- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Annual Review of Political Science
- Previous Issues
- Volume 25, 2022
Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 25, 2022
Volume 25, 2022
-
-
The Power of Beliefs
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 1–19More LessMy commitment to combining normative concerns with empirical social science led, perhaps a bit counterintuitively, to early adoption of rational choice political economy. However, it was a modified form of rational choice that takes into account ethical and societal concerns. This was the approach I applied to considerations of compliance and consent with government, what makes a trustworthy government, the formation of legitimating beliefs, and finally the construction of an expanded and inclusive community of fate as a building block for a new moral political economy. Listen to an interview with the author of this article online.
-
-
-
Political Theory Rediscovers Public Administration
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 21–42More LessPolitical theory is rediscovering the colossus of public administration—the vast public service and regulatory bureaucracies and their countless employees and extensions that conduct the daily business of government. This review explains how something so visible could ever have fallen from view, and surveys four burgeoning areas of research. These pertain to the legitimacy of public administration, to the articulation of standards of good government distinct from good public policy, to the analysis of how the moral agency of bureaucrats is implicated and undermined by the everyday operation of bureaucratic agencies, and to how we should conceptualize the state when we apprehend it through the seemingly banal routines of administration. What emerges from this body of work is a picture of the executive bureaucracy as an object of normative, critical, and conceptual inquiry on a par with the other two branches of government, the legislature and the judiciary.
-
-
-
Comparative Bureaucratic Politics
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 43–63More LessThis article discusses one of the most important institutions in the modern world, namely public bureaucracies, from a comparative perspective. Bureaucratic organizations can be seen as a result of handling dilemmas along two critical dimensions. The first dimension concerns whether bureaucrats should be autonomous or, on the contrary, directly accountable to their political masters. The second dimension is about whether bureaucrats should always be guided by the letter of the law, strictly following established rules, or, on the contrary, guided by the principle of management, searching for the most efficient solution. We review the extensive recent research on the effects of different ways of organizing public bureaucracies along these two dimensions. Specifically, we look at three fundamental outcomes: economic development, corruption, and the quality of public services. We conclude by discussing the pros and cons of the four types of bureaucracies—legalistic (accountability and law), populistic (accountability and management), Weberian (autonomy and law), and liberal (autonomy and management)—and how they relate to, but do not overlap with, the concept of administrative traditions.
-
-
-
A Framework for the Study of Persuasion
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 65–88More LessPersuasion is a vital part of politics—who wins elections and policy disputes often depends on which side can persuade more people. Given this centrality, the study of persuasion has a long history with an enormous number of theories and empirical inquiries. However, the literature is fragmented, with few generalizable findings. I unify previously disparate dimensions of this topic by presenting a framework focusing on actors (speakers and receivers), treatments (topics, content, media), outcomes (attitudes, behaviors, emotions, identities), and settings (competition, space, time, process, culture). This Generalizing Persuasion (GP) Framework organizes distinct findings and offers researchers a structure in which to situate their work. I conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of persuasion.
-
-
-
Education and Political Participation
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 89–110More LessWhether education affects political participation is a long-standing and central question in political philosophy and political science. In this review, we provide an overview of the three main theoretical models that explain different causal pathways. We then synthesize the surge in research using causal inference strategies and show that this literature has generated mixed results about the causal impact of education, even when using similar methods and data. These findings do not provide clear support for any of the three theories. Our next section covers research on civic education and political participation. The quantity of civic education matters little for political participation, but how civic education is taught does matter. Namely, strategies falling under the rubric of active learning show promise. These strategies seem especially effective for historically marginalized students. Our final section calls for more research on how civic education is taught.
-
-
-
Political Participation Amid Mass Incarceration
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 111–130More LessContact with the carceral state—ranging from police stops to prison time—is a frequent experience in the United States, particularly in communities marginalized on the basis of race and class. In recent years, political scientists have sought to measure the impacts of these encounters on individuals’ and communities’ political engagement. This review describes the main sources of evidence in this literature and what we learn from them. I present a series of stylized facts about the carceral state and political behavior, highlighting places where we know a great deal (such as the relative underrepresentation of people with criminal convictions among voters) and places where more work is needed (such as nonvoting participation and community spillovers). Then, I discuss policy proposals that seek to mitigate the political impacts of the carceral state, and what is and is not yet known about what they might accomplish.
