Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 7, 2004

The field of political socialization is often stereotyped in terms of some of the earliest work in the field and is neglected outside certain areas of American political behavior. However, the continuing and vibrant stream of work in political socialization holds potential for addressing many critical issues across American, comparative, and international politics. This article discusses three themes: the construction of a more genuinely comparative field of political socialization, a reconsideration of the relevance of childhood to politics following its virtual abandonment by the field for many years, and the importance of understanding the origins of preferences.

Cidadania não tem tamanho/Tamanho não é documento.

You don't have to be big to be a citizen/Size is not important.

          Augusto Sérgio Suares Dutra, a 10-year-old Brazilian,

               quoted in Guerra 2002, p. 77

We take as our starting point the insights of Downs (1957) into two-party competition. A careful reading of Downs offers a much more sophisticated and nuanced portrait of the factors affecting party differentiation than the simplistic notion that, in plurality elections, we ought to expect party convergence to the views of the median voter. Later scholars have built on Downsian ideas to see what happens vis-à-vis party differentiation when we modify key assumptions found in the basic Downsian spatial model. Recent work allows us to turn what is taken to be the Downsian view on its head: Although there are pressures in two-party competition for the two parties to converge, in general we should expect nonconvergence. Moreover, contra the negative portrait offered by Green & Shapiro (1994) of the limited or nonexistent value of research on party competition models in the Downsian tradition, we argue that, when viewed as a whole, neo-Downsian models—especially those of the past decade—do allow us to reconcile theory and data in terms of a multi-componented theory of party competition with testable implications for comparative statics.

Individual companies are neglected in American politics scholarship, despite their empirical and normative significance. Interest group theory does not provide an adequate framework for understanding them. Neoclassical microeconomic theory has begun to be developed for political analysis, but its assumptions restrict the scope of its utility. Cyert & March's (1992) “behavioral theory of the firm” provides a more promising foundation, one that dovetails with the historical and institutional tradition in political science. Research in this tradition has begun to analyze how the personal preferences of senior managers, institutional structures, cultural norms, and learning over time affect the political positions and strategies of firms.

This paper surveys three sources of conflict about citizenship and education in contemporary normative political theory: the extent to which rival conceptions of citizenship differ in the ends they prescribe for civic education; disagreement about the educational processes needed to yield accepted civic educational ends and how some of those processes might best be institutionalized via schooling; and disagreement about how liberal legitimacy constrains state action undertaken for the sake of democratic education.

This review addresses key issues in the study of Latino politics. Foremost among these is the question of low voter turnout. Such factors as income, education, nativity, religion, political party, organizational involvement, neighborhood composition, ethnic attachments, and mobilization of Hispanic turnout have a limited impact on Hispanic votes. I suggest that this is due to differences in the political socialization of Latinos and Anglos. The review also shows that immigrants are focused on U.S. politics rather than home-country politics. Additionally, it describes significant differences regarding the factors that shape Hispanic versus Anglo partisanship. Among the other issues considered is the limited significance of ethnic factors, as compared to partisanship and state of residence, in determining electoral and policy preferences.

There is much debate about the effects of media market deregulation and the resulting growth of vast global media corporations. Some observers argue that deregulatory pressures have undermined public service broadcasting and media social-responsibility norms, resulting in deterioration of information quality and political disengagement of citizens in many nations. Others herald deregulatory trends as expanding information choices and enabling citizens to find their preferred levels of political engagement. This analysis proposes that we understand global trends in media deregulation as part of a transnational political regime in which many players and institutional arenas shape norms for media ownership, social responsibility, and citizen information. The players include multinational corporations, parties and public officials, interest associations, and citizen advocacy organizations. The institutional settings include national legislatures and regulatory commissions as well as international trade organizations, European Union commissions, and United Nations agencies. The outcomes of contests among these players at different institutional levels influence the degrees of normative consensus on ownership and content policies in the regime and explain how different nations engage with media deregulation and the market forces that increasingly shape the content of democratic public life.

