Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 22, 2019

An interview with Theda Skocpol took place at Harvard University in December 2017. Professor Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. Skocpol is the author of numerous books and articles well known in political science and beyond, including States and Social Revolutions, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, and The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (the latter coauthored with Vanessa Williamson). Skocpol has served as President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association. Among her honors, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, and she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science. She was interviewed by Eric Schickler, the Jeffrey & Ashley McDermott Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. The following is an edited transcript; a video of the entire interview can be viewed at https://www.annualreviews.org/r/theda-skocpol.

This review proposes a comparative research agenda on center-right parties in advanced democracies, bringing together research in American and comparative politics. Political scientists have recently closely examined the decline of the center-left and the rise of the radical right but have paid less attention to the weakening of center-right parties. Yet cohesive center-right parties have facilitated political stability and compromises, while their disintegration has empowered radical challengers. After presenting an overview of right-wing politics in Western democracies and weighing different definitions of the electoral right, we discuss two factors that shape variations in center-right cohesion: organizational robustness of center-right partisan institutions and the (un)bundling of conservative mass attitudes on different policy dimensions. Last, we argue that a full account of the rise of the radical right cannot focus solely on the strategies of the center-left but must incorporate also the choices, opportunities, and constraints of center-right parties.

Rulemaking is a critical part of American government and governance. This article reviews the political underpinnings of modern rulemaking. Specifically, it highlights the process and impact of agency regulations, as well as the key tools used by the legislature, elected executive, and courts to oversee the rulemaking process. The article also reviews who participates in the rulemaking process, as well as who influences regulatory content. Finally, new directions in regulatory policymaking are explored, including data collection advancements, as well as the potential role for guidance documents as replacements for more traditionally issued notice and comment regulations.

What is the relationship between psychoactive drugs and war? This review article identifies and traces five key dimensions of this relationship: war while on drugs, war for drugs, war through drugs, war against drugs, and drugs after war. The review provides empirical illustrations across times, places, and drugs to demonstrate the importance of each of these dimensions. Political scientists and other scholars have typically either ignored the drugs–war relationship or focused on only one dimension. The common tendency is to privilege illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin in the contemporary era over the historical centrality of legal drugs such as tobacco and alcohol in relation to armed conflict. Placing both history and a wider range of drugs (legal and illegal) front and center in the analysis provides a corrective that allows for a fuller and richer understanding of the multiple linkages between psychoactive substances and warfare. It also suggests that as a counterbalance to contemporary accounts stressing the growing threat posed by drug-financed violent nonstate actors, we should recognize the many ways in which the centuries-old nexus between drugs and war has also been about statecraft and the pursuit of the state's strategic objectives.

The number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) has skyrocketed over the past 20 years. In addition to reducing barriers at the border, modern PTAs remove many behind-the-border barriers by regulating foreign direct investment (FDI), liberalizing services, and protecting intellectual property rights. This article surveys the literature explaining the formation of PTAs and their consequences. Regarding the formation of PTAs, studies have gradually moved from exploring the macro-foundation of preferential liberalization to focusing on the micro-foundation of PTAs, relying on industry- and firm-level data. Regarding the effect of PTAs, there is robust evidence that PTAs substantively increase trade flows and FDI and are associated with economic reforms in developing countries, though the general welfare effect of preferential liberalization remains largely unexplored. I make some concrete suggestions on avenues toward which to push the research on PTAs. In particular, I argue that scholars interested in PTAs would benefit from engaging in debate about the distributional consequences of trade liberalization, which not only informs much of the current academic and policy research but also features in political debates taking place in democratic polities.

Should hate speech be banned? This article contends that the debate on this question must be disaggregated into discrete analytical stages, lest its participants continue to talk past one another. The first concerns the scope of the moral right to freedom of expression, and whether hate speech falls within the right's protective ambit. If it does, hate speech bans are necessarily unjust. If not, we turn to the second stage, which assesses whether speakers have moral duties to refrain from hate speech. The article canvasses several possible duties from which such a duty could be derived, including duties not to threaten, harass, offend, defame, or incite. If there is a duty to refrain from hate speech, it is yet a further question whether the duty should actually be enforced. This third stage depends on pragmatic concerns involving epistemic fallibility, the abuse of state power, and the benefits of counter-speech over coercion.

