Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 4, 2001

Ostensibly theoretical disputes in political science often involve competing approaches to explanation, including skepticism, covering law arguments, reconstructions of propensities, system models, and explanations featuring causal mechanisms. Mechanism- and process-based accounts, including cognitive, environmental, and relational effects, deserve more attention than they have received in recent political science. Analyses of democratization illustrate these points.

Are democratization and economic reform in tension with each other, or are they mutually supportive processes? A survey of new democracies in Latin America, Southern Europe, and the postsocialist world suggests that the answer varies by region. In the postsocialist cases, the relationship is positive and robust; in the other two regions, the relationship is negligible. Region, however, cannot serve as the explanation. Instead, what emerge as critical—and what happen to vary by region—are three factors that shape the relationship between democratization and economic reform: the timing of democratization, the agenda of transformation, and variations in governing mandates.

Organized around several major theoretical traditions in international relations, this essay suggests which literature in psychology should be of greatest interest to different kinds of international relations scholars. New work in cognitive social psychology and behavioral decision theory simultaneously expands on and qualifies earlier error-and-bias portraits of the foreign policy maker, thereby enriching our understanding of internal divisions within the realist camp. Work on bounded rationality in competitive markets and mixed-motive games, as well as the literature on the power of human emotions to shape judgments of what represents an equitable allocation of scarce resources or a just resolution of conflicts of interest, can inform neo-institutionalist and constructivist theories. Developments in cross-cultural social psychology shed light on constructivist arguments about the creation and maintenance of international social order that typically rest on assumptions about decision making that are qualitatively different from realist and institutionalist approaches to world politics.

The extensive literature on postwar Japanese politics often stresses unique phenomena representative of Japanese exceptionalism, even though both Japanists and specialists on other areas of the world would profit from integrating Japanese political studies with broader comparative themes. This review seeks to correct a tendency toward scholarly isolation by addressing four themes in Japanese postwar experience and relating them to comparative political science research on other countries and regions. The four themes are styles of electoral mobilization, informalism and process as factors in party organization, power and performance in postwar policy making, and post-1993 electoral institution change.

Although scholars tend to downplay the role of religion in political life, the vast majority of people in the world profess a strong allegiance to some spiritual faith. Secularization theory has long held that religion would become irrelevant, leading many comparative scholars to ignore this potentially significant variable. A recent resurgence in religious fundamentalism and “new religious politics” has led more scholars to consider religious actors as important. However, research in this area befalls many of the same problems inherent in earlier secularization theories. A new body of scholarship, known as the “religious economy” school, seeks to address these problems by developing theories built on solid microlevel foundations of human behavior. This line of research holds great promise for the study of religion in comparative politics.

Third-generation theories of revolution pointed to the structural vulnerabilities of regimes as the basic causes of revolutions. In the last decade, critics of structural theories have argued for the need to incorporate leadership, ideology, and processes of identification with revolutionary movements as key elements in the production of revolution. Analyses of revolutions in developing countries and in communist regimes have further argued for incorporating these factors and for the inadequacy of structural theories to account for these events. Rather than try to develop a list of the “causes” of revolutions, it may be more fruitful for the fourth generation of revolutionary theory to treat revolutions as emergent phenomena, and to start by focusing on factors that cement regime stability. Weakness in those factors then opens the way for revolutionary leadership, ideology, and identification, along with structural factors such as international pressure and elite conflicts, to create revolutions.

Given the global trend of increasing ethnocultural diversity and the outbreak of nationalist movements based on cultural, linguistic, and territorial identities, this review focuses on social and political mechanisms that lead to the emergence of minority group collective action. This kind of collective action is seen as a function of three necessary conditions: the formation of distinctive social identities, the overcoming of free riding, and the development of institutional structures promoting the demand for greater autonomy. The article examines the debates, theories, and empirical evidence concerning these three conditions. We conclude by noting that the most important impediment to progress in this field is the relative paucity of historical and cross-national databases that are required to test many of the theories in the literature.

After decades of neglect, civic education is back on the agenda of political science in the United States. Despite huge increases in the formal educational attainment of the US population during the past 50 years, levels of political knowledge have barely budged. Today's college graduates know no more about politics than did high school graduates in 1950. Recent research indicates that levels of political knowledge affect the acceptance of democratic principles, attitudes toward specific issues, and political participation. There is evidence that political participation is in part a positional good and is shaped by relative as well as absolute levels of educational attainment. Contrary to findings from 30 years ago, recent research suggests that traditional classroom-based civic education can significantly raise political knowledge. Service learning—a combination of community-based civic experience and systematic classroom reflection on that experience—is a promising innovation, but program evaluations have yielded mixed results. Longstanding fears that private schools will not shape democratic citizens are not supported by the evidence.