This article reviews three recent developments in international cooperation theory: the introduction of nonstate actors, the study of norms and ideas, and increased examination of the effectiveness, or impact, of international cooperation. Through the lens of the agent-structure debate, we critique the literature that addresses these themes. We argue, first, for a view of structure that goes beyond material properties; second, that more attention could be paid to what distinguishes agency in actors; and third, that this would provide insights into how reflexivity and learning, as well as preference and identity formation, contribute to structural transformation in the international system through iterated processes of cooperation. We also develop ways of applying the agent-structure debate to empirical as well as metatheoretical questions. The article concludes by discussing directions for further research.

As laboratories, states are faced with a new agenda of social experimentation. This article first considers state elections and parties, including state realignment, party endorsements and primary elections, uncontested seats, and campaign finance. A second topic is the governorship, including governors' careers, changes in power, party leadership, and legislative programs and tactics used in negotiating with legislators. A third section considers the state legislatures, including term limits, professionalism, leadership, committees, roll-call voting, and representation. Another subject closely related to all aspects is the variety and organization of interest groups, their power, and whom they represent. The conclusion is that the states as laboratories are now equipped to handle the social experimentation that devolution has handed down to them.

In the United States, televised political advertising is the main way that modern campaigns communicate with voters. Although political scientists have made great progress in the study of its effects in recent decades, much of that progress has come in the area of advertising's indirect effects: its impact on learning and the effect of its tone on voter turnout. This essay reviews what scholars know about how political advertising affects voter decisions, voter knowledge, and election outcomes. We argue that scholars still have a long road to travel before being able to speak definitively about whether and to what extent political advertisements are successful in achieving the goal of their sponsors: winning elections. This state of affairs may be due to the vast number of methods used to measure the key independent variable in these studies: advertising exposure. Accordingly, in the last section of the essay, we review and critique seven approaches to the study of political advertising.

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) achieved arguably the most sophisticated philosophical understanding of politics in recent times. His characteristic skepticism extended to the possibility of creating a genuine science of politics. This chapter sketches the development of his conception of political understanding. It begins with his early elaboration of the modal character of all knowledge, discusses his criticism of rationalism and reflections on the appropriate curriculum for studying politics in a university. It concludes by examining the theoretical basis of his rejection of the idea that politics could be analyzed as a field governed by natural laws.

This essay reviews how three pillars of political economy—collective action, institutions, and political market imperfections—help us answer the following question: Why do some countries develop and not others? Each advances our understanding of who wins and who loses in government decision making, generally, but only a subset of this literature helps us answer the question. The study of political market imperfections strongly suggests that the lack of credibility of pre-electoral political promises and incomplete voter information are especially robust in explaining development outcomes. From the institutional literature, the most powerful explanation of contrasting development outcomes links political checks and balances to the credibility of government commitments.

Two large research programs have analyzed election-based connections between citizens and policy makers in different democracies. Studies of vote-seat representation in the tradition of Rae (1967) begin with citizens' party votes and have made substantial progress in elucidating the impact of election laws, geographic vote distributions, and the number of parties and their interactions on the proportionality of party representation. Studies of substantive representation in the tradition of Miller & Stokes (1963) begin with citizen issue preferences and link these to the positions of their representatives. Most studies outside the United States, confronting multimember districts and the cohesion of party representatives, have focused on voter-party dyads rather than geographic constituencies, and confirmed the importance of issues linked to a common electoral discourse and the greater structure of legislator issue positions. Recently, a number of explicitly comparative analyses have begun to analyze collective correspondence and confront other limitations of the literature.

This review evaluates the emerging legal and political science scholarship created in the wake of the United States Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, the case that ended the 2000 Florida election controversy between supporters of George W. Bush and those of Al Gore. The article surveys scholars' answers to four central questions: (a) Were the Supreme Court's majority or concurring opinions legally sound? (b) Was the Supreme Court's result justified, even if the legal reasoning contained in the opinions was unsound? (c) What effects, if any, will the case and the social science research it has spurred have on the development of voting rights law? (d) What does the Court's resolution of Bush v. Gore tell us about the Supreme Court as an institution?

