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- Volume 19, 2016
Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 19, 2016
Volume 19, 2016
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Democracy: A Never-Ending Quest
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 1–12More LessMost of my work focused on the functioning and the limits of democracy. I place the evolution of our understanding of this bewildering institution in the context of historical events and consider the challenges posed by its current critics. I also reflect on methods, arguing that game theory is the natural language of the social sciences. These ruminations add up to a research agenda.
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Transparency, Replication, and Cumulative Learning: What Experiments Alone Cannot Achieve*
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. S1–S23More LessReplication of simple and transparent experiments should promote the cumulation of knowledge. Yet, randomization alone does not guarantee simple analysis, transparent reporting, or third-party replication. This article surveys several challenges to cumulative learning from experiments and discusses emerging research practices—including several kinds of prespecification, two forms of replication, and a new model for coordinated experimental research—that may partially overcome the obstacles. I reflect on both the strengths and limitations of these new approaches to doing social science research.
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Preference Change in Competitive Political Environments
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 13–31More LessPolitical actions and outcomes depend on people's preferences over candidates, policies, and other politically relevant phenomena. For this reason, a great deal of political activity entails attempts to change other people's preferences. When do politically relevant preferences change? Addressing this question requires recognition of two realities: (a) Many stimuli compete for every person's attention, and (b) every person's capacity to pay attention to information is limited. With these realities in mind, we review research on preference change in competitive environments. We discuss how individuals allocate attention and how individuals' values and identities affect their use of the information to which they attend. We then discuss how this work has been applied to a new problem: improving the communication of scientific facts in increasingly politicized environments.
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The Governance of International Finance
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 33–48More LessContemporary international finance raises important questions about whether, and how, it might be overseen by national governments and international institutions. Inasmuch as global financial stability is a global public good, there is a normative case for governance structures to try to achieve this goal—whether they take the form of interstate cooperation or international institutions. This, however, does not mean that national states will necessarily be willing or able to work together to provide this global public good, as the incentives to free-ride are enormous. Nonetheless, the past 25 years do indicate that there has been some movement toward the provision of such global public goods as financial harmonization and a semblance of global lender-of-last-resort facilities. The record is spotty, but the trend appears to be in the direction of more global governance of global finance.
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Capital in the Twenty-First Century—in the Rest of the World
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 49–66More LessRecent work has documented an upward trend in inequality since the 1970s that harks back to the Gilded Age: the inegalitarian pre–World War I world. Most prominently, Thomas Piketty argues in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that this is partially due to the fact that capitalism is hardwired to exacerbate the gap between the rich and poor. By critically evaluating recent literature on this topic, this article offers three big contributions. First, we advance an alternative explanation for the long-term U-shaped nature of inequality that Piketty examines. Political regime types and the social groups they empower, rather than war and globalization, can account for the sharp fall and then sharp rise in inequality over the long 20th century. Second, we demonstrate that this U-shaped pattern only really holds for a handful of industrialized economies and a subset of developing countries. Finally, we provide a unified framework centered on two unorthodox assumptions that can explain inequality patterns beyond the U-shaped one. Capitalists and landholders actually prefer democracy if they can first strike a deal that protects them after transition. This is because dictators are not the loyal servants of the economic elite they are portrayed to be—in fact, they are often responsible for soaking, if not destroying, the rich under autocracy.
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The Turn to Tradition in the Study of Jewish Politics
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 67–87More LessThis article traces the political, intellectual, and disciplinary motivations behind the establishment of the field of Jewish political thought, and pursues implications of the field's establishment for the dynamics of Jewish political debate. Jewish political thought is decisively marked by the experience of statelessness. Thus, to establish the possibility of a Jewish political tradition, scholars have had to abandon or relax the received view that sovereignty is the defining horizon for politics. Although the pervasiveness of politics is the field's animating conviction, scholars have yet to mount a sufficiently forceful challenge to sovereignty's conceptual and political priority. This review surveys the reasons why scholars have been reluctant to pursue alternative, diasporic conceptions of the political, focusing on their notions of what constitutes a tradition. The article contends that developing a more ambitious conception of the Jewish political tradition is a prerequisite for encouraging political debate about sovereignty's importance for Jewish political agency.
