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Notes from the Editor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2003

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Extract

The American Political Science Review depends on the kindness of strangers—most conspicuously, on the good will of those to whom we turn for evaluations of the papers that are submitted to us. Although we have little to offer in return, we do what we can to repay this kindness by sending each reviewer an individual thank-you letter along with copies of my decision letter and the other reviews of the paper. Once a year, too, we provide a little extra recognition by printing the names of the hundreds of reviewers, from every part of our discipline and from many neighboring disciplines and interdisciplinary fields as well, who have voluntarily contributed their time and expertise. This year's list, which appears elsewhere in this issue, recognizes those who reviewed for the APSR between mid-August, 2002 and mid-August, 2003. Sine qua non.

Type
Editorial
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 97 , Issue 4 , November 2003 , pp. iii - viii
Copyright
© 2003 by the American Political Science Association

Some sense of the scope of our operation can be gleaned by browsing through this year's list, as I hope you will take a few moments to do in a spirit of appreciation to those named there. If your name appears on the list, please give yourself a well-deserved pat on the pack. If the list doesn't contain the name of someone who should be reviewing for the APSR, including yourself, please let us know, as we are always looking to expand our list of reviewers.

Reviewing papers for the APSR and other journals not only constitutes an invaluable, if vastly underappreciated, form of professional service, but also can be a valuable learning experience for reviewers. Increasingly, though, reviewing for journals is coming to be regarded as a burden by scholars who are being asked to provide so many such reviews each year that they fear that their own research program will suffer as a consequence. In part such concern reflects the growth of our discipline, the proliferation of journals, and the increasing emphasis on productive research scholarship. In part, too, it reflects the more rapid tempo of the review process, as compared to the leisurely pace that was commonplace not all that long ago. In any event, more and more papers are circulating, and they are circulating faster than ever before. Because each paper goes out to multiple reviewers, a prolific researcher can keep a lot of reviewers busy. Someone who submits, say, three papers to journals in a year, has each of them rejected, and then sends each of them back out to a different journal would single-handedly be responsible for the commissioning of eighteen reviews. Of course, not everyone produces three new papers in a year. Even so, the example is hardly far-fetched, and it illustrates what editors and reviewers alike are increasingly coming up against: a growing problem for which no good solution is yet in sight but one to which greater attention is going to have to be devoted in the future.

The APSR has been anything but immune to these trends. As noted a year ago in my first annual editorial report, our total number of submissions rose an unprecedented 55% during 2001–2002 over the preceding year. It was unclear at the time whether this was a one-time-only phenomenon or not, but now it is clear: It was not. Our submissions showed no signs of abating during 2002–2003. Indeed, they rose again, though thankfully not by nearly as much as in the preceding year: They were up by 9% over their record-setting 2001–2002 level. Although I would have been disappointed if submissions had fallen off substantially, I would have been distressed if they had continued to grow at the meteoric rate of the previous year, for we simply could not have handled such a huge additional manuscript load. We were able to handle the extra 9%; as evidence thereof, I can report that during 2002–2003 the median turnaround time from the day a paper arrived in our office until the day my decision letter went into the mail held steady at 39 working days. For sustaining that performance, I am pleased to acknowledge again the performance of the reviewers whose names are listed in this issue.

IN THIS ISSUE

The cover of each issue of the APSR is a striking graphic that is keyed to the theme of the first article in the issue. Our two most recent covers were, in turn, depressing (the face of a trauma victim, symbolizing Hazem Adam Ghobareh, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett's “Civil Wars Kill and Maim People—Long After the Shooting Stops” in our May issue) and frightening (a terrorist, signifying Robert Pape's “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” in our August issue). Thus, it seemed highly appropriate to lighten up a bit on this issue's cover, which represents Clarissa Rile Hayward's “The Difference States Make: Democracy, Identity, and the American City.” Probing issues associated with race in the American city, Hayward asks, “How should democrats treat difference?” Her answer is that issues of difference can be managed and structured by the democratic state in a manner that remains faithful to the norms of democracy. Indeed, rather than simply reacting to difference once it has been produced, the state can participate creatively and democratically in a continuous re-definition of difference.

The concept of difference obviously underlies the notion of representation, the subject of the second article in this issue. In “Rethinking Representation,” Jane Mansbridge challenges readers to think beyond the familiar, “promissory” form of American representation, which links representative and voter in a principal-agent relationship that requires accountability. Other, albeit less familiar, forms of representation abound, however, and three such forms—anticipatory, gyroscopic, and surrogate—frame the voter-representative relationship as prudential, predictable, and parallel, respectively. With each model come different criteria for legitimacy. Mansbridge's consideration of these options is certain to broaden readers' perspectives on what constitutes good representation and why.

