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- Volume 9, 2006
Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 9, 2006
Volume 9, 2006
- Preface
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BENTLEY, TRUMAN, AND THE STUDY OF GROUPS
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 1–18More Less▪ AbstractArthur F. Bentley and David Truman helped develop the so-called group interpretation of politics. They argued that all political activity is groups pursuing their interests against the interests of others. Despite their influence, Bentley and Truman are increasingly forgotten. This paper reviews their group interpretation, focusing on its philosophical basis. The paper argues for the continued significance and value of the group interpretation and of the pragmatist view of social science on which it is based.
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HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF LEGISLATURES IN THE UNITED STATES
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 19–44More Less▪ AbstractThis paper examines the evolution of legislatures in the United States beginning with the establishment of the first assembly in Virginia in 1619. Drawing on works by historians, it traces the development of the colonial assemblies as legislative institutions. The transition of assemblies to state legislatures is investigated, as is the underappreciated impact of the first state legislatures on the rules and structures given to the U.S. Congress in the Constitution. The effects of legislative generations are revealed by the state legislatures established during the nineteenth century, as newer legislatures were equipped from their start with the rules and committee systems evolved only over time by earlier legislatures. The continuing evolution of state legislatures after the nineteenth century is linked to the concept of legislative professionalization. Finally, the relationship between legislative evolution and membership turnover is examined, as is the idea that legislatures move in both directions on the evolutionary dimension.
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RESPONDING TO SURPRISE
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 45–65More Less▪ AbstractThis essay explores governmental and scholarly responses to the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Both events caught intelligence analysts, military officers, and elected officials by surprise. This essay describes the differences between the two events, especially in the ways official inquiries have helped shape our understanding of why the surprise occurred. Before both events, data suggesting that attacks were possible or even probable were available within the “intelligence pipeline.” The essay focuses on how scholars and official investigations reported and explained that finding. It also identifies continuities between the investigations that followed the Japanese and al Qaeda attacks on the United States.
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POLITICAL ISSUES AND PARTY ALIGNMENTS: Assessing the Issue Evolution Perspective
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 67–81More Less▪ AbstractAlthough the study of realignment is an essential component of the rich and fruitful tradition of examining long-term partisan change, questions about the usefulness of the concept persist. We seek to redirect and reinvigorate the study of lasting political change by evaluating the critiques of classic realignment theory, examining the issue evolution perspective, and assessing whether the theory of issue evolution can be used to explain recent research on the relationship between political issues and partisan change. Our review of the theoretical and empirical literature investigating political issues and party alignments sheds light on both the utility of the issue evolution perspective and the conditions under which durable changes in party alignments are most likely to occur.
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PARTY POLARIZATION IN AMERICAN POLITICS: Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 83–110More Less▪ AbstractRecent commentary points to clear increases in ideological polarization between the major American political parties. We review the theoretical and empirical literature on party polarization and partisan change. We begin by comparing the current period both to earlier political eras and to theories of partisan change. We argue that in the current period the parties have grown increasingly divided on all the major policy dimensions in American politics—a process that we term conflict extension. We discuss various perspectives on increases in polarization between the parties in government, the parties in the electorate, and the parties' activists, and we consider the causal links between polarization at each of these levels. We consider whether American society itself, and not just the parties and their identifiers, has become increasingly polarized. Finally, we discuss the consequences of growing party polarization for American political life.
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WHAT AFFECTS VOTER TURNOUT?
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 111–125More Less▪ AbstractWhy is turnout higher in some countries and/or in some elections than in others? Why does it increase or decrease over time? To address these questions, I start with the pioneer studies of Powell and Jackman and then review more recent research. This essay seeks to establish which propositions about the causes of variations in turnout are consistently supported by empirical evidence and which ones remain ambiguous. I point out some enigmas and gaps in the field and suggest directions for future research. Most of the research pertains to established democracies, but analyses of nonestablished democracies are also included here.
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PLATONIC QUANDARIES: Recent Scholarship on Plato
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 127–141More Less▪ AbstractRecent scholarship on Plato falls into three categories: Straussian readings, Socratic readings, and the readings of the Chastened Utopians. The first group follows Strauss in reaffirming that Plato saw human nature as unchangeable and human political possibilities as relatively limited; on this account, the Republic is a joke that argues against all utopian projects. The second group focuses on Socrates rather than Plato, directing attention primarily toward individual self-fashioning that may or may not have political effects. The third group sees Plato as having believed in the possibility of political change and as having sought to intervene in the politics of his day. The central issue contested by these different schools of thought is whether human nature is malleable; specific issues of gender and militarism arise repeatedly in the discussion of this question.