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Governance: What Do We Know, and How Do We Know It?
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 89–105More LessThe term governance does not have a settled definition today, and it has at least three main meanings. The first is international cooperation through nonsovereign bodies outside the state system. This concept grew out of the literature on globalization and argued that territorial sovereignty was giving way to more informal types of horizontal cooperation, as well as to supranational bodies such as the European Union. The second meaning treated governance as a synonym for public administration, that is, effective implementation of state policy. Interest in this topic was driven by awareness that global poverty was rooted in corruption and weak state capacity. The third meaning of governance was the regulation of social behavior through networks and other nonhierarchical mechanisms. The first and third of these strands of thought downplay traditional state authority and favor new transnational or civil society actors. These trends, however, raise troubling questions about transparency and accountability in the workings of modern government.
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Political Theory on Climate Change
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 107–123More LessThis article focuses on discussions in political theory on climate change in the period 2005–2015, setting them in the context of broader discussions in political theory on the environment and ecology in the period 1990–2005. The themes of justice, politics, and expertise are used to organize the review. It is argued that discussions of justice and climate change could benefit from a richer connection to the literature on historical injustice; that in discussions of the politics of climate change, a comparative advantage of political theory lies in further development of the role of ethos and imagination in reshaping our understanding of the place of the status quo; and that more research into the relationship between expertise and democracy is needed. In conclusion, the idea of the Anthropocene is considered, with the need for further consideration of politics in specifying how humans are transforming the nature of the earth and atmosphere.
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Democratization During the Third Wave
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 125–144More LessThe initial optimism that greeted the onset of the “Third Wave” of democratization has cooled with the instability of many new democracies and the proliferation of stable competitive authoritarian regimes. These disappointments have produced a return to structural theories emphasizing the constraints posed by underdevelopment, resource endowments, inequality, and ethno-religious cleavages. We argue, however, for a sharper focus on the political mechanisms that link such factors to the emergence of democracy, including the extent of institutionalization in new democracies and the still understudied role of civil society and the capacity for collective action. The international dimensions of democratization also require closer analysis. We also underline a methodological point: The quest for an overarching theory of democracy and democratization may be misguided. Generalizations supported by cross-national statistical work yield numerous anomalies and indicate the need for approaches that emphasize combinations of causal factors, alternative pathways, and equifinality.
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Representation and Consent: Why They Arose in Europe and Not Elsewhere
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 145–162More LessMedieval Western Europeans developed two practices that are the bedrock of modern democracy: representative government and the consent of the governed. Why did this happen in Europe and not elsewhere? I ask what the literature has to say about this question, focusing on the role of political ideas, on economic development, and on warfare. I consider Europe in comparison with the Byzantine Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, and Song Dynasty China. I argue that ultimately Europe's different path may have been an accident. It was produced by Western Europe's experience of outside invasion that replaced the Western Roman Empire with a set of small, fragmented polities in which rulers were relatively weak. Small size meant low transaction costs for maintaining assemblies. The relatively weak position of rulers meant that consent of the governed was necessary. I also suggest how these conclusions should influence our understanding of democracy today.
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The Eurozone and Political Economic Institutions
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 163–185More LessThis review sets out a recently developed comparative political economy literature on the Eurozone, which has a basis in both varieties of capitalism and modern macroeconomics. It contrasts the export-oriented, northern European, skill-intensive, coordinated market economies with coordinated wage-bargaining, on the one hand, with the southern European, demand-driven economies with strong public sector unions, on the other. It analyzes the Eurozone as an ongoing grouping of sovereign democratic states, each with strong concerns to remain within the Eurozone but in principle with an exit option. It argues that the origins of the Eurozone and its trajectory primarily reflected national economic concerns and not a political drive toward European integration; and its deflationary preference has been the rational choice of the export-oriented members and their bargaining power in the Eurozone, not an irrational rejection of Keynesianism. The Eurozone functioned well (comparably to the advanced economies outside the Eurozone, though with major imbalances in both) during its “dual growth model” period from inception to the Eurocrisis. The absence of flexible core labor markets suggested by the optimum currency area literature has not impeded its effectiveness; and there has been little Eurozone-generated institution building, except very partially in banking. The only important development, Outright Monetary Transactions, has made the European Central Bank the de facto lender of last resort to fiscally stable member states.
