Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 20, 2017

The roots of my fascination with politics and Africa run deep; so too does my need for clarity. The combination drove me into the professoriate. My research in Africa convinced me that modernization theory was wrong: The people I came to know in the field were sophisticated in their politics. Additional research convinced me that market-oriented approaches to political economy were wrong and that government intervention could lead to increases in productivity and welfare. Because neoclassical approaches are flexible, I continue to think in terms of strategy and choice and to apply them to the study of development.

One might argue that political science has gone further than any other social science in developing a rigorous field of study devoted to qualitative methods. This review article begins by discussing the time-honored qualitative/quantitative distinction. What is qualitative data and analysis, and how does it differ from quantitative data and analysis? I propose a narrow definition of “qualitative” and explore its implications. I also explore in a speculative vein some of the factors underlying the ongoing Methodenstreit between scholars who identify with quantitative and qualitative approaches to social science. In the remainder of the article I discuss areas of qualitative research that have been especially fecund over the past decade. These include case selection, causal inference, and multimethod research.

Contemporary just war theory is divided into two broad camps: revisionists and traditionalists. Traditionalists seek to provide moral foundations for something close to current international law, and in particular the laws of armed conflict. Although they propose improvements, they do so cautiously. Revisionists argue that international law is at best a pragmatic fiction—it lacks deeper moral foundations. In this article, I present the contemporary history of analytical just war theory, from the origins of contemporary traditionalist just war theory in Michael Walzer's work to the revisionist critique of Walzer and the subsequent revival of traditionalism. I discuss central questions of methodology, as well as consider the morality of resorting to war and the morality of conduct in war. I show that although the revisionists exposed philosophical shortcomings in Walzer's arguments, their radical conclusions should prompt us not to reject the broad contemporary consensus, but instead to seek better arguments to underpin it.

Scholars have long been fascinated by the role of international courts in the enforcement of international rule of law. They start with a foundational question: Can international courts affect how international law is implemented? In this review, we lay out four of the most common theoretical arguments for why international courts matter. We then interrogate these accounts. In particular, we examine their views on how much influence courts have and what the likely welfare consequences are for the signatories of an agreement. In so doing, we identify critical conditions that must obtain for court influence under each of the arguments. We then bring more recent scholarship to bear on the plausibility of these conditions. In particular, we examine what research on the structure of law, the preferences of judges, and institutional design implies about the efficacy of international courts based on the four foundational arguments. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

This review uses theories of political economy to provide an analytical history of systems of taxation, focusing on the determinants of total tax revenue, tax structure, and tax administration. We show that most premodern states extracted very little revenue and that total revenue increased substantially in the nineteenth century, and we explore the possibility that tax revenues have hit a ceiling in the developed world. Our history of tax structure begins by discussing the highly regressive premodern tax systems, turns to the causes of the rise of progressive taxation in the twentieth century, and concludes by arguing that the short era of progressive taxation may be ending. The sections on tax administration discuss the many varieties of premodern patrimonialism, the determinants of the development and diffusion of bureaucratic administration, and the difficulty of taxing wealth in the modern world.

Along with China's economic and military rise, its leading political values will increasingly shape both China and the world at large. Hence, we need to understand, compare, and learn from leading values in China's political culture. This review discusses recent efforts to systematically compare three leading values in China's philosophical traditions—meritocracy, hierarchy, and harmony—with leading values from the political culture of Western societies.

For a generation, political science has been dominated by the analysis of interests within the framework of rational choice. Although this has enabled major advances, it struggles to provide a plausible analysis of many instances of sociopolitical dysfunction. This article reviews recent innovations in economics, psychology, and economic history that are converging to rehabilitate culture as a legitimate element of analysis. Culture matters, and its evolution is amenable to formal scientific analysis. But these processes need not be benign: There is no equivalent to the invisible hand of the market, guiding a culture toward social optimality. An organizational culture can trap a vital public agency, such as a tax administration, into severe dysfunction. A societal culture can trap an entire country into autocracy or poverty.