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ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION AND ITS POLITICAL DISCONTENTS IN CHINA: Authoritarianism, Unequal Growth, and the Dilemmas of Political Development
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 143–164More Less▪ AbstractChina's economic growth and transition pose fascinating questions for social scientists. In the economic realm, proponents of the market-preserving federalism (MPF) model appear to have gone too far. In reality, China's central leadership has retained the prerogative to appoint top provincial officials as well as the power to reconfigure central-provincial fiscal relations, thus defying predictions of the MPF model. In the social realm, rapid growth has propelled the expansion of the middle class, but the large increase in inequality has sharpened social cleavages and class conflicts. The uncertainties of market transition and rising social conflicts pose major challenges for the ruling elite and for China's political development.
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MADISON IN BAGHDAD?: Decentralization and Federalism in Comparative Politics
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 165–188More Less▪ AbstractResearch on comparative decentralization and federalism is a booming industry. Recent research integrates insights from political science, economics, and economic history in emphasizing the importance of incentives for the operation of decentralized government. Such work has focused particular attention on fiscal, representative, and party institutions. In reviewing the past decade's research, I make two arguments. First, the comparative research on decentralization and federalism provides a model for how comparative politics can address some of the most profound questions in social thought by focusing on a theoretically and empirically tractable aspect of governance. Second, although the research addresses many of the key questions in comparative politics, it also struggles with some of the same problems and challenges as comparative politics writ large, particularly the issue of institutional endogeneity. Attention to endogeneity is central to better understanding the workings of decentralized governments and providing less facile policy recommendations for the reform of places as diverse as the United States and Iraq.
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SEARCHING WHERE THE LIGHT SHINES: Studying Democratization in the Middle East
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 189–214More Less▪ AbstractFor several decades, political scientists who work on the Middle East have been asked by both disciplinary and policy audiences about the region's prospects for democratization. We encounter difficulties in answering that question because it arises from American disciplinary and policy preoccupations, not from regional political dynamics. As a result of those preoccupations, Middle East political scientists have neglected some of the major political forces in the region, while contributing to the development of general comparative theories of democracy and democratization only at the margins.
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POLITICAL ISLAM: Asking the Wrong Questions?
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 215–240More Less▪ AbstractThe empirical literature on political Islam is fairly rich and getting better, but theoretical interpretations of these data are still quite primitive. This gap is a product of Orientalist traditions that “essentialize” Islamic movements, a resulting lack of appreciation for their global diversity, and the inevitable politicization of the subject matter. This essay seeks not only to identify the most important studies in the field but to show how they suggest a typology, chronology, and problematic that might lead to more fruitful analysis in the future.
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RETHINKING THE RESOURCE CURSE: Ownership Structure, Institutional Capacity, and Domestic Constraints*
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 241–263More Less▪ AbstractMost political scientists and economists unequivocally accept the proposition that abundant mineral resources are more often a curse than a blessing, particularly for developing countries. We argue that the widely accepted contention that an abundance of mineral resources and the influx of external rents generated from these resources during boom periods are to blame for the so-called “resource curse” should be revisited. Instead, we offer a new research agenda for studying the problem of resource-rich states that shifts the locus of study away from the “paradox of plenty” to a more appropriate paradox—that the concentration of wealth impoverishes the state whereas the dispersion of wealth enriches the state. This agenda focuses on three interrelated issues: the structure of ownership over mineral resources, the importance of strong institutions, and the relative influence of domestic versus international factors.
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A Closer Look at Oil, Diamonds, and Civil War
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 265–300More Less▪ AbstractStudies of natural resource wealth and civil war have been hampered by measurement error, endogeneity, lack of robustness, and uncertainty about causal mechanisms. This paper develops new measures and new tests to address these problems. It has four main findings. First, the likelihood of civil war in countries that produce oil, gas, and diamonds rose sharply from the early 1970s to the late 1990s; so did the number of rebel groups that sold contraband to raise money. Second, exogenous measures of oil, gas, and diamond wealth are robustly correlated with the onset of civil war. Still, these correlations are based on a small number of cases, and the substantive effects of resource wealth are sensitive to certain assumptions. Third, petroleum and diamond production lead to civil wars through at least three different mechanisms. Finally, the only resource variable robustly linked to conflict duration is a measure of “contraband,” which includes gemstones, timber, and narcotics.
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The Heart of the African Conflict Zone: Democratization, Ethnicity, Civil Conflict, and the Great Lakes Crisis
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 301–328More Less▪ AbstractIn the 1990s, simultaneous with a wave of democratization that proved only partially successful, Africa was swept by protracted civil conflicts, which had a number of novel attributes. The Great Lakes region—Congo-Kinshasa, Rwanda, and Burundi—was the epicenter. In their dynamics and demographics, the violent combats became interpenetrated, embroiling the three countries in intractable struggles. Their extraordinary complexity, and multiplicity of state and other actors, interrogated a number of distinct literatures. State decay and collapse, a broader phenomenon in Africa, was especially marked in Congo-Kinshasa. In all three countries, the irresistible pressures for democratization—which were part of a broader African pattern—triggered violent struggles over definitions of identity, citizenship, and indigeneity. The legal, moral, and analytical issue of genocide returned to the research agenda with a vengeance with the Rwandan catastrophe in 1994, and mass ethnic killings in Burundi and Congo-Kinshasa. The new dynamics of African civil wars and warlord politics demanded inquiry. Finally, the necessity of international intervention to contain and mediate the violence brought new attention to peacekeeping issues.