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American Exceptionalism and the Welfare State: The Revisionist Literature
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 187–203More LessRecent research has argued that the American welfare state is not necessarily smaller than the welfare state in other advanced industrial countries. Rather, it is organized on principles that make it seem smaller: Because it functions through tax expenditures and public–private partnerships, it is less visible than welfare states that operate on the principle of direct spending. This review summarizes the most important messages of this revisionist scholarship, particularly in how this form of welfare provision undermines support for the welfare state, increases the complexity and decreases the efficiency of the system, and hides regressive policies from public scrutiny. I then argue that although this work has taught us much about American politics, several gaps need to be addressed. First, the explanation of the origins of this state of affairs is incomplete and unconvincing. Second, while private welfare is an important part of the American experience, the scholarship on private welfare provision has not yet grappled with the fact that private welfare was also historically found in many other advanced industrial countries, but did not crowd out the public welfare state there as it has in the United States. Finally, although the scholarship has usefully called attention to the invisibility of tax expenditures, we should not consider tax expenditures part of the “welfare state,” because they only rarely accomplish the functions of redistribution and risk pooling of public welfare programs. Rather, in most cases, tax expenditures should be seen as tax cuts, that is, diminishment of state capacity. These observations suggest that the scholarship would benefit from broader engagement with the comparative literature on political economy and from a more precise and conceptually grounded definition of the “welfare state.”
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The Diplomacy of War and Peace
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 205–228More LessTwo broad traditions of scholarship can be distinguished in the vast literature on the diplomacy of conflict. The diplomatic communication tradition takes the difficulty of credible communication between adversaries as its central problem and analyzes the conditions for informative costly, costless, and inadvertent signals as well as the effects on conflict processes of these different forms of communication. A body of empirical work, focused particularly on public coercive diplomacy and alliances, also belongs to this approach. The other tradition is the rhetorical-argumentative, which focuses on rhetorical style, justificatory argument, and the effects of modes of discourse. These traditions have offered very different insights and, in some areas, complement and reinforce each other.
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Security Communities and the Unthinkabilities of War
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 229–248More LessScholarship on security communities often invokes a common goal: for war to become unthinkable. Unthinkable here means impossible, and states are considered to be most secure when war is unthinkable between them. Interestingly, the term unthinkable appears in policy discourse with nearly the opposite meaning, referring to wars that are eminently possible but horrifying to contemplate, such as war with a nuclear Iran. Taking this discrepancy as my starting point, I propose that the social phenomenon of unthinkability is not well understood and that a deeper understanding of it can point toward new directions for research on security communities. I conceptualize unthinkability along two dimensions, empirical availability and normative acceptability, combining these to create four distinct types of unthinkability. I then use this typology as a heuristic device to identify research directions on security communities and on the phenomenon of unthinkable war.
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Protecting Popular Self-Government from the People? New Normative Perspectives on Militant Democracy
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 249–265More LessThis article assesses recent normative theorizing on militant democracy—the idea that, to protect themselves, democracies might under some circumstances have to restrict the rights of those set on undermining or outright destroying democracy. Particular attention is paid to new justifications of militant democracy that seek to avoid the danger of militant democracy itself damaging democracy, as well as to the question of who the agent deciding on implementing militant democracy ought to be. Three new challenges for thinking about militant democracy are identified: certain forms of religious belief and practice, new varieties of authoritarianism that include elections and some limited freedoms, and the question of whether international and supranational institutions can play a role in protecting democracies.
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Buying, Expropriating, and Stealing Votes
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 267–288More LessIn elections around the world, large numbers of voters are influenced by promises or threats that are contingent on how they vote. Recently, the political science literature has made considerable progress in disaggregating clientelism along two dimensions: first, in recognizing the diversity of actors working as brokers, and second, in conceptualizing and disaggregating types of clientelism based on positive and negative inducements of different forms. In this review, we discuss recent findings explaining variation in the mix of clientelistic strategies across countries, regions, and individuals and identify a few areas for future progress, particularly in explaining variation in targeting of inducements by politicians on different types of voters.
