Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 11, 2008

State failure is characterized by government predation and the militarization of civic society. Drawing on data from the study of civil war, state failure, and violence, this article explores the roles of per capita income, ethnicity, and democratization. It argues that public revenues are more relevant to state failure than are private incomes; that several configurations of ethnic groups can lead to violence; and that state failure is far more likely in intermediate democracies than in full democracies or aristocracies.

Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years, and why do some see it experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and Weber's ideas are used in this essay to explore debureaucratization efforts since the late 1970s and the rediscovery of bureaucracy since the mid 1990s. One conclusion is that there has not been a monotonic development toward bureaucratization, as argued by Weber, or debureaucratization, as argued by his critics. Several normative and organizational components have coexisted; the significance of each component and their relationships has varied over time. Although elements of a theoretical framework are suggested, no great optimism for a comprehensive theory of bureaucratization and debureaucratization is offered. Institutions, agency, and macro forces all matter, but there is no agreement regarding the conditions under which one factor matters more than the others.

Democracy requires that citizens' opinions play some role in shaping policy outcomes, including in foreign policy. Yet, although the literature on public opinion and foreign policy has made great progress in recent decades, scholars have reached no consensus concerning what the public thinks, or thinks about, with respect to foreign policy; how it comes to hold those opinions; or whether those opinions influence (or even should influence) foreign policy. In this article, we first review the extensive gains in scholarly knowledge in the area of public opinion and foreign policy over the past several decades, emphasizing relatively recent work. We then suggest a framework, based on the concept of market equilibrium, aimed at synthesizing the disparate research programs that constitute the literature on public opinion and foreign policy. To do so, in addition to considering the relationship between leaders and the public, we incorporate a third strategic actor, the mass media, which we believe plays a critical role alongside citizens and elites in shaping the public's attitudes about, and influence on, foreign policy. Our goal is to clarify the multifaceted relationships between these actors and foreign policy outcomes.

The question of what the ancient Greeks can tell us about democracy can be answered by reference to three fields that have traditionally been pursued with little reference to one another: ancient history, classical political theory, and political science. These fields have been coming into more fruitful contact over the past 20 years, as evidenced by a spate of interdisciplinary work. Historians, political theorists, and political scientists interested in classical Greek democracy are increasingly capable of leveraging results across disciplinary lines. As a result, the classical Greek experience has more to tell us about the origins and definition of democracy, and about the relationships between participatory democracy and formal institutions, rhetoric, civic identity, political values, political criticism, war, economy, culture, and religion.

In recent years, the judicialization of politics worldwide has expanded its scope to encompass what we may term “mega-politics”—matters of outright and utmost political significance that often define and divide whole polities. In this article, I explore the scope and nature of judicialization of this kind. I begin by identifying the characteristics of the judicialization of mega-politics and by surveying the main explanations for its emergence. I then illustrate the various forms and manifestations of the judicialization of mega-politics through recent examples drawn from jurisprudence of courts and tribunals worldwide. Next, I explore recent studies that advance a strategic “judicialization-from-above” account, which emphasizes support from the political sphere as a necessary precondition for judicialization of pure politics. To further illustrate this point, I survey patterns of political reaction to recurrent manifestations of unsolicited judicial intervention in the political sphere in general, and unwelcome judgments concerning contentious political issues in particular.

This essay examines the recent use of the concept of institutions in economics and political science, and the impact of institutions on economic growth and democracy. The discussion includes the definition of institutions, the question of endogenous and exogenous origins of institutions, the role of fixed and flexible institutions, and the relations among different types of institutions. Particular attention is given to recent books by Avner Greif and by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson.

How have economic historians understood the role of politics in shaping country differences in economic development? An impressive recent literature can be sorted out according to the degree of “human agency” at work. At the low-agency end are perspectives that stress geography, which is unalterable, leaving little room for human action and hence no room for politics. At the other end are arguments stressing deliberate, self-aware actions, hence choice, hence a substantial role for politics. In between are arguments where some choice occurred in the past or at a specific moment, but little since then. What drives development? Two lines of argument are vigorously debated: explanations that stress human capital and explanations that stress institutions. Within each camp can be found variance on the degree of agency and hence on the role of politics. Both vary as well on how they envisage society and its interaction with both institutions and human capital.