Sociologists, political scientists, and economists have long emphasized the benefits of monopolizing violence and the risks of failing to do so. Yet recent research on conflict, state failure, genocide, coups, and election violence suggests governments cannot or will not form a monopoly. Governments worldwide are more risk acceptant than anticipated. They give arms and authority to a variety of nonstate actors, militias, vigilantes, death squads, proxy forces, paramilitaries, and counterbalancing forces. We develop a typology based on the links of the militia to the government and to society as a device to capture variations among these groups. We use the typology to explore insights from this emerging literature on the causes, consequences, and puzzling survival of progovernment militias and their implications for security and human rights, as well as to generate open questions for further research.

This article analyzes voter identification laws in the United States and their effects on voter turnout. Theoretically, there are plausible reasons to hypothesize turnout lowering effects, though there are also reasons to hypothesize those effects might be minimal. Methodologically, there are research design hurdles to clear in order to produce effect estimates that may be attributed to voter identification laws. Empirically, a small number of studies have employed suitable research designs and generally find modest, if any, turnout effects of voter identification laws. This may indicate that voter identification laws have only minor effects on turnout, or it may be due to the fact that the type of voter identification law that may have the most significant effects—a strict photo identification law—is a relatively recent phenomenon. Future elections and the related additional data may make it possible to adjudicate among these possibilities.

This review “diagnoses” climate change as an international governance challenge and explores the political feasibility of alternative “cures.” Human activities’ growing effect on Earth's climate system is extremely challenging, characterized by, inter alia, very long time lags between mitigation measures (∼costs) and environmental effects (∼benefits) and by stark asymmetries between “guilt” in causing the problem and vulnerability to climate change. Two main cures have been suggested. Some analysts argue that because climate change is a global process, adequate solutions must likewise be global. Others shift attention from the challenge's format to the sources of human motivation, arguing that a decentralized (bottom-up) approach will more directly engage a wider spectrum of motivations and actors. These cures are neither mutually exclusive nor easily combined. IR research contributes more to the former cure than to the latter but can play a constructive role in linking them.

The issue of climate change poses something of a puzzle. For all the attention accorded the issue, climate change/global warming has spawned surprisingly little grassroots activism in the contemporary United States. Drawing on social movement theory, the author seeks to explain this puzzle. The prevailing consensus among movement scholars is that the prospect for movement emergence is facilitated by the confluence of three factors: the expansion of political opportunities, the availability of mobilizing structures, and cognitive and affective mobilization through framing processes. The author then applies each of these factors to the case of climate change, arguing that (a) awareness of the issue developed during an especially inopportune period in American politics, (b) the organizations that arose to address the issue were ill suited to the kind of grassroots mobilization characteristic of successful movements, and (c) the amorphous nature of the issue played havoc with efforts at strategic framing.

A review of research findings and polling data about Americans’ attitudes on climate change reveals a lack of meaningful long-term change in mass opinion. Instead, the structure of Americans’ attitudes toward belief in climate change's existence, concern about its consequences, and demand for policy response is similar to that regarding many other issues in contemporary US politics: stability in aggregate opinion that masks partisan and ideological polarization enhanced by communications from elites. But features of the climate change problem elicit some distinctive determinants of opinion, including individuals’ trust in science, risk processing, and personal experience. Although our review of the literature and data leaves us skeptical that majority opinion will spur elected officials anytime soon to undertake the costly solutions necessary to tackle this problem comprehensively at the national level, we identify several avenues by which attitudes might promote less substantial but nevertheless consequential policy action.