Populism is the name of a global phenomenon whose definitional precariousness is proverbial. It resists generalizations and makes scholars of politics comparativist by necessity, as its language and content are imbued with the political culture of the society in which it arises. A rich body of socio-historical analyses allows us to situate populism within the global phenomenon called democracy, as its ideological core is nourished by the two main entities—the nation and the people—that have fleshed out popular sovereignty in the age of democratization. Populism consists in a transmutation of the democratic principles of the majority and the people in a way that is meant to celebrate one subset of the people as opposed to another, through a leader embodying it and an audience legitimizing it. This may make populism collide with constitutional democracy, even if its main tenets are embedded in the democratic universe of meanings and language. In this article, I illustrate the context-based character of populism and how its cyclical appearances reflect the forms of representative government. I review the main contemporary interpretations of the concept and argue that some basic agreement now exists on populism's rhetorical character and its strategy for achieving power in democratic societies. Finally, I sketch the main characteristics of populism in power and explain how it tends to transform the fundamentals of democracy: the people and the majority, elections, and representation.

While previously polarization was primarily seen only in issue-based terms, a new type of division has emerged in the mass public in recent years: Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party. Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party's members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines. This phenomenon of animosity between the parties is known as affective polarization. We trace its origins to the power of partisanship as a social identity, and explain the factors that intensify partisan animus. We also explore the consequences of affective polarization, highlighting how partisan affect influences attitudes and behaviors well outside the political sphere. Finally, we discuss strategies that might mitigate partisan discord and conclude with suggestions for future work.

The design of international institutions varies in many ways: Institutions can be more or less formal, flexible, independent, precise, inclusive, centralized, and so on. This article classifies theoretical efforts to make sense of these similarities and differences. First, some theories focus on the bargains or contracts that attempt to construct equilibrium behavior while other theories analyze institutional design as a dynamic process. Second, theories vary in whether they understand institutional design as a response to the environment in which institutions operate or as a function of the incentives, interests, values, initiatives, and power of the actors that created the institutions. The article discusses four ideal-typical theoretical approaches that fit in each quadrant of the resulting 2×2 typology: rational functionalist, distributive rationalist, historical institutionalist, and structural process theories. These approaches identify different causes for suboptimal or even dysfunctional institutional design: domestic politics, power politics, path dependence, and culture. The conclusion discusses how these theories can help us make sense of current challenges to institutions and their design.

Owning a house is the most important economic choice most families will ever make. Yet, our understanding of the political causes and consequences of homeownership is rather thin. This review argues that political scientists need to take housing much more seriously, not least because of the unprecedented surges and collapses of house prices over the past two decades. The housing market is both a proxy for and a cause of growing social cleavages that shape how citizens view political issues from the size of the welfare state to the attractiveness of populist campaigns. The article begins by re-examining classic work on property from the nineteenth century as a still-relevant guide to the winners and losers from property market shocks and regulations. It then turns to the postwar era and work that suggests that the welfare state and property ownership are in some sense substitutes. It concludes by examining the role housing plays in shaping contemporary political preferences, both as a direct measure of individuals' wealth and welfare and as a proxy for the relative fortunes of different places.

This article reviews the changing status of single-country research in comparative politics, a field defined by the concept of comparison. An analysis of single-country research published in top general interest and comparative politics journals reveals that single-country research has evolved from an emphasis on description and theory generation to an emphasis on hypothesis testing and research design. This change is a result of shifting preferences for internal versus external validity combined with the quantitative and causal inference revolutions in the social sciences. A consequence of this shift is a change in substantive focus from macropolitical phenomena to micro-level processes, with consequences for the ability of comparative politics to address many substantive political phenomena that have long been at the center of the field.

As the world turns against international institutions, this article reviews evidence of the corrupting of global organizations. The review focuses on three international organizations that emerged from World War II: the Bretton Woods institutions [the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank] and the United Nations (UN). The article explores evidence of major shareholders (mainly the United States) using the Bretton Woods institutions to funnel money and other favors to strategically preferred countries. Then the review discusses vote buying across a range of issues debated at the UN and finally turns to dark scholarship on the use of UN human rights institutions by autocratic states as a veil to violate those very rights. The article concludes that government pursuit of strategic objectives may be a necessary part of global cooperation, but scholarship should continue to delve into the micro foundations underlying the macro evidence presented here to better inform reformers on how to limit corrupting influences.