-
-
-
Government Responsiveness in Developing Countries
Guy Grossman, and Tara SloughVol. 25 (2022), pp. 131–153More LessWhen and how do governments deliver public goods and services in response to citizen preferences? We review the current literature on government responsiveness, with a focus on public goods and service delivery in developing countries. We identify three types of actors that are commonly present in these accounts: politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. Much of this literature examines interactions between dyads of these actors. The study of electoral accountability and constituency services emphasizes relationships between citizens (or voters) and politicians. Studies of bureaucratic incentives and political oversight of bureaucrats emphasize interactions between politicians and bureaucrats. Finally, studies of bureaucratic embeddedness and citizen oversight of bureaucrats elaborate the interactions between bureaucrats and citizens. We argue that an emerging literature that considers interactions between all three types of actors provides rich theoretical and empirical terrain for developing our understanding of responsiveness and accountability in low- and middle-income countries and beyond.
-
-
-
Political Control
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 155–174More LessPolitical leaders use different tactics to ensure widespread compliance with state policies and to minimize resistance. Scholarship tends to treat different tactics individually, suggesting fundamental dissimilarities in underpinning logic and goals. We introduce political control as a concept that unifies these different tactics within a single framework and demonstrate the analytical utility of considering seemingly disparate strategies in conversation rather than in isolation. We synthesize a growing recent literature on political control, including innovative approaches to repression as well as studies of indoctrination, distribution, and infiltration. We argue that tactics of political control can be understood to vary along two primary dimensions: the level of violence and the materiality of state actions. We highlight recent inquiry into the downstream effects of political control. We conclude with a call for more research on political control that considers combinations of different tactics, across regime types, in a world where tolerance of violent repression is diminishing.
-
-
-
Race in International Relations: Beyond the “Norm Against Noticing”
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 175–196More LessThe global movement for racial justice and the rise of anti-Asian hate at the height of the pandemic have called new attention to race and racism in international politics. Although critical theorists have decried the “norm against noticing,” other scholars of international relations have long sidestepped the possible role of race in shaping contemporary international affairs. New studies of hierarchy in international relations open the door for new understandings of race in world politics. We propose an analytic framework for the relationship between racial hierarchy, international law, and foreign policy, demonstrating that race can help explain patterns of interstate interactions that sustain an unequal global order. Positing two faces of racism in international relations, we examine how race biases international law in practice and affects the assessment of foreign threats and national interest. We discuss key methodological challenges in empirical research on race in international relations, focusing on issues of measurement, aggregation, and causation.
-
-
-
The American Political Economy: Markets, Power, and the Meta Politics of US Economic Governance
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 197–217More LessThis article provides an overview of the emerging field of American political economy (APE). Methodologically eclectic, this field seeks to understand the interaction of markets and government in America's unequal and polarized polity. Though situated within American politics research, APE draws from comparative political economy to develop a broad approach that departs from the American politics mainstream in two main ways. First, APE focuses on the interaction of markets and governance, a peripheral concern in much American politics research. Second, it invokes a theoretical orientation attentive to what we call meta politics—the processes of institution shaping, agenda setting, and venue shopping that unfold before and alongside the more visible processes of mass politics that figure so centrally in American politics research. These substantive and theoretical differences expand the study of American politics into neglected yet vital domains, generating fresh insights into the United States’ distinctive mix of capitalism and democracy.
-
-
-
Elites in the Making and Breaking of Foreign Policy
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 219–240More LessScholarship on elites and foreign policy has made important advances in identifying who elites are, what elites want, and how elites influence foreign policy. This review assesses these advances, focusing on the tension between elites’ expertise, on the one hand, and resentment of elites as selfish or unrepresentative of the people's interests, on the other. What remains missing in the literature on elites and foreign policy are the dynamics of elite politics. The same elites can behave very differently in different settings, and elites frequently do not get what they want on foreign policy despite strong preferences. To understand this variation, we need more research on three kinds of elite politics: how elites attain their positions; their incentives once they arrive in those positions; and how elites relate to each other and to mass publics. Without attending to elite politics, we miss important sources of state behavior.
