Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 8, 2005

Prospect theory is the most influential behavioral theory of choice in the social sciences. Its creators won a Nobel Prize in economics, and it is largely responsible for the booming field of behavioral economics. Although international relations theorists who study security have used prospect theory extensively, Americanists, comparativists, and political economists have shown little interest in it. The dominant explanation for political scientists' tepid response focuses on the theoretical problems with extending a theory devised in the lab to explain political decisions in the field. This essay focuses on these problems and reviews suggested solutions. It suggests that prospect theory's failure to ignite the imagination of more political scientists probably results from their aversion to behavioral assumptions and not from problems unique to prospect theory.

Policy makers pay relatively little attention to the vast theoretical literature in IR, and many scholars seem uninterested in doing policy-relevant work. These tendencies are unfortunate because theory is an essential tool of statecraft. Many policy debates ultimately rest on competing theoretical visions, and relying on a false or flawed theory can lead to major foreign policy disasters. Theory remains essential for diagnosing events, explaining their causes, prescribing responses, and evaluating the impact of different policies. Unfortunately, the norms and incentives that currently dominate academia discourage many scholars from doing useful theoretical work in IR. The gap between theory and policy can be narrowed only if the academic community begins to place greater value on policy-relevant theoretical work.

The growing literature on deliberative democratic practice finds that deliberation is a difficult and relatively rare form of communication. Each moment of a deliberative encounter raises significant obstacles in the path to stimulating greater intentional reflection on public issues. I explore these obstacles in the context of other empirical work in political and social psychology, small group communication, and public opinion. Taken together, these literatures explain why deliberation is difficult to achieve and sustain over time. They also suggest several rules that might assist practitioners in making deliberative democracy work better. Many of the obstacles to deliberative democracy raise questions about key theoretical constructs closely associated with deliberative democratic theory, including equality, legitimacy, autonomy, and reason. I conclude by suggesting that deliberative practitioners, empirical scholars, and theorists might gain from greater interaction.

Since 1997, Britain has been undergoing a period of constitutional reform. This reform has been radical and yet piecemeal. The process has been unique in the democratic world, in that it has been converting an uncodified constitution into a codified one, but by stages, there being neither the political will nor the consensus to do more. Some of the contours of the new constitution will be familiar to Americans, for Britain now enjoys a quasi-federal system of government, and, in effect, a Bill of Rights. The creation of a more representative upper house is also part of the ongoing process of reform. In consequence, Britain no longer lives under an organic “historic” constitution but is in the process of fashioning one that is being created by deliberate human agency.

With nearly one in ten residents of advanced industrialized states now an immigrant, international migration has become a fundamental driver of social, economic, and political change. We review alternative models of migratory behavior (which emphasize structural factors largely beyond states' control) as well as models of immigration policy making that seek to explain the gaps between stated policy and actual outcomes. Some scholars attempt to explain the limited efficacy of control policies by focusing on domestic interest groups, political institutions, and the interaction among them; others approach the issue from an international or “intermestic” perspective. Despite the modest effects of control measures on unauthorized flows of economic migrants and asylum seekers, governments continue to determine the proportion of migrants who enjoy legal status, the specific membership rights associated with different legal (and undocumented) migrant classes, and how policies are implemented. These choices have important implications for how the costs and benefits of migration are distributed among different groups of migrants, native-born workers, employers, consumers, and taxpayers.

After a long period of postwar neglect by mainstream scholars, religion assumed a new prominence in political science during the late 1970s. Despite the latter-day significance accorded religion by the discipline, the product of several unexpected real-world events, much of the recent research has focused on specific episodes or groups without drawing on or developing general theories. Social movement theory (SMT), particularly in its most recent incarnation, offers a way to address the three critical questions about religiously engaged political movements: What are the motives for political activity by religious groups? By what means do these groups facilitate political action? What features and conditions of the political system provide them opportunities for effective political action? This review explores various expressions of religiously based political action from the vantage point of SMT. We conclude that the translation of religious grievances into political action is contingent on a string of conditions that involve the interplay of motive, means, and opportunity. The implicit message is that scholars should approach religiously engaged social movements with the same theoretical frameworks used to understand secular political forces and that focusing these interpretive lenses on religion will illuminate issues of general interest to the discipline.

