Annual Review of Political Science - Early Publication

The study of criminal violence has received increasing attention in political science over the past 15 years, as organized criminal groups have grown and diversified worldwide, unleashing unprecedented waves of violence. This article presents a critical assessment of the current state of political science scholarship on criminal violence. It discusses the sources and dynamics of organized criminal violence, emphasizing the reconceptualization of state–criminal group relationships in the literature, shifts in illegal markets, and the political incentives fueling criminal wars. It also examines how states and societies respond to criminal violence. State responses include punitive approaches, institutional reform, and community-based interventions, while societal responses can be examined through the lenses of exit (e.g., migration, disengagement), voice (e.g., political participation, collective resistance), and loyalty (i.e., compliance with state authorities or criminal groups). The article also addresses conceptual and methodological challenges, policy implications, and ethical considerations inherent in this field of study and identifies promising pathways for future research.

In the past decade, there has been a global resurgence in attention to industrial policy (IP), a resurgence that cuts across political ideologies and geographic regions. IPs are inherently political, intimately connected to the roles of the state in the economy and of states within an international economic system. This review demonstrates that while overt IPs have waxed and waned in their political acceptability in the aftermath of World War II, IPs have always remained part of the policy tool kit. In using IP, policymakers have had to navigate three common governance domains: building coalitions to support productive investments, building the state's capacity to collaborate with and discipline the private sector, and creating political incentives for credible commitments to firms. Nonetheless, the political dynamics in each of these domains have shifted over time. Historically, IPs focused on export-based catch-up strategies, requiring the mobilization of coalitions around manufacturing investment and export discipline. Today's IPs often target frontier technologies and aim to address perceived vulnerabilities in global supply chains and new geopolitical competition, demanding greater experimentation with more uncertain economic outcomes and higher risks of failure. We trace the evolution of the literature on IP through four phases: state-led developmental policies, the changing coalitions and institutions in a globally fragmented production system, neoliberalism, and the more recent renewed focus on transformative IP.

My life is roughly divided into three parts. The first part covers my formative years: birth a few years before Ghana's independence, elementary education in a tiny rural village, secondary school in a nearby town, and undergraduate studies at the University of Ghana, where my interest in politics and public affairs was nurtured. The second part concerns the expansion of my intellectual horizons. It begins with my doctoral studies in political science at the University of California, Davis. It continues with my return to Ghana in the mid-1980s, when it was under military rule, to teach, research, and write about African politics from inside the continent. It ends with my relocation to Washington, DC, where I was exposed to the world of think tanks. Part three deals with my return to Ghana in the late 1990s. I spent the time observing and documenting Africa's democratic transitions in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I also played a key role in the moment through two nonstate research and advocacy institutions—the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and Afrobarometer.

If scholars and pundits are right, the erosion of norms in the United States and abroad poses a significant danger to democracy. Understanding what exactly norms are, what makes them democratic, and how best to measure them are thus essential building blocks for generating and evaluating explanations of how such norms weaken and collapse. Our article addresses each of these key elements. On the conceptual front, we argue for more precision in defining norms and more consideration in labeling them as democratic. On the measurement front, we develop a general utility function and use it to evaluate the various methodological strategies that researchers have deployed to causally identify democratic norms. In between, we synthesize the fast-growing literature on norms and democratic backsliding using a fourfold typology, with transgressors and enforcers on one dimension and political elites and citizens on the other. We conclude by pinpointing several new areas for future research.

Our understanding of state development—a term that encompasses both state formation and state building—has grown significantly in the last two decades. In this review, I outline the foundations of the literature and identify major conceptual and analytical advancements since the early 2000s, including the development of capacity investment models, the notion of intermediate institutions, and the emphasis on political agency. This review builds on research employing diverse methodologies, draws on examples from advanced economies and developing countries, and is intended for both novice and experienced readers. After taking stock of the state of the field, I discuss and reflect upon three avenues for further research—the big unknowns: Do civil wars make or break the state? How do economic openness and international hierarchy shape the incentives and opportunities for state building? And what are the perils that highly capable states pose for liberal rights and democratic governance?

Research on judicial politics has advanced considerably over the past few decades, particularly in the global South, a geopolitical region that has long been subjected to imbalanced relationships with more industrialized countries in the global North. The unique challenges confronting global South countries, including political and economic instabilities, limited state authority, and dilemmas of social integration, have shaped both the form and function of courts in these regions. We explore these implications in four key areas where a critical mass of scholarship has generated new insights and opportunities for future research: courts and stateness, courts in authoritarian regimes, courts in unstable democracies, and courts and social transformation. We show that in these areas, courts are often effective for a variety of purposes and according to standards different from those in the global North. We conclude with reflections on knowledge-building in this region and implications for future theorization and empirical inquiry.

The politics of childcare has become a vibrant area of research. This review analyzes the evolution of this research over several decades and identifies two phases of scholarship. The first phase concerned the limited public supports for childcare in most countries and how this reinforced a particular gender order. A second current of research took off as many countries expanded their childcare systems and highlighted the role of electoral politics and ideas about public spending on childcare as an investment in human capital. In the drive to explain patterns of policy change, the research focus has narrowed, occluding the substantive impact of different childcare systems. Future research should probe the stubbornness of gender inequalities in paid work and care and how politics and public policies shape different care economies.

The article reviews recent literature on bureaucratic experts as political actors in democracies, with a focus on their complex, sometimes conflictive relationships with politicians. First, we present the central promises of expertise for democratic governance: its alleged objectivity, responsiveness to the common good, and effectiveness. Then, we look into two criticisms of this optimistic and apolitical view: Expertise is neither as unbiased nor as effective as claimed. Departing from a more political understanding of experts’ power in democracies, we then discuss two topics that illustrate experts’ relationships with politicians: (a) the conditions and political dynamics that cause changes in technical policy areas’ influence, preferences, and institutional arrangements (or even experts’ demise) and (b) how challenging experts’ power is for democracy and elected politicians. We conclude with suggestions for future research and a call to find more common ground between the literatures focusing on experts and politics.

Human societies and their politics are deeply rooted in the land. Land shapes politics through its material nature and distribution across society, by serving as a mechanism of control and state-building, and by acting as a symbolic site that imbues identity and belonging. That land is inextricably intertwined with politics makes it a crucial driver of a wide range of social, political, and economic outcomes. We explain and survey these rich and complex relationships, focusing on the formation of political preferences and identities, the forms and dynamics of political violence, and the long-term structure of society, ranging from patterns of settlement and dispossession to inequality, state capacity, and economic development and urbanization. Land access, land rights, and land tenure institutions are all implicated in these outcomes. We conclude with reflections on promising research frontiers in the study of land and politics, including climate change, migration, and urbanization.