Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 5, 2002

This article reviews the use of experiments in political science. The beginning section offers an overview of experimental design and measures, as well as threats to internal and external validity, and discusses advantages and disadvantages to the use of experimentation. The number and placements of experiments in political science are reviewed. The bulk of the essay is devoted to an examination of what we have learned from experiments in the behavioral economics, political economy, and individual choice literatures.

Politics has not always fared well in the political science literature on the cities, at least not in the United States. Since the mid-nineteenth century, a substantial literature has either decried or discounted the role of politics in urban governance. Much of the early literature, written before and just after the creation of the American Political Science Association in 1903, urged politics be banished and administration privileged as a way to remedy “one conspicuous failure of the United States … the government of cities.” Subsequent literature reinstated politics—though some claimed elected officials were simply agents of special interests or upper-class elites. The prevailing view today is that political leadership is an important, independent factor in the governing equation, although it is arguable that of late national and state administrators have been empowered at the expense of local self-rule—thus approximating, albeit by different means, the system envisioned by early municipal reformers.

Does democracy affect taxation? Do varieties of democratic institutions affect levels of revenue, methods of collection, and distributions of tax burdens? Many political scientists believe so despite the currently mixed evidence. Moreover, prominent models of fiscal politics yield differing predictions about whether and how elections, parties, constitutions, and legislative and executive decision rules influence policy choices. This essay reviews recent works on taxation under democracy with a focus on how scholars derive hypotheses about institutional effects. It evaluates the leading theories' main assumptions and implications, including the results of empirical tests so far. Many explanations focus mainly on electoral competition or on post-electoral governing, but not both, and draw their evidence from a small set of countries. Promising works develop more complete models of decision making, test hypotheses against a broader range of countries' experiences, and point toward more persuasive answers to current research questions.

Political science has given policy makers many useful methods and models for understanding continuities in the world. The utility of many models that were specified with statistical analysis is likely to be undermined as relations among variables change. Today, globalization, the rapid diffusion of technology, the internet, nongovernment organizations, environmental stresses, and population growth and migration present policy makers with unfamiliar challenges. To keep from being surprised, policy makers need methods that indicate possible outcomes but do not specify probabilities, which can be misleading. Instead, policy makers should have analytic methods that warn of discontinuities and illuminate the forces and processes shaping events. Methods based on or compatible with complexity theory seem promising. I describe two methods that can meet the needs of policy makers: Bueno de Mesquita's political expected utility models and multiple scenario analysis. But methods or theories alone will not keep policy makers from being surprised by future developments. It will also be crucial to ask the right questions.

Some contemporary states seem subject to aggregational dynamics that bring them together in larger regional associations, whereas others fall prey to centrifugal forces that pull them apart. The autonomy of all states has been drawn into question by the globalization of trade and finance. For these reasons, scholars have returned to examining the historical origins and development of the modern state in the hope that this may shed light on its future, and on the process through which new logics of organization may be emerging that might displace the state. This essay discusses various accounts of the emergence and development of the modern state, comparing security, economic, and institutionalist approaches. It then links these approaches to insights regarding contemporary statehood. Arguments regarding the autonomy of the state must be distinguished from discussions of territorial sovereignty as a constitutive principle of international relations. The latter, juridical notion of sovereignty as a regulative device in international relations has retained its influence, even if the autonomy of the state has declined.

We review arguments and empirical evidence in the comparative literature that bear on the differences in the survival rates of parliamentary and presidential democracies. Most of these arguments focus on the fact that presidential democracies are based on the separation of executive and legislative powers, whereas parliamentary democracies are based on the fusion of these powers. The implications of this basic distinction lead to radically different behavior and outcomes under each regime. We argue that this perspective is misguided and that one cannot deduce the functioning of the political system from the way governments are formed. Other provisions, constitutional and otherwise, also affect the way parliamentary and presidential democracies operate, and these provisions may counteract some of the tendencies that we would expect to observe if we derived the regime's performance from its basic constitutional principle.

Considerable attention has been paid over the past decade to political cleavages in post-communist Eastern Europe. Investigators have attempted to establish whether such cleavages exist, to map their character, and to explain their formation theoretically. Research initially focused on whether communist rule had created distinctive forms of cleavage in the region as a whole, or indeed obliterated social capacity to form any structured social or ideological divisions. The results of this work, however, have tended to support a more differentiated and less sui generis understanding in which the character of cleavages varies considerably across the region. Debate has turned to accounting for the formation and variation in cleavages by reference to factors such as long-standing cultural legacies, forms of communist rule and modes of transition from it, the effects of social structure and individual social experience in the post-communist period, and the impact of institutions and party strategies.

This chapter reviews the literature concerned with explaining recent political change in Africa. After recounting some of the political transformations on the continent, it explores the economic and political factors most often invoked by scholars to account for these changes. The chapter concludes with a call for more comparative work, as well as more precise measures, models, and tests.