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PARTY IDENTIFICATION: Unmoved Mover or Sum of Preferences?
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 329–351More Less▪ AbstractAre party identifications relatively fixed features on the political landscape in the United States and elsewhere? If they are relatively fixed, do identifications move substantive issue preferences, perceptions of candidates, and perceptions of the link between candidates and issues? Early studies in the United States answered these questions in the affirmative. The track record for other systems is spotty, and each question occasioned repeated controversy in the decades since the 1960s. Much of the apparent lability and cross-national variation in party ties can be laid at the feet of measurement error, but not all. The claim that party identification moves other features on the political landscape is remarkably robust.
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REGULATING INFORMATION FLOWS: States, Private Actors, and E-Commerce
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 353–374More Less▪ AbstractGrowing interdependence between jurisdictions means that states are increasingly using private actors as proxies in order to achieve desired regulatory outcomes. International relations theory has had difficulty in understanding the exact circumstances under which they might wish to do this. Drawing on literatures in both international relations and legal scholarship, this article proposes a framework for understanding when states will or will not use private actors as proxy regulators. This framework highlights the relationship between state preferences and the presence or absence of a “point of control,” a special kind of private actor. The article then conducts an initial plausibility probe of the framework, assessing how well it explains outcomes in the regulation of gambling, privacy, and the taxation of e-commerce.
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COMPARATIVE ETHNIC POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES: Beyond Black and White
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 375–395More Less▪ AbstractThe study of race in American politics has largely been confined to the examination of African-Americans and their relations with whites. Demographic changes in the American population necessitate that we broaden this perspective to include other nonwhite groups. In this essay, we examine the similarities and differences between African-Americans on the one hand and Latinos and Asian-Americans on the other. In particular, we identify factors that are likely to distinguish the political experiences of these groups, focusing particularly on the roles of immigration and group identity. We also examine the state of knowledge regarding circumstances under which intergroup competition and cooperation are likely to occur. We suggest that neither competition nor cooperation is inevitable; rather, the emergence of either will be contingent on the specific historical and demographic circumstances of the community and the choices and attitudes of both political elites and mass publics.
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WHAT IS ETHNIC IDENTITY AND DOES IT MATTER?
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 397–424More Less▪ AbstractSince the publication of Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict, comparative political scientists have increasingly converged on their classification of ethnic identities. But there is no agreement on the definition that justifies this classification—and the definitions that individual scholars propose do not match their classifications. I propose a definition that captures the conventional classification of ethnic identities in comparative political science to a greater degree than the alternatives. According to this definition, ethnic identities are a subset of identity categories in which membership is determined by attributes associated with, or believed to be associated with, descent (described here simply as descent-based attributes). I argue, on the basis of this definition, that ethnicity either does not matter or has not been shown to matter in explaining most outcomes to which it has been causally linked by comparative political scientists. These outcomes include violence, democratic stability, and patronage.
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NEW MACROECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Vol. 9 (2006), pp. 425–453More Less▪ AbstractWe review the use of macroeconomics in political science over the past 40 years. The field has been dominated by new classical theory, which leaves little room for economic policy and focuses attention on what democratic governments can do wrong in the short term. The resulting literatures on political business cycles and central bank independence are large and sophisticated, but they fail, we argue, to account for most of the observed variance in economic policies and outcomes. In the past decade, mainstream macroeconomics has moved away from new classical approaches toward New Keynesian theories with greater scope for macroeconomic policy. These new approaches, with little impact so far in political science, are reviewed and their implications drawn out. Instead of explaining short-sighted government behavior in an economy with little scope for economic policy, the key question for political science may be why governments often pursue longer-run objectives in an economy with considerable scope for economic policy.
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Previous Volumes
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Volume 27 (2024)
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Volume 26 (2023)
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Volume 25 (2022)
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Volume 24 (2021)
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Volume 23 (2020)
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Volume 22 (2019)
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Volume 21 (2018)
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Volume 20 (2017)
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Volume 19 (2016)
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Volume 18 (2015)
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Volume 17 (2014)
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Volume 16 (2013)
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Volume 15 (2012)
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Volume 14 (2011)
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Volume 13 (2010)
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Volume 12 (2009)
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Volume 11 (2008)
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Volume 10 (2007)
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Volume 9 (2006)
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Volume 8 (2005)
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Volume 7 (2004)
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Volume 6 (2003)
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Volume 5 (2002)
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Volume 4 (2001)
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Volume 3 (2000)
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Volume 2 (1999)
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Volume 1 (1998)
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Volume 0 (1932)