We survey modern models of delegation that assume a boss and a subordinate pursue their own goals. Among the major themes covered are the following: the conditions under which the boss will prefer to delegate versus those in which she will prefer to retain authority; how a boss can induce a subordinate to truthfully reveal information; when rational principals will use the ally principle (i.e. delegate to agents with similar goals); delegation in repeated interactions; and how delegation can overcome commitment problems. These themes are relevant to a wide variety of institutions, affecting intralegislative organization, executive-legislative relations, and central banks.

This article treats the analysis of “time-series–cross-section” (TSCS) data, which has become popular in the empirical analysis of comparative politics and international relations (IR). Such data consist of repeated observations on a series of fixed (nonsampled) units, where the units are of interest in themselves. An example of TSCS data is the post–World War II annual observations on the political economy of OECD nations. TSCS data are also becoming more common in IR studies that use the “dyad-year” design; such data are often complicated by a binary dependent variable (the presence or absence of dyadic conflict). Among the issues considered here are estimation and specification. I argue that treating TSCS issues as an estimation nuisance is old-fashioned; those wishing to pursue this approach should use ordinary least squares with panel correct standard errors rather than generalized least squares. A modern approach models dynamics via a lagged dependent variable or a single equation error correction model. Other modern issues involve the modeling of spatial impacts (geography) and heterogeneity. The binary dependent variable common in IR can be handled by treating the TSCS data as event history data.

The study of interstate rivalry, which has made major contributions to theory and research on war, is reviewed, and new research on the role of territory in the origin and war proneness of rivalries is presented. Recent research has shown that states that are rivals are much more likely to go to war than are other states, and that about half the wars fought since 1815 have involved states that are rivals. This review describes the origins of interstate rivalries in terms of whether they begin over territorial disputes, policy disputes, or disputes over the nature of a state's regime. It finds that states that dispute territory have a greater probability of becoming rivals than expected by chance, compared with states that dispute other issues. It also investigates the extent to which territorial disputes and the recurring of disputes, despite their content, are related to the onset of war.

The structure of international monetary relations has gained increasing prominence over the past two decades. Both national exchange rate policy and the character of the international monetary system require explanation. At the national level, the choice of exchange rate regime and the desired level of the exchange rate involve distributionally relevant tradeoffs. Interest group and partisan pressures, the structure of political institutions, and the electoral incentives of politicians therefore influence exchange rate regime and level decisions. At the international level, the character of the international monetary system depends on strategic interaction among governments, driven by their national concerns and constrained by the international environment. A global or regional fixed-rate currency regime, in particular, requires at least coordination and often explicit cooperation among national governments.

Although millions of Americans take psychoactive medicines (e.g. Prozac and Ritalin), few social scientists believe biological theories and findings should be integrated with research on human behavior. Four topics illustrate current studies linking politics and the life sciences: (a) Developments in genetics and medicine indicate that governmental policies have greatly underrated the dangers posed by radiation and the social transformations that will result from DNA sequencing. (b) Research on brain structures and neurochemistry shows how toxic chemicals undermine normal emotions and behavior. Heavy metal burdens are higher in violent criminals, and exposure to these toxins is significantly correlated with rates of violence (controlling for socioeconomic, ethnic, and demographic factors). (c) An untested chemical used to treat water supplied to 140 million Americans significantly increases both odds of dangerous lead uptake and behavioral dysfunctions in children and adults. (d) The complexity of gene-environment interactions challenges accepted theories of gender, sociopolitical inequalities, ethnocentrism, and history. Such research in biopolitics can illuminate policy controversies in education, substance abuse, and crime.

Over the past two decades in the United States, research on women's movements has proliferated in women's studies, in sociology, and, to a much lesser extent, in political science. Focusing specifically on women's movements, this review considers current research within this emerging subfield of political science, particularly because political science and the subfield of women's movements research share a focus on the state and on comparative politics. This review assesses the contribution that scholarship of women's movements has made to empirical political science and to political movement theory. It concludes with a discussion of gender and political movements and suggests areas for future research.

Constructivism is an approach to social analysis that deals with the role of human consciousness in social life. It asserts that human interaction is shaped primarily by ideational factors, not simply material ones; that the most important ideational factors are widely shared or “intersubjective” beliefs, which are not reducible to individuals; and that these shared beliefs construct the interests of purposive actors. In international relations, research in a constructivist mode has exploded over the past decade, creating new and potentially fruitful connections with long-standing interest in these issues in comparative politics. In this essay, we evaluate the empirical research program of constructivism in these two fields. We first lay out the basic tenets of constructivism and examine their implications for research methodology, concluding that constructivism's distinctiveness lies in its theoretical arguments, not in its empirical research strategies. The bulk of the essay explores specific constructivist literatures and debates in international relations and comparative politics.

The United States has undergone a profound spatial reorganization over the course of the twentieth century, and it influences the working of democratic and judicial institutions profoundly. The critical feature is differential access to transportation and place, and the major instrument is of course the automobile. Other technologies—the AC electric grid most fundamental among them—have allowed a finer and finer sorting of the population into relatively homogeneous income strata. The failure of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is a leading example of this phenomenon. The trivialization of local politics—when resources are separated from needs in a region—is another.