A key assumption underlying democratic governance is that the ground rules should be, and/or are, applied equally to all. In another consideration of the difference that differences make, Mary Hawkesworth challenges that assumption. “Congressional Enactments of Race-Gender: Toward a Theory of Raced-Gendered Institutions,” Hawkesworth's investigation of the treatment of minority and female members of Congress, provides evidence that for black and female legislators, standing rules and common respect are subverted by Democrats and Republicans alike.

The focus of this issue then turns to matters of method. According to Paul McDonald, when political scientists debate the benefits and the limitations of rational choice theory, they give unduly short shrift to epistemological assumptions—to the detriment of the debate. McDonald argues in “Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: The Competing Epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory” that advocates of rational choice fall into either the instrumentalist-empiricist or the scientific-realist camp. Highlighting epistemological differences among rational choice practitioners serves three important purposes: it provides a common language in which to discuss debates within rational choice, it enhances the ability to provide a coherent defense of rational choice to its critics, and it defines a collective standard for assessing whether rational choice can serve as a “grand unified theory” for political science.

This methodological focus is sustained by Gary King, Christopher J.L. Murray, Joshua Salomon, and Ajay Tandon in “Enhancing the Validity and Cross-cultural Comparability of Measurement in Survey Research.” Measurement would seem to presuppose a shared universe of discourse, for unless there is some common understanding of what an underlying concept means, how can there be any assurance that what is being measured is really “the same thing”? What, then, are survey researchers to do if different people have their own “yardstick” when it comes to responding to their questions? This problem stems from individual and cultural differences between respondents, especially when intangibles like “freedom,” “health,” and “trust” are under consideration. King and his colleagues describe a method designed to subtract out such individual and cultural biases and thereby to enable consistent cross-cultural measurement of important concepts of interest—a method that will surely be of widespread interest to researchers in various subfields of political science and several other disciplines as well.

The four remaining articles in this issue all put the spotlight on international politics. The past decade has witnessed an explosion of research on the “democratic peace,” and no end seems yet to be in sight of new studies refuting, modifying, replicating, or extending previously reported conclusions about the connection between democracy and peace. This debate has largely been conducted at the level of dueling data sets, operationalizations, specifications, and techniques. That is, fueling the debate have been ongoing disagreements concerning the soundness of empirical findings. But what about the theoretical foundations of the democratic peace thesis? Is the underlying logic sound? Sebastian Rosato answers that question emphatically in the negative. Sifting through the causal linkages of the various versions of the theory, Rosato skewers “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory” in a contribution that seems sure to stir controversy and may turn attention from the empirical back to the theoretical dimensions of the debate.

Although the idea of state sovereignty has lost ground with the onset of globalization, the operation of migration-terrorism and the ability of sleeper cells to branch out across national boundaries, the significance of the state as a political agent has been renewed in the post-September 11 world. Examining the various security environments of the United States and Europe since 1945, Christopher Rudolph argues in “Security and the Political Economy of International Migration” that changing ideas of national interest and security in relation to international migration and border control policies require the presence of the state as the only political agent that has the ability to alleviate domestic insecurities.

Finally (and, it seems, inevitably), the attention of students of international politics turns to war. Wars are, among many other things, expensive. They are so expensive, in fact, that nations often conduct elaborate cost-benefit analyses to determine whether a prospective conflict would be worth the loss of blood and treasure. As William Reed notes in “Information, Power and War,” however, often little information is available on which to base such analyses. The availability of such information, Reed argues, depends on the balance of power. As nations approach power parity, they know the least about the prospective worth of conflict. Fueled by uncertainty, war is more likely in periods of power transition and multipolarity. Therefore, either to predict or to avoid war, it is necessary to evaluate distributions of information as well as power.

When two states start a war, they both seek to win. But when does one agree to lose? In “The Principle of Convergence in Wartime Negotiations,” Branislav L. Slantchev develops a model that allows for simultaneous learning on and off the battlefield. During a war, a state learns about its opponents via diplomatic negotiations and military outcomes. The “fog of war” may cloud a state's understanding of its relative position in a conflict, but each side still learns about its opponent though strategic bargaining in the context of battle outcomes. The goal of each is to avoid settling prematurely on terms worse than it might get in the future, so each waits and learns from the outcomes of its battles and from the other side's responses to those outcomes. By developing a model that incorporates all these processes, Slantchev finds that peace does not emerge from war until the combatants “converge” on a place and time where each knows enough about the other to recognize a reasonable peace treaty.

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