This article reviews and analyzes recent research on regional integration. The review is structured along a political economy framework and proceeds in three steps. After analyzing the development of regional integration agreements (RIAs) from a historical perspective, I first discuss regional integration as a consequence of the decision-making calculus of office-motivated political leaders who find themselves under pressure from different societal groups interested in promoting or hindering regional integration. These pressures are conveyed, constrained, and calibrated by domestic institutions, which provide an important context for policy making, and in particular for the choice to enter RIAs. The analysis also highlights the importance of international pressures for regional integration. Second, I summarize the determinants and consequences of variations in regional institutional design. Third, I analyze the normative and strategic consequences of regional integration. The article concludes by outlining opportunities for future research, with emphasis on the domestic politics of regional integration, the causes and consequences of institutional design beyond trade agreements, and the consequences of the increasing number of often overlapping regional agreements.

This article reviews the literature on the politics of bureaucracy in the developing world, with a focus on service delivery and bureaucratic performance. We survey classic topics and themes such as the developmental state, principal–agent relations, and the efficient grease hypothesis, and we link them to new research findings in political science, sociology, and economics. We identify the concept of embeddedness as an important yet still underexplored framework that cuts across disciplines and may be used to understand bureaucratic performance and service delivery. Looking forward, we outline a framework for conceptualizing bureaucratic action by exploiting variation across time, space, task, and client, and we identify promising areas for further research on the bureaucrat–citizen encounter in developing countries.

Feminist theory is not only about women; it is about the world, engaged through critical intersectional perspectives. Despite many significant differences, most feminist theory is reliably suspicious of dualistic thinking, generally oriented toward fluid processes of emergence rather than static entities in one-way relationships, and committed to being a political as well as an intellectual enterprise. It is rooted in and responsible to movements for equality, freedom, and justice. Three important contemporary questions within feminist theory concern (a) subjectivity, narrative, and materiality; (b) global neoliberal geopolitics; and (c) global ecologies. Feminist theorists employ the tools of intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, and the intertwinings of scholarship and activism to address these questions. While we labor to contribute to our academic fields, our primary responsibility is to contribute to positive social change.

What is the relationship between globalization and poverty? Developing economies have long turned to international trade and finance as a solution for development, yet 35% of the world's population still lives below the international poverty line. Economists and political scientists explore this relationship but are far from reaching a conclusion. We review this literature and argue that to understand the relationship between globalization and poverty, we must ultimately understand the political motivations underlying the policies directed at the poorest. Specifically, we contend that scholars need to identify the ideological positions of developing country governments, an identification that moves beyond the conventional left–right divide that prevails in developed nations. We provide theoretical guidance on how scholars might begin to operationalize ideology on a global basis and why this is necessary to evaluate the globalization–poverty linkage. Further, we provide some preliminary quantitative and qualitative tests of our argument. Ultimately, scholars from both disciplines must begin to evaluate government commitment to pro-poor redistribution (rather than the extent to which policy is beholden to vested elite interest groups) in order to assess the relationship between trade and poverty.

How can we best gauge the political opinions of the citizenry? Since their emergence in the 1930s, opinion polls—or surveys—have become the dominant way to assess the public will. But even given the long history of polling, there is no agreement among political scientists on how to best measure public opinion through polls. This article is a call for political scientists to be more self-conscious about the choices we make when we attempt to measure public opinion with surveys in two realms. I first take up the question of whom to interview, discussing the major challenges survey researchers face when sampling respondents from the population of interest. I then discuss the level of specificity with which we can properly collect information about the political preferences of individuals. I focus on the types of question wording and item aggregation strategies researchers can use to accurately measure public opinion.

This article critically reviews scholarship on the role of conflict and cooperation in conditioning nuclear proliferation. We start by laying out the trajectory of scholarship on the causes of proliferation, organizing it in three waves: (a) security and (b) nonsecurity drivers of proliferation, and (c) supply constraints on nuclear acquisition. We then examine the recent turn in the proliferation literature toward a strategic interaction approach, focusing on how conflict and cooperation between proliferators, their adversaries, and their allies shape the spread of nuclear weapons. We argue for an integrated framework for analyzing the tools states can deploy to foster or stymie proliferation. Finally, we sketch an agenda for research on nuclear proliferation. Here, we argue that scholarship should (a) incorporate nonsecurity dynamics into the strategic interaction approach to the study of proliferation and (b) combine rigorous theory with careful historical research to further our understanding of the causes of proliferation.