In the early 1990s, popular discontent with politics in Italy, New Zealand, and Japan led to the enactment of new electoral systems in all three countries. The results of the reforms have been mixed, as they have dramatically altered politics in some cases but in others have been a great disappointment to many observers. This essay examines the reforms and the conditions under which they successfully addressed the problems of their party systems. The cases highlight the limitations of using electoral systems to explain political outcomes that are not direct effects of electoral rules.

Political science traditionally has either ignored biology in favor of purely environmental explanations for political phenomena or merely ruminated about the likely role of biology, leaving data-based research on biopolitics in dangerously short supply. Currently, attention to the apparent genetic basis for political and social orientations holds the greatest promise of advancing empirical biopolitics. Thus, in this essay, we orient behavior genetics research in the larger framework of biology and politics, confront its normative implications, describe the techniques involved, assess the strengths and weaknesses of commonly employed data and procedures, and describe the next steps in this research stream. Because these next steps involve molecular genetic work, we provide some background genetic information, but we mainly urge political scientists to join interdisciplinary teams so that nature and nurture can both be employed in ongoing efforts to understand the sources of mass-scale human politics.

With the enormous expansion of scholarship on this subject, “rule of law” has come to mean different things—ranging from security and order to the operations of courts and the administration of justice. We review the various streams of theoretical and empirical research by academics and practitioners, emphasizing the connections to economic development. The core logic is that security of property rights and integrity of contract underpin, respectively, investment and trade, which in turn fuel economic growth and development. However, property rights and contracts rest on institutions, which themselves rest on coalitions of interests. Formal institutions are important, but, particularly in developing countries, informal institutional arrangements play a significant part as well. These considerations lead us to caution against an exaggerated confidence in the ability of development assistance to implant new institutions for the rule of law.

Over the past three decades, the United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. The emergence and consolidation of the US carceral state are a major milestone in American political development.The explosive growth of the prison population and the retributive turn in US penal policy are well documented. But the political causes and consequences of this massive expansion are not well understood. This is starting to change. During the past decade or so, scholars in criminology, sociology, and law, recently joined by a few political scientists, have produced outstanding works on the connection between politics and the origins of the carceral state. Recently, the wider political consequences and analytical implications of the carceral state are a new and expanding area of interest. The carceral state has grown so huge that it has begun to transform fundamental democratic institutions, from free and fair elections to an accurate and representative census. The findings of scholars of the carceral state prompt us to rethink claims about issues in the study of American politics that may seem far afield from criminal justice, including voter turnout and the “vanishing voter,” the achievements of the US model of neoliberal economic development in the 1990s, and the triumph of the modern Republican Party in national politics. Scholarship on the carceral state also raises other important issues about power and resistance for marginalized and stigmatized groups.

Regulations that govern the social and environmental impacts of global firms and markets without state enforcement are a relatively new dimension of global business regulation. The growth of such voluntary “civil regulations” reflects both the expansion of legitimate authority in the global economy outside the state and the increasing use of alternative regulatory instruments to govern firms, including self-regulation, market-based instruments, and soft laws. In response to global social activism, many firms have adopted voluntary regulatory standards to avoid additional regulation and/or to protect their reputations and brands. Activists have targeted highly visible firms and have been willing to work cooperatively with them. The most important civil regulations are multi-stockholder codes, whose governance is shared by firms and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and which rely on product and producer certifications. Such codes face the challenge of acquiring legitimacy and of persuading both firms and NGOs of the value of their standards. The emergence of civil regulation addresses but does not resolve the challenge of making global firms and markets more effectively and democratically governed.

Following closely the practice of peacekeeping, the literature on the subject has come in one small wave and then two larger ones. The first wave, during the Cold War, includes classic works focusing mainly on peacekeeping in wars between states. The second wave, at first inspired by the boom in peacekeeping shortly after the end of the Cold War, soon reflected disillusionment and focuses largely on failure and dysfunction, despite significant cases of success. The third and most recent wave also reflects a resurgence in peacekeeping but is newly concerned with systematic and methodologically rigorous analysis (both quantitative and qualitative) of basic empirical questions about the effects of peacekeeping and the sources of peacekeeping outcomes. Recent empirical studies have demonstrated peacekeeping's effectiveness in maintaining peace, but related questions persist concerning the use of force, transitional administrations, which organizations most effectively keep peace, perspectives of the “peacekept,” and effects on democratization.