This essay examines the failure to anticipate the terrorist attacks of September 11 from four perspectives: cognitive biases of government analysts and policy makers concerned with terrorism, organizational pathologies of key bureaucracies such as the CIA and the FBI, political and strategic errors of senior government officials, and the unusual nature of al Qaeda. Drawing on past studies of strategic surprise, it argues that agencies such as the CIA at times did impressive work against the terrorist organization, but that in general the U.S. government, and the U.S. intelligence community in particular, lacked a coherent approach for triumphing over the skilled terrorists it faced. In hindsight, it is clear that numerous mistakes at all levels of the U.S. government and the broader U.S. analytic community made strategic surprise more likely.

What “counts” as transnational citizenship? Like the related notions of global or transnational civil society, the term's appeal to internationalists is greater than its conceptual precision. However, a wide range of empirical trends do raise questions about the nation-state-based approach to the concept of citizenship. In an effort to avoid conceptual stretching, this essay assesses the degree to which the concept of transnational citizenship helps to address issues raised by “globalization from below.” Because many approaches to citizenship focus on the dynamics and texture of participation, this review incorporates recent findings in sociology, anthropology, and geography into the political science discussion. The essay is organized by propositions that bring together analysis of two distinct empirical literatures, on transnational civil society and on migrant civic and political participation. The review concludes by contrasting two cross-cutting sets of definitional choices. The discussion is framed by a recognition that definitions of citizenship vary along two main dimensions: in their emphasis on rights versus membership, and in high versus low intensity. Only a very bounded definition of transnational citizenship holds up under conceptual scrutiny, limited to what is also called dual or multiple citizenship for migrants.

With tools borrowed from the economic analysis of insurance, principal-agency theory has allowed political scientists new insights into the role of information asymmetry and incentives in political relationships. It has given us a way to think formally about power as the modification of incentives to induce actions in the interests of the principal. Principal-agency theory has evolved significantly as political scientists have sought to make it more applicable to peculiarly political institutions. In congressional oversight of the bureaucracy, increasing emphasis has been placed on negotiation of administrative procedures, rather than the imposition of outcome-based incentives, as originally conceived. Awareness of the problem of credible commitment has impelled more dramatic reformulations, in which agents perform their function only when their interests conflict with those of the principal, and they are guaranteed some degree of autonomy.

The ‘political master’ finds himself in the position of the ‘dilettante’ who stands opposite the ‘expert,’ facing the trained official who stands within the management of administration.

(Weber 1958)

Is it possible for people to join their way to good citizenship? Contemporary thinking, both academic and popular, often leaves the impression that it is, but a careful investigation of the evidence raises serious doubts. In actuality, belonging to voluntary associations is a woefully inadequate foundation for good citizenship for three primary reasons: People join groups that are homogeneous, not heterogeneous; civic participation does not lead to, and may turn people away from, political participation; and not all groups promote democratic values. Good citizens need to learn that democracy is messy, inefficient, and conflict-ridden. Voluntary associations do not teach these lessons.

Research on interest groups today neglects the important task of analyzing historical patterns and secular, long-term changes. We note critical measurement errors in how contemporary political science has assessed the origins and development of interest group politics in the United States. Interest group scholars lack the reliable longitudinal data available to such fields as electoral or congressional studies. We suggest multidimensional means of recovering the “lost years” of interest group research, compensating for the absence of comprehensive and systematic data on U.S. organized interests before the 1960s. In order to generate empirical and theoretical insights that are not constrained by a particular historical context, we propose a conceptual framework for studying “interest group systems” across time. We also examine the rich possibilities of investigating the interest group and party systems as interacting and autonomous vehicles of representation in American political development. Only by broadening the time horizons of research will scholars be able to develop reliable insights about patterns and transformations of American interest group politics.

For half a century, Ernst B. Haas was an extraordinarily prolific contributor to theoretical debates in international relations. His work focused on the question of continuity and transformation in the system of states. His substantive writings are extremely diverse and can be difficult, so no overall appreciation has ever been attempted. This essay pulls together the major strands of Haas' theoretical work into a coherent whole and seeks to make it accessible to the broadest possible audience of IR scholars. The first section locates Haas in the overall theoretical milieu in which his thinking evolved, and it identifies some core intellectual choices he made. The next three sections summarize Haas' main theoretical contributions to the fields of European integration, the study of change at the level of the world polity, and nationalism.