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Rethinking Dimensions of Democracy for Empirical Analysis: Authenticity, Quality, Depth, and Consolidation
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 289–309More LessThis article analyzes the scholarship on variation among democracies and offers a proposal intended to address the relative lack of consensus over the fundamental conceptual infrastructure underpinning this literature. The framework introduced here differentiates between four dimensions of democracy: authenticity, quality, depth and consolidation—arguing that they may vary with some independence from one another. This approach simultaneously addresses concerns of normative and empirical democratic theory, rooting the conceptualization of democracy's dimensions in central aspirations that motivate normative theorists and political actors. The distinction between authenticity and quality as formulated here centers on the difference between standards understood to be required for membership in the democratic genus and normatively valued goals that surpass such standards. Work on democratic depth, as formulated here, addresses concerns over the possible tension between “minimalist” operational definitions and the underlying idea of democracy with its emphasis on political equality and rule by the people.
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Chavismo, Liberal Democracy, and Radical Democracy
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 311–329More LessScholars studying Hugo Chávez and his movement are generally divided into two camps: a liberal one that sees Chavismo as an instance of democratic backsliding and a radical one that upholds Chavismo as the fulfillment of its aspirations for participatory democracy. Boundaries are not fixed, but the two sides generally fail to understand each other's assumptions or to acknowledge each other's criticisms. The result has been a less productive body of scholarly work on both sides.
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Give Me Attitudes
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 331–350More LessExplorations of political attitudes and ideologies have sought to explain where they come from. They have been presumed to be rooted in processes of socialization; to be imposed by elites through partisan affiliations, the social milieu, and experiences; or to result from psychological traits. Far less attention has been focused on the inherent component of attitudes and where attitudes lead. Synthesizing research across academic fields, we propose that attitudes are a core constituent element of individual temperament, with far-reaching influence on many aspects of psychological and social functioning. Once instantiated, political values guide human behavior across domains, including affiliation into social networks, mate selection, physiological perception, psychological disposition, personality characteristics, morality construction, decision making, and selection into the very environments that influence political preferences. Here, we reconceptualize the ontology of political attitudes and ideologies from both a top-down and bottom-up perspective and as a combination of biological and environmental processes that drive an entire suite of coordinated downstream effects across the life course.
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Re-imagining the Cambridge School in the Age of Digital Humanities
Vol. 19 (2016), pp. 351–373More LessRecent work on the history of political thought, exploiting digital resources, is challenging the idea that empirically and hermeneutically minded political scientists must work independently in silos. Work by students of the Cambridge School and work by textual data miners are showing the way toward a new hermeneutical circle—one in which empirically and hermeneutically minded political scientists can use digital resources to analyze diverse texts and make groundbreaking discoveries on relationships between textual uses of language and political change. I analyze this new trend toward different sorts of political scientists using digital resources to study ideas, to outline underlying paradigms relating language and politics in these respective fields, and to consider how they could be brought into productive conversation. I then consider how such conversation would enrich subdisciplinary understandings of the role of language in politics. Ultimately, I use this analysis to generate a broader model for how empirically and hermeneutically inclined political scientists can benefit from collaboration in the age of digital humanities.
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Previous Volumes
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Volume 27 (2024)
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Volume 26 (2023)
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Volume 25 (2022)
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Volume 24 (2021)
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Volume 23 (2020)
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Volume 22 (2019)
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Volume 21 (2018)
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Volume 20 (2017)
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Volume 19 (2016)
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Volume 18 (2015)
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Volume 17 (2014)
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Volume 16 (2013)
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Volume 15 (2012)
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Volume 14 (2011)
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Volume 13 (2010)
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Volume 12 (2009)
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Volume 11 (2008)
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Volume 10 (2007)
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Volume 9 (2006)
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Volume 8 (2005)
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Volume 7 (2004)
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Volume 6 (2003)
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Volume 5 (2002)
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Volume 4 (2001)
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Volume 3 (2000)
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Volume 2 (1999)
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Volume 1 (1998)
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Volume 0 (1932)