Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 13, 2010

In this account, I discuss my own personal journey and the efforts of many of us associated with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University to develop better analyses of how institutions affect behavior and outcomes in diverse settings. First, I reflect on my experience as a young student and in my early career, primarily to encourage those who face obstacles. Then, I discuss our institutional analysis and our research on urban governance and common-pool resources, which helped me to develop more general frameworks for the analysis of complex systems over time. The frameworks have enabled us to dig into and analyze system structure, behavior, and outcomes to make and test coherent predictions and build better theory. Last, I share some ideas concerning future scholarly directions.

This essay explores how three components of the new political history—research on the motivations behind the rise of conservatism, the discovery of the nineteenth-century state, and arguments about the particularities of public policy—can offer useful analytical tools for political scientists.

The proliferation of historically oriented replication data has provided great opportunities for political scientists to develop and to test theories relevant to a range of macrohistorical phenomena. But what is the quality of such data? Are the codings or quantitative mappings of historical events, processes, and unit characteristics based on sufficiently solid foundations equivalent to those found in detailed case studies? This article evaluates a set of the most transparently disseminated replication datasets across a variety of research domains from the perspective of best-practice qualitative-historical research. It identifies a wide range of practices, highlighting both fundamental and innovative standards that might be adopted in future research.

There is little consensus on whether foreign aid can reliably increase economic growth in recipient countries. We review the literature on aid allocation and provide new evidence suggesting that since 1990 aid donors reward political contestation but not political inclusiveness. Then we examine some challenges in analyzing cross-national data on the aid/growth relationship. Finally, we discuss the causal mechanisms through which foreign aid might affect growth and argue that politics can be viewed as both (a) an exogenous constraint that conditions the causal process linking aid to growth and (b) an endogenous factor that is affected by foreign aid and in turn impacts economic growth.

Most theoretical studies of coalition politics have focused on selection, rather than accountability: Coalition partners are selected according to the proximity of their positions in a Euclidean policy space. This proximity, together with institutional attributes of the party systems or the coalitions, serves also to explain the duration of the coalition. Empirical studies of retrospective voting, often with little connection to accountability theory, have generally concluded that the political survival of coalitions is considerably independent from elections. Such results, however, refer to governments as a whole. In this work, voters allocate rewards and punishments for past outcomes focusing on the prime ministers and their parties. If differences in clarity of responsibility exist, they do not seem to produce greater economic accountability of single-party governments—it is similarly limited under both coalition and single-party governments. Coalitions, however, increase the risks of losing office due to political crises, rather than elections. Prime ministers can respond to challenges by reshuffling the government or the coalition. Because such crises are launched under economic conditions that improve the welfare of citizens, coalitions may undermine democratic accountability.

An emerging literature on civil and international conflict management is developing and testing insights from formal theories of conflict. Third parties may attempt to prevent or resolve conflict by providing material incentives or by providing or filtering information. Material incentives are the province of states, for the most part, while weaker third parties can provide information. There is considerable debate over whether threats of third-party intervention actually deter conflict, provoke conflict, have no effect, or have nonmonotonic effects on the likelihood of conflict. Providing information via mediation is seen as effective in preventing conflict, but questions remain about precisely how it works and about the appropriate characteristics of the mediator, such as whether mediators should be biased or unbiased.

The second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of one-party autocracies. One-party regimes have become the most common type of authoritarian rule and have proved to be more stable and to grow faster than other types of authoritarianism. We review the literature on one-party rule and, using data from 1950–2006, suggest four avenues for future research: focusing on autocrats' ability to simultaneously minimize threats from the elites and from the masses; focusing on the conditions that foster the establishment and the collapse of one- party regimes and on transitions from one type of authoritarianism to another; focusing on the relationship between authoritarian elections and democratization; and focusing on the global and international forces that influence the spread of one-party rule.

We review and analyze some recent research on regionalism. We begin by discussing how various studies have defined regions and regionalism. Because much of the work has been conducted by economists, we then turn to a summary of the economics of regionalism. However, it is widely held that economic factors alone are insufficient to explain regionalism's causes and consequences and that political factors are centrally important. We analyze how domestic and international political factors have guided both economic regionalism and security regionalism. We conclude by outlining some avenues for future research, placing particular emphasis on the need to better integrate insights from political economy and international security in the study of regionalism.

