more on the mechanics of agenda change, the likelihood of nonincremental policy change, and how the policy-making process varies across issue areas. Economists have influenced government decisions that led to the creation of public utility commissions, emissions trading, revenue sharing, and health maintenance organizations. Political scientists have influenced government decisions on the design of political institutions (environmental impact statements, legislative redistricting) and on the choice of public policies (criminal justice strategies, welfare reform). In general, the presence of a scholarly consensus facilitates the use of policy analysis. However, interest group politics and electoral incentives also play an important role.

The reissue of Carl Schmitt's most important works, Political Theology and The Concept of the Political, offers the opportunity for reflection on Schmitt's pervasive influence over myriad fields of political and legal studies and for re-evaluation of the basic tenets of his thought. In these works, the conservative Weimar jurist unveiled his theory of ”the exception,“ put forth his ”friend/enemy“ thesis of politics, and insisted that Enlightenment rationality had undermined the European state, leaving it vulnerable to the forces of atheism, anarchism, and socialism that were taking root in Soviet Russia. Among other issues, this article explores Schmitt's Janus-faced critique of liberalism: For Schmitt, liberals are either not worthy to be considered enemies because they deny the inevitability of mortal combat, or they are, in fact, consummate enemies because they successfully punish and destroy adversaries under the cover of universal, humanitarian principles. The article also interrogates the status of morality in Schmitt's conception of the political—specifically, whether the categories of good and evil inform the distinction between friend and enemy, or whether the political operates in a sphere completely autonomous of morality and theology.

Studies of how economic globalization influences domestic politics have disproportionately focused on questions of policy rather than politics. Recently, however, a number of studies have examined how economic globalization influences politics—specifically electoral politics. This article surveys these new studies, which have often appeared in disparate research areas, and argues that they constitute considerable evidence that international economic integration influences seemingly domestic political processes.

In this review article, I identify the key questions raised by the treatment of electoral systems not as causal influences on party systems but as effects or byproducts of party systems. Framing these questions in the context of the classic consequences-oriented study of electoral institutions, I first review the classic approach, which treats electoral systems as causes, and explore the potential implications when electoral systems are viewed instead as outcomes of party systems. I then survey a variety of principal explanations of the origins and change of electoral laws, followed by a focus on several of the more explicitly defined models of this process. I conclude by discussing—and contesting—the notion that except for exceptional founding episodes of institutional choice, electoral systems eventually stabilize as equilibrium institutions.