Since at least Cicero, we have known that “money is the sinew of war.” Is it possible for a political economy of security (PES) subfield to contribute knowledge beyond Cicero's claim? This article aims to delineate the boundaries of a PES subfield by using the classic “guns versus butter” trade-off to define the existing literature within the subfield. Thinking seriously about this trade-off, including conditions under which a trade-off may not exist, raises a host of questions. The two most direct questions are: How does consuming “guns” influence the consumption of “butter”? And how does using “guns” influence the consumption of “butter”?

How do we know whether judges of different backgrounds are biased? We review the substantial political science literature on judicial decision making, paying close attention to how judges' demographics and ideology can influence or structure their decision making. As the research demonstrates, characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and gender can sometimes predict judicial decision making in limited kinds of cases; however, the literature also suggests that these characteristics are far less important in shaping or predicting outcomes than is ideology (or partisanship), which in turn correlates closely with gender, race, and ethnicity. This leads us to conclude that assuming judges of different backgrounds are biased because they rule differently is questionable. Given that the application of the law rarely provides one objectively correct answer, it is no surprise that judges' decisions vary according to their personal backgrounds and, more importantly, according to their ideology.

The increased polarization in the United States among the political branches and citizenry affects the selection, work, perception, and relative power of state and federal judges, including justices of the US Supreme Court. Polarization in the United States over the last few decades matters to the American judicial system in at least four ways. First, polarization affects judicial selection, whether the selection method is (sometimes partisan-based) elections or appointment by political actors. In times of greater polarization, governors and presidents who nominate judges, legislators who confirm judges, and voters who vote on judicial candidates are more apt to support or oppose judges on the basis of partisan affiliation or cues. Second, driven in part by selection mechanisms, polarization may be reflected in the decisions that judges make, especially on issues that divide people politically, such as abortion, guns, or affirmative action. The Supreme Court, for example, often divides along party and ideological lines in the most prominent and highly contested cases. Those ideological lines now overlap with party as we enter a period in which all the Court liberals have been appointed by Democratic presidents and all the Court conservatives have been appointed by Republican presidents. Third, increasingly polarized judicial decisions appear to be causing the public to view judges and judicial decision making (at least on the US Supreme Court) through a more partisan lens. Fourth, polarization may affect the separation of powers, by empowering courts against polarized legislative bodies sometimes paralyzed by gridlock. The review concludes by considering how increased polarization may interact with the judiciary and judicial branch going forward and by suggesting areas for future research.

How does the experience of economic shocks affect individuals' political views and voting behavior? Inspired partly by the fallout of the financial crisis of 2008, research on this question has proliferated. Findings from studies covering a broadening range of countries and economic contexts highlight several notable patterns. Economic shocks—e.g., job loss or sharp drop in income—exert a significant and theoretically predictable, if often transient, effect on political attitudes. In contrast, the effect on voting behavior is more limited in magnitude and its manifestations less understood. Negative economic shocks tend to increase support for more expansive social policy and for redistribution, strengthening the appeal of the left. But such shocks also tend to decrease trust in political institutions, thus potentially driving the voters to support radical or populist parties, or demobilizing them altogether. Further research is needed to detect the conditions that lead to these distinct voting outcomes.

Big data and data science are transforming the world in ways that spawn new concerns for social scientists, such as the impacts of the internet on citizens and the media, the repercussions of smart cities, the possibilities of cyber-warfare and cyber-terrorism, the implications of precision medicine, and the consequences of artificial intelligence and automation. Along with these changes in society, powerful new data science methods support research using administrative, internet, textual, and sensor-audio-video data. Burgeoning data and innovative methods facilitate answering previously hard-to-tackle questions about society by offering new ways to form concepts from data, to do descriptive inference, to make causal inferences, and to generate predictions. They also pose challenges as social scientists must grasp the meaning of concepts and predictions generated by convoluted algorithms, weigh the relative value of prediction versus causal inference, and cope with ethical challenges as their methods, such as algorithms for mobilizing voters or determining bail, are adopted by policy makers.

