Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 18, 2015

An interview with Hanna Pitkin took place at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 2014. What follows is an edited transcript; a video of the entire interview can be found at www.annualreviews.org/r/hannapitkin. Prof. Pitkin is the author of books well known to scholars and students in political theory and political science: The Concept of Representation (1967), Wittgenstein and Justice (1972), Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Machiavelli (1984), and The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (1998). Her influential articles include the two-part essay “Obligation and Consent” (1965). Hanna Pitkin is winner of the 2003 Skytte Prize in Political Science “for her groundbreaking theoretical work, predominantly on the problem of representation.” In this interview, she discusses with Prof. Nancy L. Rosenblum her work on representation, Machiavelli's republicanism and the study of gender, early conceptual analysis in political theory, political advocacy and organization, and the personal: her childhood and early influences, and the course of her academic career.

The growing concern about economic inequality leads to a similar concern about political inequality. This article explores the seeming contradiction between the literature pointing to inequality in political representation in the United States and the literature showing that public policy does tend to represent public opinion in general. Low-income voters are much less likely to vote or to be politically knowledgeable than high-income voters, which limits their influence and creates an upper-income bias to effective public opinion. Considerable research suggests that low-income voters' opinions count for even less than would be implied by their low participation rate, a matter that should continue to be the subject of research. Seemingly contrary to any upper-income bias to policy making, major legislation usually moves policy in the direction favored by low-income voters (e.g., redistribution, government programs). Upper-income voters and interest groups, however, are able to slow the pace of liberal change.

A review of the evidence leaves no doubt election campaigns do matter in a variety of important ways. The serious questions concern when, where, why, how, for what, and for whom they matter. This essay reviews a selection of high-quality studies that address these questions, focusing on several distinct lines of research that have been particularly productive in recent years: on the effects of events and advertising in presidential elections; on the effects of campaign spending in elections for down-ballot offices; on the effects of mobilization campaigns on voting turnout; on campaign influences on the vote choice (with special attention to the effects of negative campaigns); and on the nature of persuadable voters. It also offers some suggestions of areas where additional research should be productive.

This essay reviews models of strategic mobilization and turnout, focusing on two important questions about the effects of electoral rules. First, how does the disproportionality of the electoral system affect the variance and mean of mobilization and turnout? This question has been investigated at least since Gosnell (1930). In addition to reviewing the literature, I argue that extant models should pay more explicit attention to secondary mobilization (conducted by interest groups, activists, and ordinary voters). Second, how do electoral rules regulating the electoral calendar and vote fusion affect mobilizational spillovers and, hence, incentives to build mobilizational alliances? This question has attracted less attention from modelers but is well represented in the empirical literature.

This article reviews the existing literature, mostly from political science, on suicide bombing. A prominent weapon in the toolkit of violent nonstate actors for a generation, suicide bombing generates a significantly larger number of casualties per attack than other uses of force by terrorist groups, insurgents, and others. Scholars tend to agree that no single reason leads individuals to become suicide bombers. Moreover, groups use suicide bombing for strategic reasons—although whether suicide bombing campaigns make groups more likely to achieve their goals is unclear. Scholars continue to disagree about what drives groups to adopt or eschew suicide bombing, including the role of religion. Although groups that are more religious are significantly more likely to adopt suicide bombing, the underlying cause and its relationship to particular religious ideologies (such as Salafi Jihadi movements) versus the structure of religious groups remain matters of contention.

Is the US Congress dysfunctional? The American public thinks so: In the summer of 2014, just 7% approved strongly of Congress (Riffkin 2014). Still, legislative scholars disagree about the severity of Congress's legislative challenges. Is legislative deadlock a sign that Congress can no longer identify and resolve major public problems? Or are Congress's difficulties temporary and correctable? In this article, I review theoretical and empirical literatures on the dynamics of lawmaking and evaluate alternative methods for testing lawmaking theories. Finally, I draw on recent research to put contemporary stalemate into historical perspective. I argue that even when Congress and the president have reached agreement on the big issues of the day, Congress's problem-solving capacity appears to have fallen to new lows in recent years. Whether and how well our political system can or will self-correct in the coming years remains an open question.

This essay focuses on questions that pertain to the ideological, normative, symbolic, and epochal aspects of political Islam. Political theorists, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have disagreed on whether political Islam is an exclusively modern political phenomenon or is indebted to long-standing Islamic religious commitments. More specifically, they have also disagreed on whether the shape and ambitions of political Islam are entirely determined by the powers and institutions of the modern, bureaucratic state, particularly its secular desire to control, regulate, and reshape religion. These interpretive debates have often sat uneasily with ongoing normative debates about what kind of secularism democracy requires and whether democracy has priority over liberal rights and freedoms.