As globalization has opened up channels of communication between different countries and increased interest in cross-national analysis, public opinion survey research has expanded its reach in the world. This article examines both the breadth and the depth of the globalization of public opinion research. First, we discuss the growth of cross-national surveys such as the World Values Survey, the International Social Survey Program, the European Social Survey, and the various Global Barometers. We then turn to the issues of data quality and comparability. Has the globalization of survey research meant the spread of a standard “product” of known and equivalent quality to diverse countries? Can survey research in diverse countries and contexts deliver meaningful comparisons of public opinion? Has globalization led to the dominance of an intellectual framework and set of assumptions that may not be quite appropriate outside their original homes? Finally, the article suggests a new standard for “grading” cross-national programs of survey research, inspired by debates in evidence-based medicine.

This review examines the policies and practices that address the evolving conditions of risk, security, and disaster management in U.S. society. Although each condition presents particular challenges to public agencies and the communities they serve, all represent varying states of uncertainty and require different approaches for informed action. This analysis reframes the issue of managing risk by focusing on the distinction between policies and practices developed in reference to natural and technological hazards and those developed to enhance security from hostile acts. The author concludes that building networks of organizations committed to a process of continual inquiry, informed action, and adaptive learning is a more flexible, robust strategy than the standard practice of establishing greater control over possible threats through administrative structures. Supported by methods of network analysis, computational simulation, information infrastructure, and long-term policy goals, networked strategies offer an important alternative to hierarchical structures that prove vulnerable in uncertain environments.

The study of the European Union (EU) has been transformed during the past decade, and three distinct theoretical approaches have emerged. The first approach, which seeks to explain the process of European integration, has largely abandoned the long-standing neofunctionalist-intergovernmentalist debate in favor of a rationalist-constructivist debate reflecting broader developments in international relations theory. A second approach, however, has rejected the application of international relations theory in favor of comparative politics approaches which analyze the EU using off-the-shelf models of legislative, executive, and judicial politics in domestic politics. A third and final approach sees the EU as an emerging system of multi-level governance in which national governments are losing influence in favor of supranational and subnational actors, raising important normative questions about the future of democracy within the EU.

In this review, we address three principal questions that have dominated the debate over the distributive effects of globalization. First, how has globalization affected inequality among countries? Second, how has globalization affected inequality within countries? Third, how has globalization affected the ability of national governments to redistribute wealth and risk within countries? We conclude that despite the proliferation of research on the consequences of globalization, there is no solid consensus in the relevant literature on any of these questions, largely because scholars disagree about how to measure globalization and about how to draw causal inferences about its effects. We also suggest possible foci for future research.

We've seen the result [of globalization]. The spread of sweatshops. The resurgence of child labor, prison and forced labor. Three hundred million more in extreme poverty than 10 years ago. Countries that have lost ground. A boom in busts in which a generation of progress is erased in a month of speculation. Workers everywhere trapped in a competitive race to the bottom.

AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney at the

International Confederation of Free Trade Unions Convention,

April 4, 2000 (see http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/

prsptm/sp04042000.cfm for text of this speech)

[T]hose who protest free trade are no friends of the poor. Those who protest free trade seek to deny them their best hope for escaping poverty.

President George W. Bush (Los Angeles Times, 2001)

New works by five young political scientists are establishing a new paradigm for studying judicial review. In different ways, Terri Peretti, Ran Hirschl, George Lovell, Kevin McMahon, and Thomas Keck point out that judicial review is established and maintained by elected officials. Adjudication is one of many means that politicians and political movements employ when seeking to make their constitutional visions the law of the land. Elected officials provide vital political foundations for judicial power by creating constitutional courts, vesting those courts with jurisdiction over constitutional questions, staffing those courts with judges prone to exercising judicial power, assisting or initiating litigation aimed at having those courts declare laws unconstitutional, and passing legislation that encourages justices to make public policy in the guise of statutory or constitutional interpretation. Judicial review does not serve to thwart or legitimate popular majorities; rather, it is a practice that alters the balance of power between the numerous political movements that struggle for power in a pluralist democracy.