Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 2, 1999

The utility of military threats as a means to deter international crises and war has been a central topic of international relations research. Rational choice models have provided the foundation for theorizing about the conditions under which conventional deterrence is likely to succeed or fail. Rational deterrence theorists have focused on four sets of variables: the balance of military forces, costly signaling and bargaining behavior, reputations, and interests at stake. Over the past two decades, scholars have tested propositions from rational deterrence theory utilizing both statistical and comparative case study methods. Although the empirical results from these tests have supported a number of hypotheses derived from the theoretical literature, they have also challenged some theoretical arguments and have sparked vigorous debates about both theory and research designs for conducting empirical research.

Revolutions may be defined as periods in which the rate of change of power positions of factions, social groups, or armed bodies changes rapidly and unpredictably. Revolutions then come to an end to the degree that political uncertainty is reduced by building enough bargains into a political structure that can maintain those bargains. The paper summarizes what we know about the structures that can produce such decreases in uncertainty: conservative authoritarianism, independence, occupation government, totalitarianism, democracy, and caudillismo. The essay describes these governmental types by how they increase certainty of power distributions in the short and medium run and so bring revolutions to an end.

Harold D. Lasswell's extensive and wide-ranging books and essays are extraordinarily rich sources of ideas, methods, and topics for the study of political behavior. Whether and how the legacy of his writings is used by contemporary political scientists and theorists is reported here by way of an investigation of references to his work appearing in mainstream political science journals (available through JSTOR) for the 17 years following the end of his academic career. We find that most references to Lasswell are superficial (perfunctory, suggestive, deferential), although a few are more substantial (critical, extending). We conclude that Lasswell's legacy is today undervalued and underused, to the discipline's detriment.

One of the most salient changes in the world economy since 1980 has been the move toward freer trade among countries across the globe. How do existing theories about trade policy explain this puzzle? Three sets of explanations are prominent. First, many focus on changes in trade policy preferences among domestic actors, either societal groups or political leaders. Second, scholars examine changes in political institutions to account for such policy change. Third, they seek explanations in changes in the international political system. Large-scale changes in political institutions, especially in the direction of democracy, may be necessary for the kind of massive trade liberalization that has occurred. But changes in preferences cannot be overlooked in explaining the rush to free trade. Moreover, the influence of international institutions has been important. Finally, the reciprocal impact of trade on domestic politics and the international political system is important. If the rush to free trade is sustained, will its impact be benign or malign?

This essay synthesizes the results of the large number of studies of late–20th-century democratization published during the last 20 years. Strong evidence supports the claims that democracy is more likely in more developed countries and that regime transitions of all kinds are more likely during economic downturns. Very few of the other arguments advanced in the transitions literature, however, appear to be generally true. This study proposes a theoretical model, rooted in characteristics of different types of authoritarian regimes, to explain many of the differences in democratization experience across cases in different regions. Evidence drawn from a data set that includes 163 authoritarian regimes offers preliminary support for the model proposed.

Electoral coordination occurs at two main levels: (a) within individual electoral districts, where competitors coordinate entry and citizens coordinate votes; and (b) across districts, as competitors from different districts ally to form regional or national parties. We know a fair amount about district-level electoral coordination for single-tier electoral systems. In particular, when political actors are primarily concerned with the current election and have good information about the relative chances of potential competitors, two different M + 1 rules apply in an M-seat district. First, the number of competitors entering a given race tends to be no more than M + 1; second, when more than M + 1 competitors do enter a race, votes tend to concentrate on at most M + 1 of them. We know much less about cross-district coordination, in which potentially separate local party systems merge to form a national party system. This essay focuses on the latter, relatively neglected topic.

The literature on term limits has burgeoned in recent years. This paper looks at both the empirical and normative studies, exploring how the term-limit debate is confounded by both fact and value disagreements. We identify four schools of thought with respect to the desirability of term limits and conclude that, because people start from different normative perspectives, findings about term-limit effects can be interpreted in very different ways. Reviewing the literature on electoral impacts, we discovered that term limits have increased turnover most noticeably in the more professionalized legislatures. The length of term limitations and the types of legislatures that adopt them are critical explanatory variables. The implications for the internal workings of legislatures and the balance of power are less well documented by scholars, but there is a great deal of testimony from legislators and lobbyists that term limits have changed their operations in important ways.

Do people assimilate new information in an efficient and unbiased manner—that is, do they update prior beliefs in accordance with Bayes' rule? Or are they selective in the way that they gather and absorb new information? Although many classic studies in political science and psychology contend that people resist discordant information, more recent research has tended to call the selective perception hypothesis into question. We synthesize the literatures on biased assimilation and belief polarization using a formal model that encompasses both Bayesian and biased learning. The analysis reveals (a) the conditions under which these phenomena may be consistent with Bayesian learning, (b) the methodological inadequacy of certain research designs that fail to control for preferences or prior information, and (c) the limited support that exists for the more extreme variants of the selective perception hypothesis.

Who will guard the guardians? Political scientists since Plato have sought to answer this, the central question of the civil-military relations subfield. Although civil-military relations is a very broad subject, encompassing the entire range of relationships between the military and civilian society at every level, the field largely focuses on the control or direction of the military by the highest civilian authorities in nation-states. This essay surveys political science's contribution to our understanding of civil-military relations, providing a rough taxonomy for cataloguing the field and discussing the recent renaissance in the literature as well as fruitful avenues for future research. The essay focuses on theoretical developments, slighting (for reasons of space) the many case studies and empirical treatments that have also made important contributions to our knowledge.