Research on the relationship between territorial disputes, militarized conflict, and economic integration occurs at the intersection of two large research programs in international relations: one linking territorial disputes to violence, and another exploring the effects of conflict on trade and vice versa. Although we know that territorial disputes fuel conflict and that conflict dampens trade, we know less about whether the prospects of economic gains contribute to the settlement of disputes and subsequent compliance with those settlements. I argue that research in this area could profitably adopt an emerging view of borders as institutions that not only distribute territory but also allow cooperation and the production of joint gains. This review identifies gaps in the existing literature on the resolution of territorial disputes and helps to reframe a persistent methodological challenge in this area: missing and noisy data on trade flows.

This article reviews recent research on how mass opinion affects policy making in the context of US national institutions. Three themes materialize. First, research provides compelling evidence for “responsiveness,” in which change in mass opinion is associated with subsequent policy changes, but not for a high level of “congruence” between the policies that are favored by a majority of the public and those that are enacted. Second, although scholarship suggests that both congruence and responsiveness have declined since the 1970s, they are not low by historic standards; rather, mass opinion was particularly influential in that decade. Third, the literature rebuts conventional explanations for the post-1970s decline and suggests that standard proposals for how to reverse it would not significantly alter the impact of mass preferences on policy. The article concludes by considering the possibility that fundraising developments over the past three decades have changed politicians' electoral incentives.

In many democratic polities, constitutional courts significantly shape the political landscape. Yet, how they are able to do so is a puzzle: With limited resources at their disposal, and no direct powers of enforcement, judges must rely on the willingness of executives and legislators to comply with their decisions and to respect judicial authority. This essay surveys recent literature that has explored the conditions that sustain judicial authority. I contrast explanations that highlight the benefits that independent courts can provide to other policy makers (“endogenous explanations”) with explanations that emphasize the constraints that keep executives and legislators from undermining the judiciary (“exogenous explanations”). I conclude by exploring the role of strategic judicial behavior in maintaining and expanding judicial power.

Epistemic democracy defends the capacity of “the many” to make correct decisions and seeks to justify democracy by reference to this ability. Epistemic democrats marshal substantial evidence from the history of political thought and a set of models to support their claims. The essay assesses this evidence and argues in favor of more empirical testing. It also cautions against using the contextually limited evidence of wise decisions as a basis for justifying democratic decision making. Instead, the article sketches a “deflationary model” that relies on neither an independent standard of correctness nor the more ambitious assertions of the reliability of the mechanisms. That model, termed judgment democracy, retains epistemic democracy's attractive respect for individual judgments and concern with institutional design, while eschewing its least plausible features.

Over 50 years of research into American political ideology have left scholars with a contested paradigm. One side argues that the mass public is distinctly nonideological. The other side argues that ideological thinking is not beyond the public. The way forward for research in political ideology does not lie in rehashing this debate but in advancing two new areas of work. The first considers the role that values and principles play in determining the political and ideological thinking of individuals. The second questions the current conception and measurement standards of political ideology. This research argues that ideology among the American mass public is formed by positions along two related but separate dimensions. In this article, we summarize the major arguments of and criticisms of current ideology research. Then we discuss recent research on principles and values and the measurement of ideology.

This article reviews recent contributions addressing the following questions: Under what circumstances is monetary policy delegated to politically independent central banks? What effects do these politically independent institutions have, and how do they interact with their macroeconomic institutional environment? What explains the variation in their behavior? And finally, to what extent has the recent economic crisis altered the role of these institutions? In answering these questions, this article advances two arguments. First, even though central banks' activities involve a great deal of technical knowledge, they are unavoidably political institutions: They make distributional choices informed by ideas, preferences, and the political context in which they operate. Second, the economic crisis, by expanding the type of activities that monetary authorities undertake, further contributes to the politicization of these institutions. The final section of the article speculates about the implications of these developments for economic policy making in contemporary democracies.

Since 2001, hundreds of academic studies have examined the “political resource curse,” meaning the claim that natural resource wealth tends to adversely affect a country's governance. There is now robust evidence that one type of mineral wealth, petroleum, has at least three harmful effects: It tends to make authoritarian regimes more durable, to increase certain types of corruption, and to help trigger violent conflict in low- and middle-income countries. Scholars have also made progress toward understanding the mechanisms that lead to these outcomes and the conditions that make them more likely. This essay reviews the evidence behind these claims, the debates over their validity, and some of the unresolved puzzles for future research.

