Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 17, 2014

Agent-based models (ABMs) provide a methodology to explore systems of interacting, adaptive, diverse, spatially situated actors. Outcomes in ABMs can be equilibrium points, equilibrium distributions, cycles, randomness, or complex patterns; these outcomes are not directly determined by assumptions but instead emerge from the interactions of actors in the model. These behaviors may range from rational and payoff-maximizing strategies to rules that mimic heuristics identified by cognitive science. Agent-based techniques can be applied in isolation to create high-fidelity models and to explore new questions using simple constructions. They can also be used as a complement to deductive techniques. Overall, ABMs offer the potential to advance social sciences and to help us better understand our complex world.

Many social scientists rely on the rule of law in their accounts of political or economic development. Many, however, simply equate law with a stable government capable of enforcing the rules generated by a political authority. As two decades of largely failed efforts to build the rule of law in poor and transition countries and continuing struggles to build international legal order demonstrate, we still do not understand how legal order is produced, especially in places where it does not already exist. We here canvas literature in the social sciences to identify the themes and gaps in the existing accounts. We conclude that this literature has failed to produce a microfoundational account of the phenomenon of legal order. We then discuss our recent effort to develop the missing microfoundations of legal order to provide a better framework for future work on the rule of law.

Immigration has irreversibly changed Western European demographics over the past generation. This article reviews recent research drawing implications of this migration for labor-market discrimination and for immigrant–state and immigrant–native violence. It further reports on research measuring the effects of political institutions and policy regimes on reducing the barriers to immigrants' economic integration. In the course of reviewing the literature, we discuss some of the methodological challenges that scholars have not fully confronted in trying to identify the causes and consequences of discrimination and violence. In doing so, we highlight that future work needs to pay greater attention to sequencing, selection, and demographic effects. Further, we suggest ways to resolve contradictory findings in regard to preferred policies aimed at advancing immigrants' economic performance.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the potential of transparency—the provision of information to the public—to improve governance in both developed and developing societies. In this article, we characterize and assess the evolution of transparency from an end in itself to a tool for resolving increasingly practical concerns of governance and government performance. After delineating four distinct varieties of transparency, we focus on the type that has received the most rigorous empirical scrutiny from social scientists—so-called “transparency and accountability” (T/A) interventions intended to improve the quality of public services and governance in developing countries. T/A interventions have yielded mixed results: some are highly successful; others appear to have little impact. We develop a rubric of five ideal-typical “worlds” facing transparency that helps to account for this variation in outcomes. Reform based on transparency can face obstacles of collective action, political resistance, and long implementation chains. T/A interventions are more likely to succeed in contextual “worlds” with fewer of these obstacles. We find that 16 experimental evaluations of T/A interventions are largely consistent with the theoretical predictions of our five-worlds rubric.

This article reviews the political science literature on political violence against civilians, including genocide, mass killing, and terrorism. Early work on these subjects tended to portray this kind of violence as irrational, random, or the result of ancient hatreds between ethnic groups. Most scholars studying political violence today, however, understand it to be primarily, if not exclusively, instrumental and orchestrated by powerful actors seeking to achieve tangible political or military objectives. Scholars continue to disagree, however, about the specific motives that drive belligerents to target civilians or the conditions under which large-scale violence against civilians is most likely.

The Great Recession that began in late 2007 had devastating consequences for the fiscal health of state and local governments, and many remain in a precarious financial position. Several cities have declared bankruptcy, and more will do so in coming years. The future, however, promises no long-term relief. Due primarily to the aging population of the United States, state and local governments are allocating large and increasing shares of their budgets to expenditures on Medicaid and on retirement benefits that they have promised to their past and current employees. As these expenditures consume more of their budgets, there is less to spend on transportation, parks and recreation, education, public safety, and all the other services that these governments provide. We are thus experiencing the onset of a New Fiscal Ice Age, a period in which a given level of tax revenue purchases a considerably lower level of current services.