The political problems of democratic legitimacy related to the construction of the European Union have mutated deeply during the crisis. The survival of the Eurozone has exacted a high toll on democratic principles. National representative democracy has been weakened due to the imperatives of economic integration. The technocratic elements of European integration (independent agencies, binding rules on economic matters) have expanded dramatically in scope. In the past, the technocratic dimension was circumscribed to efficiency-enhancing policies; during the crisis, it has been extended to issues with clear distributional consequences (such as the burden of adjustment between debtor and creditor countries). The resulting paradox is that in a time of growing “politicization” of European affairs, the technocratic bias of the European Union has “depoliticized” economic issues. This article reviews the recent debates about the tension between technocracy and democracy in the context of European supranational integration.

The Eurozone crisis constitutes a grave challenge to European integration. This article presents an overview of the causes of the crisis and analyzes why it has been so difficult to resolve. We focus on how responses to the crisis were shaped by distributive conflicts both among and within countries. On the international level, debtor and creditor countries have fought over the distribution of responsibility for the accumulated debt; countries with current account surpluses and deficits have fought over who should implement the policies necessary to reduce the current account imbalances. Within countries, interest groups have fought to shift the costs of crisis resolution away from themselves. The article emphasizes that the Eurozone crisis shares many features of previous debt and balance-of-payments crises. However, the Eurozone's predicament is unique because it is set within a monetary union that strongly constrains the policy options available to policy makers and vastly increases the interdependence of the euro crisis countries. The outcome of the crisis has also been highly unusual because the costs of crisis resolution have been borne almost exclusively by the debtor countries and taxpayers in the Eurozone.

Democratic elections have been assumed to play a crucial role in curbing corruption among public officials. Voters, due to their general distaste for corruption, are expected to sanction politicians who misuse public office for private gains. Yet, empirical evidence to date is mixed, and it often suggests that the electoral punishment of corruption is rather mild. Recently, political scientists have made great strides in understanding why corruption might be tolerated by voters. In this review, we identify three key stages—information acquisition, blame attribution, and behavioral response—that underlie a retrospective vote based on corruption. A breakdown of one or more of these stages may lead to a lack of electoral punishment of corruption. We also outline some areas for future progress, particularly highlighting the importance of voter coordination for understanding the extent to which corruption is punished at the ballot box.

Decades of research across several disciplines have produced substantial evidence that labor unions, on balance, reduce economic disparities. But unions are complicated, multifaceted organizations straddling markets and politics. Much of their equality-promoting influence occurs through their ability to reduce class-based inequity in politics and public policy. Declining unionization across much of the developed world is eroding workers’ bargaining power. Reduced economic leverage puts pressure on union solidarity and weakens labor-based political movements. Important research design problems and significant heterogeneity across unions, regions, countries, and time imply a continued need for more work.

Many of the questions that are central to political science involve understanding either the causes or consequences of policy change. Scholars have relied on both data-driven and model-driven approaches to characterize the content and direction of policy. This review briefly describes several prominent measures from each approach, and it highlights important limitations that scholars continue to face in the hope of prompting continued contributions to this difficult, but essential, task.

What do we know about wealth inequality and democracy? Our review shows that the simple conjectures that democracy produces wealth equality and that wealth inequality leads to democratic failure are not supported by the evidence. Why are democracy and high levels of wealth inequality sustainable together? Three key features of democratic politics can make this outcome possible. When societies are divided along cleavages other than wealth, this can inhibit the adoption of wealth-equalizing policies. Likewise, voter preferences for the redistribution of wealth depend on the beliefs they form about the fairness of these measures, and some voters without wealth may feel that redistribution is unfair. Finally, wealth-equalizing policies may be absent if the democratic process is captured by the rich; however, the evidence explaining when, where, and why capture accounts for variation in wealth inequality is less convincing than is often claimed. This phenomenon is a useful avenue for future research.