Many theorists have long extolled the virtues of public deliberation as a crucial component of a responsive and responsible democracy. Building on these theories, in recent years practitioners—from government officials to citizen groups, nonprofits, and foundations—have increasingly devoted time and resources to strengthening citizen engagement through deliberative forums. Although empirical research has lagged behind theory and practice, a body of literature has emerged that tests the presumed individual and collective benefits of public discourse on citizen engagement. We begin our review of this research by defining “public deliberation”; we place it in the context of other forms of what we call “discursive participation” while distinguishing it from other ways in which citizens can voice their individual and collective views on public issues. We then discuss the expectations, drawn from deliberative democratic theory, regarding the benefits (and, for some, pitfalls) assumed to derive from public deliberation. The next section reviews empirical research as it relates to these theoretical expectations. We conclude with recommendations on future directions for research in this area.

In this essay, we survey the literature on international criminal tribunals and transitional justice. We argue that the literature has been dominated by two general orientations, a legalism that is premised on a logic of appropriateness and a pragmatism premised on a logic of consequences. We also consider a third orientation, guided by a logic of emotions, that recognizes the significance of transitional justice but emphasizes strategies that diverge from the model of legalism. Our primary concern is with scholarship in political science, although we also consider work from the disciplines of law, history, and sociology and from practitioners and advocates. The normative positions of scholars have heavily influenced the development of literature in this field, in which scholarship, practice, and advocacy are deeply intertwined. Advocates and individuals who have played key roles in the development of international criminal justice institutions, domestic tribunals, and truth commissions have been prominent in setting the agenda for scholars. Nonetheless, there is also a growing body of rigorous social science research that attempts to assess empirically—and sometimes critically—the claims of advocates and practitioners and to explain changing strategies of justice.

This article uses Martin Shapiro's body of work as a point of departure for tracing the development over the past few decades of “institutionalist” approaches to the study of law and courts. It begins by reviewing some of the distinctive characteristics of Shapiro's brand of institutional analysis, including the pluralist and process models that informed his vision of politics and his preference for using historical-interpretive case study methods rather than more quantitative or formal approaches. This lays the groundwork for the claim that he was a progenitor of what emerged in the late 1980s as the so-called “new institutionalism” in public law scholarship. After then reviewing some of Shapiro's provocative (and not entirely positive) reactions to the emergent literature, the article explores the useful ways in which more recent institutionalist scholarship has moved beyond Shapiro's agenda.

The study of race and U.S. politics has always been controversial in the discipline. Theory and evidence are often ignored or misconstrued. Furthermore, literatures that examine the impact of race have developed in relative isolation from one another. We try to address this shortcoming here. We examine research on the influence of race on the political attitudes, behavior, and institutions of both blacks and whites. Our focus is on partisanship, voting, policy opinions, and representation. We identify linkages across these domains and then discuss the implications of this work for assessing the nation's progress toward achieving racial justice.

Models of veto bargaining have become an important tool for formal institutional analysis. This chapter reviews the core model of veto bargaining and some of its more interesting and useful extensions, focusing on one of the best developed applications, the presidential veto over legislation. One of the primary attractions of these models is that they often produce crisp, testable empirical predictions. Our review focuses on 18 such predictions. We conclude with a brief review of the empirical evidence related to these hypotheses.

This assessment of research on contemporary democratic politics in Latin America is organized around the distinction between institutional and alternative approaches. Initially it considers institutionalism on its own terms and, through an assessment of the debate about the institutional causes of gridlock, draws attention to key strengths of this literature. Thereafter, this article adopts a broader perspective that exposes some limitations but also other strengths of institutional analyses and considers the possibility of combining insights developed from institutional and alternative theoretical perspectives. The suggested terms of integration are as follows. With regard to causal theorizing, institutionalists need to borrow ideas from a broader literature on political regimes, especially regarding the causes of transitions to, and the breakdown of, democracy. With regard to descriptive theorizing, in contrast, students of the quality of democracy need to incorporate the contributions of institutionalists, especially regarding principal-agent relationships among citizens, policy makers, and policy administrators. Throughout this review, various pointed suggestions to advance research are offered.