The newest “new institutionalism,” discursive institutionalism, lends insight into the role of ideas and discourse in politics while providing a more dynamic approach to institutional change than the older three new institutionalisms. Ideas are the substantive content of discourse. They exist at three levels—policies, programs, and philosophies—and can be categorized into two types, cognitive and normative. Discourse is the interactive process of conveying ideas. It comes in two forms: the coordinative discourse among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the public. These forms differ in two formal institutional contexts; simple polities have a stronger communicative discourse and compound polities a stronger coordinative discourse. The institutions of discursive institutionalism, moreover, are not external-rule-following structures but rather are simultaneously structures and constructs internal to agents whose “background ideational abilities” within a given “meaning context” explain how institutions are created and exist and whose “foreground discursive abilities,” following a “logic of communication,” explain how institutions change or persist. Interests are subjective ideas, which, though real, are neither objective nor material. Norms are dynamic, intersubjective constructs rather than static structures.

Opposition to economic liberalization has intensified since the late 1990s, with Latin America often standing at the forefront of new social and political movements that challenge market globalization. The revival of social protest and populist or leftist political alternatives has shattered the technocratic consensus around neoliberal policies in the region. By demanding an expanded set of social citizenship rights, these movements are also contesting the terms under which popular sectors were reincorporated politically under the new democratic regimes of the 1980s. This “second” historical process of mass political incorporation differs in fundamental ways from that associated with the process of labor incorporation in the first half of the twentieth century. It is marked by a more pluralistic set of social subjects, a more decentralized organizational structure, and more fluid patterns of institutional development. Existing scholarship often fails to explain variation in the patterns of social and political mobilization, due to both methodological and theoretical limitations—in particular, a tendency to focus on outcomes with little variation on the dependent variable, and a failure to engage theoretically with the literature on social fragmentation and demobilization. There is thus a need to problematize the process of mobilization by conducting more rigorous comparative research on a broader range of social responses to market liberalization.

The game theoretic study of coalitions focuses on settings in which commitment technologies are available to allow groups to coordinate their actions. Analyses of such settings focus on two questions. First, what are the implications of the ability to make commitments and form coalitions for how games are played? Second, given that coalitions can form, which coalitions should we expect to see forming? I examine classic cooperative and new noncooperative game theoretic approaches to answering these questions. Classic approaches have focused especially on the first question and have produced powerful results. However, these approaches suffer from a number of weaknesses. New work attempts to address these shortcomings by modeling coalition formation as an explicitly noncooperative process. This new research reintroduces the problem of coalitional instability characteristic of cooperative approaches, but in a dynamic setting. Although in some settings, classic solutions are recovered, in others this new work shows that outcomes are highly sensitive, not only to bargaining protocols, but also to the forms of commitment that can be externally enforced. This point of variation is largely ignored in empirical research on coalition formation. I close by describing new agendas in coalitional analysis that are being opened up by this new approach.

Democratic theorists have paid increasing attention to problems of political representation over the past two decades. Interest is driven by (a) a political landscape within which electoral representation now competes with new and informal kinds of representation; (b) interest in the fairness of electoral representation, particularly for minorities and women; (c) a renewed focus on political judgment within democratic theory; and (d) a new appreciation that participation and representation are complementary forms of citizenship. We review recent innovations within democratic theory, focusing especially on problems of fairness, constituency definition, deliberative political judgment, and new, nonelectoral forms of representation.

After discussing issues related to the conceptualization, measurement, and statistical analysis of data on generalized trust, I survey recent empirical work (mainly from about 2000–2007) on this topic. First, results concerning cross-country differences in the level of generalized trust and the dynamics of these levels are presented. Then comes an investigation of empirical work on the determinants of generalized trust, covering contributions focusing on the impact of civic society, quality of institutions, culture and values, and ethnic heterogeneity. In these studies, generalized trust is treated as the dependent variable. After that, I survey recent empirical work on societal impacts of generalized trust, covering research on the impact of generalized trust on economic outcomes, on politics and “good government,” and on the welfare state. Here, generalized trust is treated as an independent variable. I conclude with a short assessment of where we stand and how research on generalized trust may proceed from here.