-
-
-
Historical Persistence
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 241–259More LessThis article reviews the literature on historical persistence in political science and the related social sciences. Historical persistence refers to causal effects that (a) operate over time scales of a decade or more and (b) explain spatial variation in political, economic, or social outcomes. Although political scientists have always drawn from history, the historical persistence literature represents a new approach to historical research in the social sciences that places a premium on credible research designs for causal inference. We discuss regional and national coverage, state-of-the-art research designs, analytical and inferential challenges, and mechanisms and theories of persistence, drawing broadly from the contemporary literature in political science and economics.
-
-
-
International Statebuilding and the Domestic Politics of State Development
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 261–281More LessManaging the threat of violence remains a central concern in international security and development. International actors seek to terminate civil wars and prevent conflict recurrence by building peace and strengthening state institutions. In this article, I review the scholarship on international statebuilding, defined broadly as external efforts to create, strengthen, reform, and transform the authority structures of the state. Much of this literature models international statebuilding as provision, in which external actors provide a solution to the enforcement problem that plagues postconflict bargains. However, in many cases, the assumptions about domestic politics underpinning the provision model do not hold. When the central problem of domestic politics concerns bargaining over the distributional consequences of the peace rather than the parties’ ability to credibly commit to the peace, international statebuilding is more fruitfully modeled as imposition, in which terms are imposed on recalcitrant domestic actors. The imposition model allows the preferences of external actors over the postwar order to diverge from the preferences of domestic actors. Divergence arises because statebuilding interventions have distributional consequences that threaten the interests of domestic elites. To unpack why this is the case, I turn to the literature on the domestic politics of statebuilding, which shows that governance arrangements that appear to outsiders as weak statehood can help manage violence by facilitating the distribution of sovereignty rents. Insights from these literatures suggest exciting new avenues for future scholarship.
-
-
-
Three Faces of Climate Justice
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 283–301More LessThere is overwhelming consensus about the science of climate change. Climate politics, however, remains volatile, driven by perceptions of injustice, which motivate policy resistance and undermine policy legitimacy. We identify three types of injustice. The first pertains to the uneven exposure to climate change impacts across countries and communities within a country. Socially, politically, and economically disadvantaged communities that have contributed the least to the climate crisis tend to be affected the most. To address climate change and its impacts, countries and subnational units have enacted a range of policies. But even carefully designed mitigation and adaptation policies distribute costs (the second justice dimension) and benefits (the third justice dimension) unevenly across sectors and communities, often reproducing existing inequalities. Climate justice requires paying careful attention to who bears the costs and who gets the benefits of both climate inaction and action.
-
-
-
Comparative Politics in Borderlands: Actors, Identities, and Strategies
Robert Braun, and Otto KienitzVol. 25 (2022), pp. 303–321More LessComparativists are increasingly researching national border regions. Yet the distinct way in which proximity to borders independently shapes politics is rarely theorized explicitly. Drawing on the emerging subdiscipline of border studies, we identify three types of border effects: Borders involve specific actors, shape local identities, and provide distinct strategies, each of which directly affects key areas of comparative politics. An in-depth review of work on political violence and state formation shows that specifying these effects (a) demands that comparativists consider the ways in which borderlands differ from other regions and be careful in attributing processes found there to nations as a whole, (b) improves theories by elucidating scope conditions, and (c) scrutinizes the validity of our research designs and measurement strategies. We end with a call to move from a comparative politics in border regions to a comparative politics of border regions that contextualizes how borders alter political processes.
-
-
-
Non-Modernization: Power–Culture Trajectories and the Dynamics of Political Institutions
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 323–339More LessModernization theory is a cornerstone of much of political science, despite the mounting evidence against its predictions. We outline a theory in which the distribution of political power critically combines with political culture. We call the basic components of culture “attributes” and argue that these can be combined into larger cultural configurations. These configurations interact with the distribution of power and lead to three distinct self-reinforcing paths of political development, with very different state–society relations, institutions, and economic structures. These are paths to Despotic, Absent, and Shackled Leviathans. The role of cultural configurations is critical in legitimizing the social arrangements in each path. None of the three different paths we highlight support modernization theory. We discuss how political equilibria can change in ways critically dependent on cultural and political entrepreneurship in order to formulate and popularize new cultural configurations and institutionalize political changes.