When they assess competing theories, political scientists typically rely almost exclusively and rather naively on criteria of empirical performance. They have correspondingly little to say about conceptual problems and seem generally unaware of the extent to which their assessments of empirical performance are parasitic on conceptual commitments. This blind spot, in turn, hinders their ability both to persuasively conduct and critically assess substantive research. I call attention to the importance and complexity of conceptual problems for ongoing social and political research. As a vehicle for this argument, I examine and criticize recent attempts to integrate interpretive and rational choice theories in hopes of improving our understanding of how culture and politics intersect. I argue that these efforts are plagued by important, mostly unrecognized conceptual problems that, in turn, subvert their explicitly stated explanatory objectives. I also show, in light of this same example, how conceptual problems unintentionally can frustrate laudable pluralist aspirations. This essay illustrates why, if we take conceptual problems seriously, calls for methodological and theoretical pluralism are significantly more demanding than they often appear.

Political science has tended to neglect the study of the news media as political institutions, despite a long history of party-subsidized newspapers and despite a growing chorus of scholars who point to an increasing “mediatization” of politics. Still, investigators in sociology, communication, and political science have taken up the close study of news institutions. Three general approaches predominate. Political economy perspectives focus on patterns of media ownership and the behavior of news institutions in relatively liberal versus relatively repressive states; a second set of approaches looks at the social organization of newswork and relates news content to the daily patterns of interaction of reporters and their sources; a third style of research examines news as a form of culture that often unconsciously incorporates general belief systems, assumptions, and values into news writing.

This review assesses the state of the newly emerging field of the study of post-communist elections and voting by building and analyzing a database of 101 articles on the topic that have appeared in 16 leading academic journals (8 general political science journals and 8 post-communist area studies journals) between 1990 and 2000. The database is then used to make inferences concerning both what is being studied by scholars and how it is being studied. The review systematically assesses which countries have been analyzed, the types of elections examined, the prevalence of comparative analysis, the division between quantitative and qualitative research, and the types of data used in quantitative studies. It then turns to substantive questions, examining both how scholars have explained post-communist election results and voting decisions, and what they have used these elections to explain.

Following a period of almost obsessive academic attention in the 1980s, in the early 1990s the concept of corporatism fell from favor, as its explanatory powers appeared to wane and the Keynesian welfare systems under which it had flourished apparently fell into decline. In the late 1990s, a new interest in corporatism emerged, in line with new patterns of concertation and corporatist behavior in some unexpected places—countries in which the institutional basis for collaborative, bargained methods of policy making and conflict resolution seemed distinctly unpromising. We review the extensive literature on corporatism since the 1970s and consider its applicability in the contemporary period. We argue that an excessively structural-functionalist interpretation of corporatism led many wrongly to predict its demise as a form of policy making, and that an understanding of its persistence and new manifestations today must resurrect and strengthen some early, recently neglected insights into processes of political exchange.

This paper traces the course of inquiry on the U.S. Congress from 1945 to the present day, noting antecedents in the work of Woodrow Wilson, and through Wilson, of Walter Bagehot. Since 1945, the study of Congress has gone through an anglophile responsible-party phase, championed especially by William Yandell Elliott at Harvard, followed by a sociologically oriented legislative-behavior phase, identified in one generation with Lewis Anthony Dexter, Stephen K. Bailey, David Truman, and especially Ralph K. Huitt at Wisconsin, and in the next generation with Richard Fenno, Charles O. Jones, Donald R. Matthews, and H. Douglas Price, among others. A third, contemporary intellectual orientation is identified most strongly with rational choice scholars, especially from the University of Rochester. The agenda of political science is formed not only by the literature but by events. Hence, the congressional reforms of the 1970s were influential in shaping the literature, as were such organizational innovations as the Congressional Fellowship Program and the Study of Congress, both projects of the American Political Science Association.

Policy makers in democracies have strong partisan and electoral incentives regarding the amount, nature, and timing of economic-policy activity. Given these incentives, many observers expected government control of effective economic policies to induce clear economic-outcome cycles that track the electoral calendar in timing and incumbent partisanship in character. Empirics, however, typically revealed stronger evidence of partisan than of electoral shifts in real economic performance and stronger and more persistent electoral and partisan shifts in certain fiscal, monetary, and other policies than in real outcomes. Later political-economic general-equilibrium approaches incorporated rational expectations into citizens' and policy makers' economic and political behavior to explain much of this empirical pattern, yet critical anomalies and insufficiencies remain. Moreover, until recently, both rational- and adaptive-expectations electoral-and-partisan-cycle work underemphasized crucial variation in the contexts—international and domestic, political and economic, institutional, structural, and strategic—in which elected partisan incumbents make policy. This contextual variation conditions policy-maker incentives and abilities to manipulate economic policy for electoral and partisan gain, as well as the effectiveness of such manipulation, differently across democracies, elections, and policies. Although relatively new, research into such context-conditional electoral and partisan cycles seems to offer much promise for resolving anomalies and an ideal substantive venue for theoretical and empirical advancement in the study of political economy and comparative democratic politics more generally.

The past two decades have brought revolutionary change to the field of political methodology. Steady gains in theoretical sophistication have combined with explosive increases in computing power to produce a profusion of new estimators for applied political researchers. Attendance at the annual Summer Meeting of the Methodology Section has multiplied many times, and section membership is among the largest in APSA. All these are signs of success. Yet there are warning signs, too. This paper attempts to critically summarize current developments in the young field of political methodology. It focuses on recent generalizations of dichotomous-dependent-variable estimators such as logit and probit, arguing that even our best new work needs a firmer connection to credible models of human behavior and deeper foundations in reliable empirical generalizations.