If citizens are to hold politicians accountable for their performance, they probably must have some sense of the relevant facts, such as whether the economy is growing. In surveys, Democrats and Republicans often claim to hold different beliefs about these facts, which raises normative concerns. However, it is not clear that their divergent survey responses reflect actual divergence of beliefs. In this review, we conclude that partisan divergence in survey responses is often not due to sincere, considered differences of belief that fall along party lines—but determining what it is due to is difficult. We review the evidence for possible explanations, especially insincere responding and congenial inference. Research in this area is still nascent, and much more will be required before we can speak with precision about the causes of partisan divergence in responses to factual questions.

The link between climate change and conflict has been discussed intensively in academic literature during the past decade. This review aims to provide a clearer picture of what the research community currently has to say with regard to this nexus. It finds that the literature has not detected a robust and general effect linking climate to conflict onset. Substantial agreement exists that climatic changes contribute to conflict under some conditions and through certain pathways. In particular, the literature shows that climatic conditions breed conflict in fertile grounds: in regions dependent on agriculture and in combination and interaction with other socioeconomic and political factors such as a low level of economic development and political marginalization. Future research should continue to investigate how climatic changes interact with and/or are conditioned by socioeconomic, political, and demographic settings to cause conflict and uncover the causal mechanisms that link these two phenomena.

What are the political and economic consequences of contention (i.e., genocide, civil war, state repression/human rights violation, terrorism, and protest)? Despite a significant amount of interest as well as quantitative research, the literature on this subject remains underdeveloped and imbalanced across topic areas. To date, investigations have been focused on particular forms of contention and specific consequences. While this research has led to some important insights, substantial limitations—as well as opportunities for future development—remain. In particular, there is a need for simultaneously investigating a wider range of consequences (beyond democracy and economic development), a wider range of contentious activity (beyond civil war, protest, and terrorism), a wider range of units of analysis (beyond the nation year), and a wider range of empirical approaches in order to handle particular difficulties confronting this type of inquiry (beyond ordinary least-squares regression). Only then will we have a better and more comprehensive understanding of what contention does and does not do politically and economically. This review takes stock of existing research and lays out an approach for looking at the problem using a more comprehensive perspective.

The subfield of civil–military relations has experienced a remarkable revitalization in recent years, yielding a wealth of intriguing insights. Yet, despite these auspicious developments, research remains unnecessarily divided across multiple dimensions: along the subdisciplinary boundaries of comparative, international, and American politics; within these subdisciplines by independent and dependent variables; by regional focus; by regime type analyzed (democratic, democratizing versus authoritarian); and by scholars' emphasis on normative versus positive analysis. This article aims to bridge existing divides and reduce fragmentation. It proposes several pathways forward, including proposing innovations in deductive theorizing, developing new analytical frameworks, and synthesizing and adjudicating empirical findings. It also suggests ways of bridging to research beyond the study of civil–military relations, such as that on the global phenomenon of democratic backsliding, the efficacy of nonviolent strategies of political struggle, military effectiveness, and the causes and outcomes of interstate war.

We survey the literature on firms as primary actors in trade politics. In contrast with prevailing approaches, firm-centered models predict that trade internally divides industries and that larger firms are the strongest advocates for globalization. This new preference map alters extant predictions about the dynamics of interest group contestation over trade and suggests revised accounts for how political organization and institutions contribute to an open international order. We also explore the potential for new insights into the operation of the global trade regime, the politics of foreign investment, immigration and capital movements, and exchange rates. Poli-tical activities undertaken by firms are important areas for further research in international political economy: Their economic engagements directly affect the movement of goods, services, capital, and people across the globe.

There are reasons why some political ideas fit better into a theoretical framework than others. This article analyzes attempts to detheorize nationalism, arguing that they serve three major functions. First, they free nationalists from universalizing their arguments and from the ensuing rights and obligations. Second, they allow its rivals to present nationalism as morally inferior to other political standpoints. Third, they lead to the singling out and legitimization of one specific form of nationalism that is principle driven. Drawing a line between forms of nationalism—those motivated by primordial feelings and those motivated by rational and universal principles—lays the groundwork for a distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism. Though in theory these are two distinct forms of nationalism, in reality the boundaries are blurred. And yet advocates of civic nationalism keep the distinction alive, wishing to distance themselves from the other form of nationalism and promoting a vision (some would say the illusion) of a nationless nationalism. Assuming that Western democracies have transcended their national and ethnic elements encourages politicians to ignore social schisms, avoiding the need to cope with their consequences. The civic language therefore not only is theoretically inaccurate but also motivates avoidance where action is needed.

