Although my most recent annual editorial report was published in the January issue of PS: Political Science & Politics, it seems unsafe to assume that everyone who may be interested in how things are going at the APSR will have ventured into the nether regions of PS and there chanced upon my report. Therefore, I summarize here its most salient points.

How to promote cooperative behavior is classically solved by incentives that lead self-interested individuals in socially desirable directions, but by now well-established laboratory results show that people often do act cooperatively, even at significant cost to themselves. These results suggest that cooperative dispositions might be an evolved part of human nature. Yet such dispositions appear inconsistent with the “Machiavellian intelligence” paradigm, which develops the idea that our brains have evolved, in substantial part, for capturing adaptive advantage from within-group competition. We use simulation to address the evolutionary relationship between basic Machiavellian capacities and cooperative dispositions. Results show that selection on such capacities can (1) permit the spread of cooperative dispositions even in cooperation-unfriendly worlds and (2) support transitions to populations with high mean cooperative dispositions. We distinguish between “rationality in action” and “rationality in design”—the adaptive fit between a design attribute of an animal and its environment. The combination of well-developed Machiavellian intelligence, modest mistrust, and high cooperative dispositions appears to be a rational design for the brains of highly political animals such as ourselves.

Political theorists from Machiavelli to Huntington have denied the possibility of popular government arising out of the chaos of civil war, instead prescribing an intermediate stage of one-man rule by a Prince, Leviathan, or a military dictator. Based on recent empirical evidence of post-civil war democratization in El Salvador, Mozambique, and elsewhere, I show that democracy can arise directly from anarchy. Predatory warring factions choose the citizenry and democratic procedures over a Leviathan when (1) their economic interests depend on productive investment by the citizens, (2) citizens' political preferences ensure that power allocation will be less biased under democracy than under a Leviathan, and (3) there is an external agency (e.g., the United Nations) that mediates and supervises joint disarmament and state-building. Ultimately, I discuss the implications of this argument for the basic intuitions of classical political theory and contemporary social theory regarding democratization and authoritarianism.

This paper examines the bases of opposition to immigrant minorities in Western Europe, focusing on The Netherlands. The specific aim of this study is to test the validity of predictions derived from two theories—realistic conflict, which emphasizes considerations of economic well-being, and social identity, which emphasizes considerations of identity based on group membership. The larger aim of this study is to investigate the interplay of predisposing factors and situational triggers in evoking political responses. The analysis is based on a series of three experiments embedded in a public opinion survey carried out in The Netherlands (n=2007) in 1997–98. The experiments, combined with parallel individual-level measures, allow measurement of the comparative impact of both dispositionally based and situationally triggered threats to economic well-being and to national identity at work. The results show, first, that considerations of national identity dominate those of economic advantage in evoking exclusionary reactions to immigrant minorities and, second, that the effect of situational triggers is to mobilize support for exclusionary policies above and beyond the core constituency already predisposed to support them.

Elections take place at intervals, most citizens vote on the same day, and the electoral outcome is irrevocable until the next election. Each of these temporal properties—periodicity, simultaneity, and finality—is grounded in fundamental democratic values. Analyzing the properties shows how and why several anomalies in electoral theory and practice in the United States should be eliminated. Together the properties mark off electoral politics as a sphere that requires different and often more stringent standards than the rest of political life outside of government. Periodicity requires that the control of redistricting be independent of legislatures. Simultaneity opposes publishing the results of exit polls, expanding the use of early voting, and granting legislatures the authority to select presidential electors on their own schedule. Finality justifies more stringent regulation of campaign practices, such as electioneering ads.

We inquire whether residence in majority–minority districts raises or lowers turnout among Latinos. We argue that the logic suggesting that majority–minority districts suppress turnout is flawed and hypothesize that the net effect is empowering. Further, we suggest that residing in multiple overlapping majority–minority districts—for state assemblies, senates, and the U.S. House—further enhances turnout. We test our hypotheses using individual-level turnout data for voters in five Southern California counties. Examining three general elections from 1996 to 2000, we demonstrate that residing in a majority-Latino district ultimately has a positive effect on the propensity of Latino voters to turn out, an effect that increases with the number of Latino districts in which the voter resides and is consistent across the individual offices in which a voter might be descriptively represented. In contrast, the probability that non-Hispanic voters turn out decreases as they are subject to increasing layers of majority-Latino districting.

When two candidates of different quality compete in a one-dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome. Third, the equilibrium varies systematically with the level of uncertainty about the location of the median voter. We test these three predictions using laboratory experiments and find strong support for all three. We also observe some biases and show that they can be explained by quantal response equilibrium.