-
-
-
Las Vidas Negras Importan: Centering Blackness and Racial Politics in Latin American Research
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 341–356More LessRacial disparities in Latin America exist in poverty levels, income, education, infant mortality, political representation, access to social services, and other key indicators. However, researchers in comparative politics face an uphill challenge to prioritize racial politics in studies of democratization, democratic consolidation, representation, and even social movements and inequality, despite racial hierarchies being quite harmful to democracy in Latin America. This article argues for the centering of Black politics and racial hierarchies in Latin American politics and highlights recent literature to map just how that can be done. More than adding race as a variable or a control, we must understand racial identification and anti-Black racism in Latin America: how they operate, and how they influence, complicate, motivate, affirm, and inspire politics. In this article, I address (a) why we should center racial politics in Latin American politics, (b) how comparative racial scholars have centered Black politics, (c) the methodologies necessary to accurately measure racial identification, and (d) recent research that examines the interplay between racial self-identification, Black group consciousness, and voting behavior.
-
-
-
Does Democracy Matter?
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 357–375More LessDoes democracy matter for normatively desirable outcomes? We survey results from 1,100 cross-country analyses drawn from 600 journal articles published after the year 2000. These analyses are conducted on 30 distinct outcomes pertaining to social policy, economic policy, citizenship and human rights, military and criminal justice, and overall governance. Across these diverse outcomes, most studies report either a positive or null relationship with democracy. However, there is evidence of threshold bias, suggesting that reported findings may reflect a somewhat exaggerated image of democracy's effects. Additionally, democratic effects are more likely to be found for outcomes that are easily attained than for those that lie beyond the reach of government but are often of great normative importance. We also find that outcomes measured by subjective indicators show a stronger positive relationship with democracy than outcomes that are measured or proxied by more objective indicators.
-
-
-
Immigration and Globalization (and Deglobalization)
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 377–399More LessImmigration policy is often portrayed as a zero-sum trade-off between labor and capital or between high- and low-skilled labor. Many have attributed the rise of populist politicians and populist movements to immigrants and/or immigration policy. While immigration has distributional implications, we argue that something is clearly missing from the discussion: the fact that migrants are an engine of globalization, especially for countries in the Global South. Migration and migrant networks serve to expand economic markets, distribute information across national borders, and diffuse democratic norms and practices throughout the world, increasing trade and investment flows. We further argue that many commentators have got the causal relationship backward: Instead of immigration reducing support for globalization, we argue that trade, financial flows, and offshoring have reduced support for immigration among the elite and a vocal plurality of citizens in the Global North.
-
-
-
Emotion and Politics: Noncognitive Psychological Biases in Public Opinion
Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 401–418More LessContemporary politics is noteworthy for its emotional character. Emotions shape and, in turn, are elicited by partisan polarization, public opinion, and political attitudes. In this article, we outline recent work in the field of emotion and politics with an emphasis on the relationship between emotion and polarization, issue attitudes, information processing, and views on democratic governance. We also highlight a growing body of scholarship that examines the racial and gender differences in emotion's ability to affect political behavior. We conclude with a discussion of unaddressed questions and suggestions for future directions for scholars working in this area of growing importance.
-
Previous Volumes
-
Volume 27 (2024)
-
Volume 26 (2023)
-
Volume 25 (2022)
-
Volume 24 (2021)
-
Volume 23 (2020)
-
Volume 22 (2019)
-
Volume 21 (2018)
-
Volume 20 (2017)
-
Volume 19 (2016)
-
Volume 18 (2015)
-
Volume 17 (2014)
-
Volume 16 (2013)
-
Volume 15 (2012)
-
Volume 14 (2011)
-
Volume 13 (2010)
-
Volume 12 (2009)
-
Volume 11 (2008)
-
Volume 10 (2007)
-
Volume 9 (2006)
-
Volume 8 (2005)
-
Volume 7 (2004)
-
Volume 6 (2003)
-
Volume 5 (2002)
-
Volume 4 (2001)
-
Volume 3 (2000)
-
Volume 2 (1999)
-
Volume 1 (1998)
-
Volume 0 (1932)