Kenneth J. Arrow was one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, and his “impossibility theorem” is arguably the starting point of modern, axiomatic social choice theory. In this review, we begin with a brief discussion of Arrow's theorem and subsequent work that extended the result. We then discuss its implications for voting and constitutional systems, including a number of seminal results—both positive and negative—that characterize what such systems can accomplish and why. We then depart from this narrow interpretation of the result to consider more varied institutional design questions such as apportionment and geographical districting. Following this, we address the theorem's implications for measurement of concepts of fundamental interest to political science such as justice and inequality. Finally, we address current work applying social choice concepts and the axiomatic method to data analysis more generally.

In recent years, there has been a surge in the study of representation and elections in local politics. Scholars have made progress on many of the empirical barriers that stymied earlier researchers. As a result, the study of representation and elections in local politics has moved squarely into the center of American politics. The findings of recent research show that local politics in the modern, polarized era is much more similar to other areas of American politics than previously believed. Scholars have shown that partisanship and ideology play important roles in local politics. Due to the growing ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans, Democratic elected officials increasingly take more liberal positions, and enact more liberal policies, than Republican ones. As a result, despite the multitude of constraints on local governments, local policies in the modern era tend to largely reflect the partisan and ideological composition of their electorates.

Universal basic income (UBI) is a radical policy proposal of a monthly cash grant given to all members of a community without means test, regardless of personal desert, with no strings attached, and, under most proposals, at a sufficiently high level to enable a life free from economic insecurity. Once a utopian proposal, the policy is now widely discussed and piloted throughout the world. Among the various objections to the proposal, one concerns its moral adequacy: Isn't it fundamentally unjust to give cash to all indiscriminately rather than to those who need it and deserve it? This article reviews the variety of strategies deployed by political theorists to posit that the proposal is in fact justified, or even required, by social justice. The review focuses mainly on the contemporary normative debate on UBI—roughly dating back to Philippe Van Parijs's influential work in the 1990s—and is centered on the ideals of freedom and equality.

Authoritarianism, it seems, is alive and well these days. The Trump administration's blatant dismissal of democratic norms has many wondering whether it fits the authoritarian model. This review offers a framework for understanding authoritarianism in the American past, as well as the American present. Starting in the early twentieth century, this analysis seeks to provide a better understanding of how authoritarianism once existed in enclaves in the Jim Crow South, where it was intended to dominate blacks in the wake of emancipation. Confining the definition of authoritarianism to regime rule, however, leaves little room for a discussion of more contemporary authoritarianism, at the micro level. This review shifts focus to an assessment of political psychology's concept of authoritarianism and how it ultimately drives racism. Ultimately, we believe a tangible connection exists between racism and authoritarianism. Even so, we question the mechanism. Along the way, we also discuss the ways in which communities of color, often the targets of authoritarianism, resist the intolerance to which they have been exposed. We conclude with a discussion of why we believe, despite temporal and spatial differences as well as incongruous levels of analysis, that micro- and macro-level authoritarianism have much in common.

Collaborations between the academy and governments promise to improve the lives of people, the operations of government, and our understanding of human behavior and public policy. This review shows that the evidence-informed policy movement consists of two main threads: (a) an effort to invent new policies using insights from the social and behavioral science consensus about human behavior and institutions and (b) an effort to evaluate the success of governmental policies using transparent and high-integrity research designs such as randomized controlled trials. We argue that the problems of each approach may be solved or at least well addressed by teams that combine the two. We also suggest that governmental actors ought to want to learn about why a new policy works as much as they want to know that the policy works. We envision a future evidence-informed public policy practice that (a) involves cross-sector collaborations using the latest theory plus deep contextual knowledge to design new policies, (b) applies the latest insights in research design and statistical inference for causal questions, and (c) is focused on assessing explanations as much as on discovering what works. The evidence-informed public policy movement is a way that new data, new questions, and new collaborators can help political scientists improve our theoretical understanding of politics and also help our policy partners to improve the practice of government itself.