To most readers, Aristotle's many references to nature throughout the first book of the Politics imply a foundational role for nature outside and prior to politics. Aristotle, they claim, pairs nature with necessity and, thus, sets nature as a standard that fixes the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in political life. Through readings of Aristotle on the nature of citizens, slaves, and foreigners in the Politics, this essay argues, in contrast, that, to Aristotle, nature, especially human nature, is changeable and shaped by politics. Through an analysis of Aristotle's philosophical and scientific treatments of nature in the Metaphysics and Physics, this essay demonstrates that in order to preserve what he takes to be characteristic and also constitutive of a distinctively human way of living—prohairetic activity—Aristotle is especially keen to guard against any assimilation of nature to necessity.

Most scholars, following Rousseau himself, have had little to say about what Rousseau calls “the desire to extend our being.” Yet the concept is foundational to his political philosophy. Though less compelling a formulation (and deliberately so) than Plato's “eros” or Nietzsche's “will to power,” “the desire to extend our being” is comparable to these in its strength and reach, and hence in its power to unlock the full meaning of Rousseau's thought. My purpose in this paper is to uncover Rousseau's view of the meaning and significance of this desire; its pervasive influence on moral and political life; and the means through which it can and cannot, and should and should not, be fulfilled.

Neorealism and some versions of realism seek to furnish nomothetic theories of the international system at the same time that they also strive to prescribe policy for political leaders. Insofar as practical advice is insufficiently articulated by means of either nomothesis or the structural theoretical framework that (neo-)realist paradigms supply, these two aspirations seem contradictory. This essay is an examination of what contemporary realism and, especially, neorealism require to make practical wisdom available for practitioners. It argues that narrative, which is exemplified in the so-called classical realism of Thucydides, remains a crucial component of practical realism and neorealism.

The view of institutions as coercion rather than as contracts dominates the comparative politics literature on both institutional creation and the politics of economic reform. The emergence of a collectively optimal tax code in Russia demonstrates the limitations of this emphasis on coercion. This new tax code was not imposed by a strong central leader, mandated by international institutions, or the result of state capture by powerful economic interest groups. Rather, it is the product of a mutually beneficial exchange between the Russian government and the Russian oil companies. Russia's ability to negotiate an effective tax regime also suggests the conditions under which and the microcausal mechanism whereby exogenous shocks promote institutional change and economic reform. Owing to their mutual vulnerability and interdependence, the August 1998 financial crisis generated widely shared perceptions among these actors that the payoffs of cooperation had changed. Yet the economic reform institution that resulted required a series of incremental strategic moves that established common knowledge.

This article explains how the institutional context of international negotiations influences their outcomes. I argue that issue linkage counteracts domestic obstacles to liberalization by broadening the negotiation stakes. Institutions bolster the credibility of the linkage to make it more effective. I test the argument in the agricultural sector, which has been among the most difficult sectors for governments to liberalize. Statistical analysis of U.S. negotiations with Japan and the EU from 1970 to 1999 indicates that an institutionalized linkage between agricultural and industrial issues encourages agricultural liberalization in both Japan and Europe. Through case studies of key negotiations, I first examine why countries choose to link issues, then show how the linkage changes interest group mobilization and shifts the policy process to promote liberalization.

One of the most important developments over the past three decades has been the spread of liberal economic ideas and policies throughout the world. These policies have affected the lives of millions of people, yet our most sophisticated political economy models do not adequately capture influences on these policy choices. Evidence suggests that the adoption of liberal economic practices is highly clustered both temporally and spatially. We hypothesize that this clustering might be due to processes of policy diffusion. We think of diffusion as resulting from one of two broad sets of forces: one in which mounting adoptions of a policy alter the benefits of adopting for others and another in which adoptions provide policy relevant information about the benefits of adopting. We develop arguments within these broad classes of mechanisms, construct appropriate measures of the relevant concepts, and test their effects on liberalization and restriction of the current account, the capital account, and the exchange rate regime. Our findings suggest that domestic models of foreign economic policy making are insufficient. The evidence shows that policy transitions are influenced by international economic competition as well as the policies of a country's sociocultural peers. We interpret the latter influence as a form of channeled learning reflecting governments' search for appropriate models for economic policy.

We address two long-standing survey research problems: measuring complicated concepts, such as political freedom and efficacy, that researchers define best with reference to examples; and what to do when respondents interpret identical questions in different ways. Scholars have long addressed these problems with approaches to reduce incomparability, such as writing more concrete questions—with uneven success. Our alternative is to measure directly response category incomparability and to correct for it. We measure incomparability via respondents' assessments, on the same scale as the self-assessments to be corrected, of hypothetical individuals described in short vignettes. Because the actual (but not necessarily reported) levels of the vignettes are invariant over respondents, variability in vignette answers reveals incomparability. Our corrections require either simple recodes or a statistical model designed to save survey administration costs. With analysis, simulations, and cross-national surveys, we show how response incomparability can drastically mislead survey researchers and how our approach can alleviate this problem.