A central claim of democratic theory is that democracy induces governments to be responsive to the preferences of the people. Political parties organize politics in every modern democracy, and some observers claim that parties are what induce democracies to be responsive. Yet, according to others, parties give voice to extremists and reduce the responsiveness of governments to the citizenry. The debate about parties and democracy takes on renewed importance as new democracies around the globe struggle with issues of representation and governability. I show that our view of the impact of parties on democratic responsiveness hinges on what parties are—their objectives and organization. I review competing theories of parties, sketch their testable implications, and note the empirical findings that may help adjudicate among these theories. I also review debates about the origins of parties, about the determinants of party-system size and characteristics, and about party competition.

The Rochester school of political science, led by William H Riker, pioneered the new method of positive political theory. Positive political theory, or rational choice theory, represents the attempt to build formal models of collective decision-making processes, often relying on the assumption of self-interested rational action. This method has been used to study such political processes as elections, legislative behavior, public goods, and treaty formation and diplomatic strategy in international relations. In this article, we provide a retrospective account of the Rochester school, which discusses Riker's theoretical synthesis and his institution building in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We discuss some of the most important Rochester school contributions related to spatial models of voting, agenda setting, structure-induced equilibria, heresthetics, game theory, and political theory. We also briefly situate positive political theory within the larger context of political science and economics.

Findings from behavioral organization theory, behavioral decision theory, survey research, and experimental economics leave no doubt about the failure of rational choice as a descriptive model of human behavior. But this does not mean that people and their politics are irrational. Bounded rationality asserts that decision makers are intendedly rational; that is, they are goal-oriented and adaptive, but because of human cognitive and emotional architecture, they sometimes fail, occasionally in important decisions. Limits on rational adaptation are of two types: procedural limits, which limit how we go about making decisions, and substantive limits, which affect particular choices directly. Rational analysis in institutional contexts can serve as a standard for adaptive, goal-oriented human behavior. In relatively fixed task environments, such as asset markets or elections, we should be able to divide behavior into adaptive, goal-oriented behavior (that is, rational action) and behavior that is a consequence of processing limits, and we should then be able to measure the deviation. The extent of deviation is an empirical issue. These classes are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, and they may be examined empirically in situations in which actors make repeated similar choices.

The failure to anticipate the collapse of communist one-party systems stands in striking contrast to the determinism of retrospective accounts. This essay reviews accounts of the decay and breakdown of one-party systems in order to uncover the causes behind political science's inability to both anticipate these developments and provide satisfactory explanations. These causes include the deterministic character of most accounts, the absence of a theory of single-party rule, the absence or misspecification of causal links between the major building blocks of the arguments put forth, and the analytic conflation of decay and breakdown. Understanding the decay and breakdown of one-party systems requires a methodologically conscious distinction between these two processes and a specification of their links (and the links between the variables affecting each process), grounded in a theory of single-party rule.

The essay provides a short outline of Berlin's career and an assessment of his contribution to pluralist and liberal thought. He was a British academic with a Russian cast of mind, and an inhabitant of the ivory tower who was very much at home in the diplomatic and political world. Similarly, he was neither a historian of ideas nor a political philosopher in the narrow sense usually understood in the modern academy. Rather, he engaged in a trans-historical conversation about the human condition with such figures as Machiavelli, Herzen, Vico, and Herder. The Russian liberal understanding of the historical and cultural setting was, in his view, much superior to that of familiar figures such as John Stuart Mill, just as the nonliberal Machiavelli cast a particularly vivid light on the problems of a pluralist world view.

This article provides an overview of recent developments in historical institutionalism. First, it reviews some distinctions that are commonly drawn between the “historical” and the “rational choice” variants of institutionalism and shows that there are more points of tangency than typically assumed. However, differences remain in how scholars in the two traditions approach empirical problems. The contrast of rational choice's emphasis on institutions as coordination mechanisms that generate or sustain equilibria versus historical institutionalism's emphasis on how institutions emerge from and are embedded in concrete temporal processes serves as the foundation for the second half of the essay, which assesses our progress in understanding institutional formation and change. Drawing on insights from recent historical institutional work on “critical junctures” and on “policy feedbacks,” the article proposes a way of thinking about institutional evolution and path dependency that provides an alternative to equilibrium and other approaches that separate the analysis of institutional stability from that of institutional change.

Despite high mass poverty, illiteracy, and religious and linguistic heterogeneity, the states of South Asia enjoy a moderately high level of orderly and democratic government. This contrast to other comparable parts of the world is explained to some extent by the cultural, institutional, and social legacies of British colonial rule and the orderly transfer of power in these successor states. However, 50 years after decolonization, one needs to look beyond colonial rule for explanations. The essay develops a general model based on a rational choice perspective to explain political stability through institutional arrangements. In its application of this model to South Asia, the chapter suggests that political stability is conditional (a) on the capacity of the postcolonial state to innovate new institutions and (b) on the ability of its new political elites to integrate modern and premodern political structures and values within the institutional set-up and to consult the masses periodically through a democratic political process. This model is illustrated with reference to state-society, state-economy, and interstate relations within South Asia.

The growing use of institutional analysis in the study of the European Union (EU) has improved EU scholarship and rendered it more integral to the discipline of political science. Institutionalist analyses differ regarding the theoretical role of institutions and actor preferences. We classify institutionalist approaches to the EU by their theoretical treatment (exogenous or endogenous) of institutions and preferences. Analyses at the research frontier transcend these categories and offer the promise of an improved understanding of EU politics and a greater contribution by EU studies to the broader discipline of political science.