The purpose of this review is to take stock of how party polarization affects governance in the United States. The article begins by defining polarization and discussing the means by which it can be measured. It is undeniable that the two parties have grown more sharply differentiated. Some evidence suggests that the substantive policy preferences of liberals and conservatives diverge more widely, but the case for ideological polarization in the spatial sense is not definitive. Effects on the institutional processes of US government have entailed a hardening of party divisions and a tendency toward centralization of power. Nevertheless, these more cohesive parties are not more effective than their predecessors at enacting policies or managing routine governing responsibilities. The consequences for public policy seem best characterized as “drift” (Hacker 2004, p. 246). There is little evidence that party polarization has promoted ideologically extreme policy outcomes or has systematically advantaged either liberalism or conservatism.

In the field of international political economy, workers are commonly analyzed as objects of global economic forces whose fate is determined by the profit-seeking behaviors of firms and governments. Workers, however, can also assert themselves to protect their rights, and they can emigrate to other countries to find employment. We analyze the literature on the nexus between the international economy and labor with a focus on workers on both the receiving and originating ends of global finance. Beginning with workers as inputs in multinational production, we explore the roles of economic openness, factor endowments, government policy, and unionization as drivers of workers' rights. We then shift to workers as migrant labor and explore the impact of migrants' own cross-border financial transfers—also known as remittances—on political outcomes in their home countries. Our overview not only highlights tremendous progress in explaining the agency and vulnerability of labor in the global economy but also reveals significant weaknesses in recent research, especially a mismatch between micro-level theorizing and macro-level data analysis.

The tension between law and politics places transitional justice under cross-pressures. The impetus to hold perpetrators legally accountable for atrocities and major rights violations has emerged in part from the expectation that subjecting political behavior to the apolitical judgment of law will exert a civilizing effect. As demands for accountability have risen, politics has played a central role at every step. The past decade has seen a flourishing of research in empirical political science on the relationship between law and politics in postconflict and postauthoritarian justice. This research has tried to explain the turn to individual legal accountability and the development of norms and institutions for accountability. Research has stressed the role of politics in shaping the implementation of trials and other modes of accountability. It has also examined the consequences of these modes of accountability. We address research on each of these topics.

This article considers the vast academic literature on campaign finance regulation in the United States, drawing on the fields of political theory, American politics, election law, constitutional law, and economics. The scholarly treatment of campaign finance regulation has become increasingly focused on fundamental questions about democratic governance and democratic values, and it has generated profound debates about participation, representation, free speech, political equality, liberty, and the organization and distribution of political power in government and society. This article reviews the original debate about campaign finance regulation and traces its evolution in both political theory and constitutional law, identifying current areas of inquiry and new directions in research. In particular, the article focuses on corruption, political equality and representation, electoral exceptionalism, and the post–Citizens United landscape. It also surveys empirical findings from political science and economics.

For decades, scholars have uncovered evidence that male and female legislators' priorities and preferences differ and that women's inclusion brings to elite-level politics a more cooperative leadership style. They also point to the symbolic benefits associated with more diversity among candidates and office holders. Although these effects are not uniform, there is no question among political scientists that women's presence in US political institutions bears directly on issues of substantive and symbolic representation. Accordingly, it is important to understand why we have so few women in politics, whether they are willing to run for office, what happens when they do, and the extent to which their presence systematically affects the legislative process. I cover each of these topics in this review, emphasizing the latest and most interesting research that speaks to these questions.

This article assesses the utility of selectorate theory as a tool for understanding authoritarian politics. We start by discussing the intellectual history of the selectorate concept and its original usage in the authoritarian context. We then turn our focus to the selectorate theory as developed in The Logic of Political Survival (LPS) (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003), identifying three problematic aspects of the theory and its application to authoritarian politics. First, the utility of the theory's key concepts of the selectorate and winning coalition is questionable in authoritarian systems where formal institutions to structure political transitions are absent or inconsequential. Second, measurement of the sizes of the selectorate and winning coalition is flawed, calling into question the empirical findings in LPS, such as its central claims about the survival of rulers. Third, the assumptions in the LPS version of the theory are restrictive in ways that reduce the utility of the selectorate concept relative to earlier works. We conclude that selectorate theory is a blunt instrument for understanding authoritarian rule.