Post-2003 civil wars are different from previous civil wars in three striking ways. First, most of them are situated in Muslim-majority countries. Second, most of the rebel groups fighting these wars espouse radical Islamist ideas and goals. Third, most of these radical groups are pursuing transnational rather than national aims. Current civil war theories can explain some of what is going on, but not everything. In this article, I argue that the transformation of information technology, especially the advent of the Web 2.0 in the early 2000s, is the big new innovation that is likely driving many of these changes. I offer a theory to explain why rebel groups, especially those in Muslim countries, have chosen to pursue a particular type of extreme ideology and goals. I then identify the six big implications this new information environment is likely to have for rebel behavior in the future. Innovations in information and communication technology are currently manifesting themselves in the rise of global Jihadi groups in the Muslim world, but we can expect them to be exploited by other groups as well.

This review examines state building in the Middle East from a long-term, historical perspective. The Middle East's early transition to settled agriculture meant the region was home to many of the most sophisticated and best-developed states in the ancient world. As Middle Eastern states emerged from Late Antiquity, their fiscal and bureaucratic capacity enabled institutional forms not possible in Europe, including reliance on slave soldiers for the state military elite as well as state control of land that could be distributed to state servants in the form of temporary, revocable land grants. Because a landed gentry did not emerge as an influence-wielding social class in the Middle East until a relatively late date, religious elites—who served as important providers of public goods as a result of their control of Islamic charitable foundations—became key intermediaries between state and society. Core features of the institutions of Islam's classical period largely persisted until the decline of the Ottoman Empire with implications for the nation-state forms to follow.

Uncertainty about capabilities, intent, or resolve has long been linked to war. More recently, the bargaining model of war has established uncertainty, also referred to as asymmetric information, as one of the two major causes of costly conflict, the other being the dynamics of commitment in anarchy. A growing theoretical literature has made significant strides in fleshing out causal mechanisms and expanding our understanding of the role of information in conflict onset and how it relates to crisis bargaining and arms races. This article reviews these theoretical developments and describes current efforts to better understand the relationships between information, uncertainty, and war.

Text has always been an important data source in political science. What has changed in recent years is the feasibility of investigating large amounts of text quantitatively. The internet provides political scientists with more data than their mentors could have imagined, and the research community is providing accessible text analysis software packages, along with training and support. As a result, text-as-data research is becoming mainstream in political science. Scholars are tapping new data sources, they are employing more diverse methods, and they are becoming critical consumers of findings based on those methods. In this article, we first describe the four stages of a typical text-as-data project. We then review recent political science applications and explore one important methodological challenge—topic model instability—in greater detail.

As the World Trade Organization (WTO) begins its third decade, its future is uncertain. The initial expectation that the WTO would be the fulcrum for future international trade agreements has not been met. At best, its tenure has had mixed results. This review addresses the political consequences of WTO membership, focusing on the rules and norms of the regime and why they have become less functional over time; looks at the effectiveness of the WTO and the dispute settlement system in encouraging trade and compliance with agreements; and offers some general thoughts on the impact of shifting mass opinion on the virtue of trade agreements and other stumbling blocks the WTO faces.

Against the backdrop of Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement, we ask what the American politics subfield has to say about the political lives of communities subjugated by race and class. We argue that mainstream research in this subfield—framed by images of representative democracy and Marshallian citizenship—has provided a rich portrait of what such communities lack in political life. Indeed, by focusing so effectively on their political marginalization, political scientists have ironically made such communities marginal to the subfield's account of American democracy and citizenship. In this article, we provide a corrective by focusing on what is present in the political lives of such communities. To redress the current imbalance and advance the understandings of race and class in American politics, we argue that studies of the liberal-democratic “first face” of the state must be complemented by greater attention to the state's more controlling “second face.” Focusing on policing, we seek to unsettle the mainstream of a subfield that rarely inquires into governmental practices of social control and the ways “race-class subjugated communities” are governed through coercion, containment, repression, surveillance, regulation, predation, discipline, and violence.