This article analyzes the central arguments and findings of “transitional justice,” the study of how incoming rulers address the human rights abuses of outgoing regimes. A scholarly consensus suggests the balance of political power matters most for explanations of transitional justice decision making. However, other important influences include international factors and the passage of time combined with democratic governance and/or emotions. Our review finds no consensus on the efficacy of transitional justice measures, in part because few studies currently exist. However, existing studies suggest that trials and truth commissions neither destabilize democracy nor foster animosity, respectively. Finally, this article considers whether restricting the study of transitional justice to third-wave democracies is appropriate in light of recent developments in long-established democracies.

Despite its centrality in European politics, Christian democracy came to be the object of systematic research only recently. We review the research that has emerged since the mid-1990s and pinpoint its contributions in specifying the origins, evolution, and broader impact of Christian democratic parties. We begin with a discussion of the origins of Christian democracy and show that it is a distinctive political movement; we review the state of contemporary Christian democratic politics, describe the impact of Christian democracy on the process of European integration, evaluate the content of the Christian democratic welfare regime, and explore whether the European Christian democratic experience travels outside Europe and Christianity, especially in the world of political Islam. We conclude with an overview of the future outlook of this political movement.

The past decade has seen a spate of new work on empire in political theory and the history of political thought. Much of this work has focused on the place of empire in the thought of many canonical thinkers and in the formation of modern liberalism and related arenas, such as postcolonial settler societies and the discipline of international law. Political theory's turn to empire has been belated in comparison to other fields, such as history, literature, and anthropology, which had been grappling with the histories and legacies of modern European empires since the 1970s. Despite intense attention to the question of American imperialism during the Bush administration, political theory arguably continues to fail to deal adequately with the imperial features of the current global order, including the substantial responsibility on the part of the great powers for conditions such as extreme poverty, ecological crisis, civil conflict, and tyranny around the world.

Political scientists make heavy use of census statistics but have given scant attention to the politics behind the production of those statistics. Key issues that merit analytic attention by political science include vote dilution, the policy of population growth and composition, distributional accuracy and census undercounts, the establishment of statistical races, the color-blind challenge to the ethnoracial classification, the political independence of federal statistics, the important distinction between the scientific production and the political use of the census and other statistical products, public concern about government intrusiveness, and the shift from survey and census data to administrative and digital data.

The objectivist truth claims traditionally pressed by most political scientists have made the use of ethnographic methods particularly fraught in the discipline. This article explores what ethnography as a method entails. It makes distinctions between positivist and interpretivist ethnographies and highlights some of the substantive contributions ethnography has made to the study of politics. Lamenting the discipline's abandonment of a conversation with anthropology after Geertz, this review also insists on moving beyond the anthropological controversies so powerfully expressed in the edited volume Writing Culture (1986) and other texts of the 1980s and 1990s. I contend that interpretive social science does not have to forswear generalizations or causal explanations and that ethnographic methods can be used in the service of establishing them. Rather than fleeing from abstractions, ethnographies can and should help ground them.

International law has enjoyed a recent renaissance as an important subfield of study within international relations. Two trends are evident in the recent literature. First, the obsession with theoretical labels is on the decline. Second, empirical, especially quantitative, work is burgeoning. This article reviews the literature in four issues areas—security, war, and peace; international trade; protection of the environment; and human rights—and concludes we have a much stronger basis for assessing claims about compliance and violation now than was the case only a few years ago. Still, the literature suffers from a few weaknesses, including problems of selection and endogeneity of treaties themselves and an enduring state-centric focus, despite the fact that researchers recognize that nonstate and substate actors influence treaty behavior. Nonetheless, the quality and quantity of new work demonstrates that international law has regained an important place in the study of international politics.