The variation in the efficacy of governance-related authority structures is stunning. The focus among scholars primarily on domestic conditions, and only secondarily on the external environment, to explain patterns of political development conforms to the prevailing assumptions of comparativists, international relations scholars, and international lawyers. Over the past decade, however, some scholars have studied the possibility that political institutions within states can be influenced or determined not only by internal factors and the external environment but also by the explicit policies of foreign actors. An emerging body of scholarship examines the efficacy of different policy tools that external actors might use to change the structure of domestic institutions in target states. We review this literature and reach the following conclusions. First, contracting often works, coercion sometimes works, and imposition rarely works. Second, the motivation of initiators matters: to be effective, intervening states must be committed to institutional change. Third, conditions in the target state are consequential: higher levels of development facilitate institutional change, and elite motivations must be aligned with the goals of external actors.

Military rule as a form of autocratic governance can mean either rule by a military strongman unconstrained by other officers or rule by a group of high-ranking officers who can limit the dictator's discretion. We label the latter form a military regime. Both military strongmen and military regimes are more likely to commit human rights abuses and become embroiled in civil wars than are civilian dictatorships. The behavior of strongmen diverges from that of more constrained military rulers in other areas, however. Military strongmen start more international wars than either military regimes or civilian dictators, perhaps because they have more reason to fear postouster exile, prison, or assassination. Fear of the future may also motivate their resistance to transition. Military strongmen are more often ousted by insurgency, popular uprising, or invasion than are military regimes or civilian dictators. Their tenures rarely end in democratization, whereas the opposite is true of military regimes.

This review identifies empirical facts about lobbying that are generally agreed upon in the literature. It then discusses challenges to empirical research in lobbying and provides examples of empirical methods that can be employed to overcome these challenges—with an emphasis on statistical measurement, identification, and casual inference. The article then discusses the advantages, disadvantages, and effective use of the main types of data available for research in lobbying. It closes with a number of open questions for researchers in the field and avenues for future work to advance empirical research on lobbying.

There is a widespread presumption that Islamists have an advantage over their opponents when it comes to generating mass appeal and winning elections. The question remains, however, as to whether these advantages—or, what we refer to collectively as an Islamist political advantage—actually exist. We argue that—to the extent that Islamists have a political advantage—the primary source of this advantage is reputation rather than the provision of social services, organizational capacity, or ideological hegemony. Our purpose is not to dismiss the main sources of the Islamist political advantage identified in scholarly literature and media accounts, but to suggest a different causal path whereby each of these factors individually and sometimes jointly promotes a reputation for Islamists as competent, trustworthy, and pure. It is this reputation for good governance that enables Islamists to distinguish themselves in the streets and at the ballot box.

Spatial models are ubiquitous within political science. Whenever we confront spatial models with data, we need valid and reliable ways to measure policy positions in political space. I first review a range of general issues that must be resolved before thinking about how to measure policy positions, including cognitive metrics, a priori and a posteriori scale interpretation, dimensionality, common spaces, and comparability across settings. I then briefly review different types of data we can use to do this and measurement techniques associated with each type, focusing on headline issues with each type of data and pointing to comprehensive surveys of relevant literatures—including expert, elite, and mass surveys; text analysis; and legislative voting behavior.

Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives' attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology. These two literatures have developed largely in isolation from one another, yet the conclusions that emerge from each are strikingly similar. Consistently, immigration attitudes show little evidence of being strongly correlated with personal economic circumstances. Instead, research finds that immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about its cultural impacts—and to a lesser extent its economic impacts—on the nation as a whole. This pattern of results has held up as scholars have increasingly turned to experimental tests, and it holds for the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Still, more work is needed to strengthen the causal identification of sociotropic concerns and to isolate precisely how, when, and why they matter for attitude formation.

The understanding of observable associations between institutions and inequality today requires a better grasp of the process driving the selection of economic institutions, in particular wage bargaining centralization agreements, as the outcome of a distributive conflict in which inequality itself plays a prominent role. Low levels of inequality facilitated the adoption of encompassing wage centralization agreements during the early twentieth century in Europe, thereby creating a long-term association between low inequality and high centralization that, for a large subset of cases, remained stable throughout the century. We develop a theoretical argument as to why inequality should lead to lower levels of coordination and test it against competing hypotheses on the basis of a database on 11 OECD nations between the 1910s and the 1950s.