Forms of convenience voting—early in-person voting, voting by mail, absentee voting, electronic voting, and voting by fax—have become the mode of choice for >30% of Americans in recent elections. Despite this, and although nearly every state in the United States has adopted at least one form of convenience voting, the academic research on these practices is unequally distributed across important questions. A great deal of literature on turnout is counterbalanced by a dearth of research on campaign effects, election costs, ballot quality, and the risk of fraud. This article introduces the theory of convenience voting, reviews the current literature, and suggests areas for future research.

Little controversy remains about how the United States has changed demographically since the mid-1960s. Far more controversial is whether this change is bringing about a new politics of race. This article argues that a key to settling this debate is a clearer specification of the identity-to-politics link—the nexus from a population defined by shared racial and ethnic labels to a collective group politics based on those definitions. The article articulates some potential pitfalls in how this nexus is commonly specified in empirical research. It then proposes that researchers should be mindful of five processes that are typically lumped together in linking shared demographic categories to common political destinies: definition, identification, consciousness, venue selection, and choice. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential utility and limitations of unpacking these five processes in our analysis of the identity-to-politics link.

Low levels of female labor force participation contribute to female underrepresentation in democratic polities, both by reinforcing traditional voter attitudes toward women (a demand-side feature) and by constraining the supply of women with professional experience and resources who are capable of mounting credible electoral campaigns. Female labor force participation, however, is only part of the story. Comparative analysis suggests that electoral systems have a strong, systematic effect on the extent to which women's workforce participation boosts female political representation. In candidate-centered political systems, where seniority is an important factor in legislative effectiveness, career interruptions for the sake of childcare and other family work hurts female aspiring politicians more seriously than in proportional representation (PR) systems, where political parties control the policy platform and constituency service is a minor consideration in the careers of candidates. In countries with mixed electoral systems, women do better in seats elected by PR than by single-member plurality. Within countries, women are more likely to get elected to offices characterized by shorter tenure and higher average levels of turnover.

Although empirical studies of deliberative democracy have proliferated in the past decade, too few have addressed the questions that are most significant in the normative theories. At the same time, many theorists have tended too easily to dismiss the empirical findings. More recently, some theorists and empiricists have been paying more attention to each other's work. Nevertheless, neither is likely to produce the more comprehensive understanding of deliberative democracy we need unless both develop a clearer conception of the elements of deliberation, the conflicts among those elements, and the structural relationships in deliberative systems.

To further dialogue between theory and research on deliberative democracy, I advocate abandoning tests of deliberative theory per se and instead developing “middle-range” theories that are each important, specifiable, and falsifiable parts of deliberative democratic theory. By replacing vaguely defined entities with more concrete, circumscribed concepts, and by requiring empirically and theoretically grounded hypotheses about specific relationships between those concepts, researchers may come to understand which elements of the deliberative experience are crucial to particular valued outcomes.

Little attention has been paid to the social processes of civil war—the transformation of social actors, structures, norms, and practices—that sometimes leave enduring legacies for the postwar period. In this article, I explore the changes wrought by six social processes: political mobilization, military socialization, polarization of social identities, militarization of local authority, transformation of gender roles, and fragmentation of the local political economy. Some of these social processes occur in peacetime, but war may radically change their pace, direction, or consequences, with perhaps irreversible effects. I trace the wide variation in these processes during the wars in four countries: Peru, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, and Sierra Leone. I analyze the effects of these processes as transformations in social networks. These processes reconfigure social networks in a variety of ways, creating new networks, dissolving some, and changing the structure of others.

For more than two decades political scientists have discussed rising elite polarization in the United States, but the study of mass polarization did not receive comparable attention until fairly recently. This article surveys the literature on mass polarization. It begins with a discussion of the concept of polarization, then moves to a critical consideration of different kinds of evidence that have been used to study polarization, concluding that much of the evidence presents problems of inference that render conclusions problematic. The most direct evidence—citizens' positions on public policy issues—shows little or no indication of increased mass polarization over the past two to three decades. Party sorting—an increased correlation between policy views and partisan identification—clearly has occurred, although the extent has sometimes been exaggerated. Geographic polarization—the hypothesized tendency of like-minded people to cluster together—remains an open question. To date, there is no conclusive evidence that elite polarization has stimulated voters to polarize, on the one hand, or withdraw from politics, on the other.