We review debates concerning the evolution and impact of parliamentary obstruction in the U.S. Senate, focusing on path dependency versus remote majoritarian perspectives. We consider the viability of circumventing supermajority requirements for rules changes by using rulings from the chair to establish precedents. Because the viability of this approach depends, at least in part, on the anticipated reaction of the public, we conduct a preliminary analysis of public opinion data from the 1940s through the 1960s and from the showdown over the obstruction of judicial nominees in 2005. We contend that the balance of the evidence favors the position that senators have generally supported the maintenance of the filibuster and have been able to make procedural adjustments when obstruction threatened a committed majority's top priorities, although we offer some important refinements required in comparing the historical operation of obstruction to its impact in today's Senate.

In order to address classic questions about democratic representation in countries with winner-take-all electoral districts, it is necessary to understand the distribution of political preferences across districts. Recent formal theory literature has contributed new insights into how parties choose platforms in countries with a continuum of heterogeneous districts. Meanwhile, increases in survey sample sizes and advances in empirical techniques have made it possible to characterize the distribution of preferences within and across electoral districts. This review addresses an emerging literature that builds on these new tools to explore the ways in which the geography of political preferences can help explain the parties that compete, the platforms and policies they choose, and even the rules under which they compete. Building on insights from economic and political geography, it pays special attention to electoral and policy biases that can emerge when there is an asymmetric distribution of preferences across districts.

Theories of political economy offer rich intellectual resources for scholars today who hope to explain some of the most striking real-world changes of contemporary American politics, including the dramatic widening of economic inequality since the 1970s, the financial and economic breakdowns since 2008, and the government policies that contributed to these developments. Yet few scholars in American politics have been making use of these resources. This article reviews research on the politics of inequality within the United States and situates it more explicitly within an intellectual framework for the study of political economy. The article traces the decline of political economy research within mainstream scholarship on American politics and reviews the upsurge of interest in the politics of inequality. It develops a typology of distinct frameworks for analyzing the American political economy and for bringing greater intellectual organization to a growing but disparate body of research.

How did the no-party, extremely-low-turnout, fragmented political system that V.O. Key, Jr. described in his 1949 book Southern Politics get transformed into the Republican-dominant, average-turnout, highly-organized political structure that propelled Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich into the House Speakership in 1995? After a long series of analytical narratives that focused on racial explanations for the shifts in white voting behavior, several of the most recent works have emphasized class and economic development. I suggest that both explanations are misleading because they treat race, class, and party as stable phenomena, when it is the changes in these phenomena and in their interactions that ought to be the focus of explanations for the reshaping of southern politics. A comprehensive successor to Key's masterwork will have to blend religion and ideology (which have also undergone dramatic changes in the six decades of southern history since Key wrote) with race and class, and it will have to describe and explain changes in governance, as well.

Political science research on indigenous peoples' politics in Latin America is methodologically diverse and interdisciplinary. It has produced significant insights about citizenship, reform of the state, and the causes and consequences of the emergence and success of identity-based social movements and political parties. In order to expand and deepen our knowledge, future research should pursue three goals. First, scholars should explore a wider selection of cases, including countries where indigenous populations are small and where dramatic events have not occurred, in order to better explain more common types of indigenous political mobilization in the region. Second, they should better connect the study of indigenous politics to that of Afro-descendent movements and gender and, thus, expand our understanding of racial and gender politics. Third, they should be more critical of the democratic performance of indigenous organizations and politicians, especially when they hold public office.

Local governments in the United States provide essential services and allocate an enormous share of the country's public goods. Knowing how benefits are distributed and who wins and who loses in American politics requires understanding the functioning of local representative democracy. Pitkin (1967) delineates three components to democratic representation—authorization, responsiveness, and accountability. Elections play a fundamental role in each of these processes, from selecting government officials, to influencing the policies governments choose, to holding representatives accountable for outcomes. Scholars of local politics have tended toward two themes in analyzing the link between elections and representation: exploring the role of race and ethnicity, and understanding how institutions shape both practices and outcomes. Racial and ethnic divisions are prominent in local politics and shape both voting decisions and policy outcomes. Institutions implemented by municipal reformers tend to decrease the visibility of politics and in some situations advantage white, middle/upper-class residents. This review presents the research on both themes, discussing each of Pitkin's components of representation in turn, with the goal of summarizing what we know and what we still need to learn.