By analyzing the politics of Indigenous peoples in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, political scientists gain new perspectives on power and powerlessness. Such study offers a new vantage point on pathways of exclusion and regulation, as well as on the pathways of challenging inequity. It illustrates how beliefs and identity configure and reconfigure power. I highlight research from four domains of research on Indigenous politics: studies of political advocacy, political attitudes, rules of the game, and the public good. Political science research on Indigenous peoples fits comfortably within the discipline. It is flush with ideas that draw on and speak to other theories of politics.

Were political science to broaden its perspective and recognize the insights available from the racial minority groups and indigenous nations regarding the manner in which law and political institutions channel energies of distinct groups and create, in their application of discriminatory policies, responses and reactions manifest in other areas of life, it could embark on a broadening of its offerings and clientele.

Deloria & Wilkins (1999)

Apart from some notable exceptions, education is regrettably understudied in comparative politics. This paucity stems from both a dearth of reliable data on schooling and the fact that education raises analytical issues that fall outside the typical domain of political scientists. In light of education's crucial role in everything from citizen attitudes to earnings to economic growth, we recommend that political scientists pay more attention to education. In particular, comparative researchers should shift from an almost exclusive focus on average levels of schooling to explaining the causes and consequences of educational inequality. To that end, we provide a broad comparative framework for analyzing the politics of education. In our formulation, skill-biased technological change and factor endowments condition the extent to which firms demand human capital. The supply of skills is a function of the interests and institutions that link voters and politicians. We conclude by positing theoretical and empirical puzzles for future research.

This article reviews the burgeoning literature on democratic authoritarianism, which examines two related but distinct questions: why authoritarian regimes adopt institutions conventionally associated with democracy, and how these institutions strengthen authoritarian regimes and forestall democratization. The literature suggests that authoritarian regimes adopt and utilize nominally democratic institutions to augment their strength through five main mechanisms: signaling, information acquisition, patronage distribution, monitoring, and credible commitment. After evaluating each of these mechanisms, I discuss the empirical challenges facing this research agenda and suggest how the field should proceed to overcome these challenges.

This review examines how legislators' race and ethnicity affect the representation of racial and ethnic minorities' interests and priorities in the mass public, how these legislators affect the political participation of these groups, how the presence of these candidates affects voter decision making, and how their prevalence impacts the composition of the parties and the nature of public policy. It also points to new directions and opportunities for scholarship on why minority legislators matter for American politics.

Is the state still the basic unit of political authority in OECD countries? International relations scholars discuss whether international institutions undermine or buttress state authority. Students of comparative political economy argue about the extent to which political authority has migrated to private market actors. We inventory and compare the main arguments in both debates. Our findings suggest a different pattern of state transformation than most participants in the debates implicitly assume. The key feature is not a zero-sum shift of political authority to nonstate actors but an unbundling and reconfiguration of authority. The segmental differentiation into largely self-contained national states is overlaid by a functionally differentiated order in which different dimensions of authority are exercised by different state and nonstate actors. The state remains focal, but its role changes from virtual monopolist to manager of political authority.

A nascent but growing research area examines political institutions through the use of field experiments. I consider why field experimentation has been used infrequently in the study of political institutions and note that some research questions are not amenable to field experimentation. I review areas of research inquiry where field experimentation has enhanced scholarly knowledge about political institutions and representation. These areas include the study of race, representation, and bias in legislatures and courts; and policy responsiveness and legislative accountability. I synthesize this research by examining puzzles that emerge between the field experimental and observational work. I conclude with suggestions for promising research avenues, including the use of field experiments to study the bureaucracy. The discipline's understanding of political institutions could be improved with a greater emphasis on field experimental work.

Justifications for war often invoke reputational or social aspirations: the need to protect national honor, status, reputation for resolve, credibility, and respect. Studies of these motives struggle with a variety of challenges: their primary empirical manifestation consists of beliefs, agents have incentives to misrepresent these beliefs, their logic is context specific, and they meld intrinsic and instrumental motives. To help overcome these challenges, this review offers a general conceptual framework that integrates their strategic, cultural, and psychological logics. We summarize important findings and open questions, including (a) whether leaders care about their reputations and status, (b) how to address the tension between instrumental and intrinsic motives, (c) how observers draw inferences, (d) to whom and across what contextual breadth these inferences apply, and (e) how these relate to domestic audience costs. Many important, tractable questions remain for future studies to answer.