The first thing most readers will notice about this issue is the cover, which is colored blue this time and is adorned by a clock to signify “Taking Temporality Seriously,” the first article in the issue. After noting the cover (admiringly, I hope) and browsing through the table of contents, readers are hereby invited to shift their attention briefly to the roster of editorial board members inside the cover. There they will see something new: as previewed in an earlier “Notes from the Editor,” an executive committee of the Review's editorial board is now in operation. The six-member executive committee consists of four representatives of major subfields of the discipline (Darren Davis for American politics, James Morrow for international politics, Kirstie McClure for political theory, and Sven Steinmo for comparative politics) and two “at-large” members (Neta Crawford and Robert Goodin). The members of the executive committee are intended to be the “first among equals” in advising me on matters of editorial policy, serving as an initial sounding board and source of new ideas before issues come to the full editorial board. Pertinent examples of the committee's responsibilities include planning an appropriate commemoration of the Review's centenary and revisiting our procedures for handling “Forum” submissions and responses. Executive committee members also constitute a first line of defense in advising me when issues arise concerning particular manuscripts, though such responsibilities tend to be infrequent and, given the diversity of the manuscripts we consider, are fairly widely dispersed among members of the editorial board rather than confined solely to executive committee members. All editorial board members also share responsibility for “recruiting” promising manuscripts within their areas of expertise, but executive committee members are asked to be especially active in this regard. Finally, it is the executive committee that will, early in 2003, review the performance of our editorial office in general and my performance as editor in particular. With the latter point in mind, I want to emphasize (1) that I selected the executive committee with an eye toward diversity of various sorts (substantive, theoretical, methodological, demographic, and so on), and (2) that the executive committee consists of individuals with whom I have not been associated professionally or personally, apart from my familiarity with their work, and with whom I have no more than a nodding acquaintance, if that.

Social scientists interested in explaining historical processes can, indeed should, refuse the choice between modeling causal relationships and studying history. Identifying temporality as the defining characteristic of processes that can be meaningfully distinguished as “history,” I show that modeling such phenomena engenders particular difficulties but is both possible and fruitful. Narratives, as a way of presenting empirical information, have distinctive strengths that make them especially suited for historical scholarship, and structuring the narratives based on the model allows us to treat them as data on which to test the model. At the same time, this use of narratives raises methodological problems not identified in recent debates. I specify these problems, analyze their implications, and suggest ways of solving or minimizing them. There is no inherent incompatibility between—but much potential gain from—modeling history and using historical narratives as data.

This paper subjects to critical analysis four common arguments in the sociopolitical theory literature supporting the cultural nationalist thesis that liberal democracy is viable only against the background of a single national public culture: the arguments that (1) social integration in a liberal democracy requires shared norms and beliefs (Schnapper); (2) the levels of trust that democratic politics requires can be attained only among conationals (Miller); (3) democratic deliberation requires communicational transparency, possible in turn only within a shared national public culture (Miller, Barry); and (4) the economic viability of specifically industrialized liberal democracies requires a single national culture (Gellner). I argue that all four arguments fail: At best, a shared cultural nation may reduce some of the costs liberal democratic societies must incur; at worst, cultural nationalist policies ironically undermine social integration. The failure of these cultural nationalist arguments clears the way for a normative theory of liberal democracy in multinational and postnational contexts.

This case study of late-nineteenth century federal courts in the United States sheds light on two seemingly unrelated questions of general interest to political scientists: What tools are available to party leaders who seek to institutionalize their policy agendas or insulate those agendas from electoral politics? and How do we account for expansions of judicial power? Using an historical–interpretive analysis of partisan agendas, party control of national institutions, congressional initiatives relating to federal courts, the appointment of federal judges, judicial decision making, and litigation patterns, I demonstrate that the increased power, jurisdiction, and conservatism of federal courts during this period was a by-product of Republican Party efforts to promote and entrench a policy of economic nationalism during a time when that agenda was vulnerable to electoral politics. In addition to offering an innovative interpretation of these developments, I discuss the implications arising from this case study for our standard accounts of partisan politics, political development, and the determinants of judicial decision making.

Plato's Meno deserves careful examination today because it highlights two facets of the concern for virtue neglected or obscured by the current revival of virtue among liberal theorists: the devotion to a good that cannot simply be reduced either to individual flourishing or to communal well-being—what Plato calls “nobility” or “the noble”; and the complex relation of virtue so understood to the concern for religion or piety. If the sought-for incorporation of virtue into liberal thought and practice today fails to grapple with these profound human concerns, in the first place by recognizing their existence, the language of virtue and its attendant moral sentiments will remain a matter more of scholarly debate than of lived practice.

This research challenges models of democratization that claim liberal principles affirming the equality of rights-bearing individuals equably enhance the political inclusion of groups marginalized by race, class, or gender. While such explanations may suffice for race and class, this study's quantitative cross-national analysis of women's contemporary officeholding patterns establishes that gender presents a counter case whereby women's political citizenship is enhanced, first, by government institutions that paradoxically affirm both individual equality and kinship group difference and, second, by state policies that paradoxically affirm both individual equality and women's group difference. These findings challenge assumptions about the relationship between political citizenship and democratization, demonstrate how women's political inclusion as voters and officeholders is strengthened not by either a “sameness” principle (asserting women's equality to men as individuals) or a “difference” principle (asserting women's group difference from men) but rather by the paradoxical combination of both, and provide new views for assessing multiculturalism prospects within democratic states.

According to the theory of representative bureaucracy, passive representation among public employees will lead to active representation in bureaucratic outputs. Existing research demonstrates that the link between passive and active representation exists for race but not for sex. Past research on this topic has not, however, taken into account the contextual environment that affects whether sex will translate into gender and lead to active representation in the bureaucracy. In this paper, we create a framework that specifies the conditions that affect whether passive representation results in active representation for sex and then test this framework using the case of education. We find that passive representation of women in education leads to active representation and that the institutional context affects the extent to which this link between passive and active representation occurs.

Decades of participation research show that political activity increases with income, but the participation of senior citizens specifically with regard to Social Security poses an exception to this pattern. Social Security-oriented participation decreases as income rises, in part because lower-income seniors are more dependent on the program. The negative income-participation gradient is especially pronounced for letter writing about the program, but even Social Security-related voting and contributing are less common among higher-income seniors. This is an instance in which self-interest is highly influential: Those who are more dependent are more active. It is also an example of lower-class mobilization with regard to an economic issue, something quite unusual in the United States.

An important agenda power in parliamentary democracies is the discretion over the dissolution of parliament. We argue that variation in constitutional rules and the political environment will systematically affect the frequency of early elections. We hypothesize that dissolution will be more frequent under single-party governments, when the head of state plays an insignificant role, when neither parliament nor the cabinet can inhibit dissolution, when minority governments are in power, when the head of state can dissolve unilaterally, and later in the constitutional term. Using standard logistic and Cox-proportional hazard techniques, we test these expectations in a pooled time-series setting against observations of most OECD parliamentary democracies for the years 1960–1995. We find that parliamentary dissolutions are more frequent earlier in the constitutional term, under minority governments, when the head of state plays an insignificant role, and when the parliament or the cabinet is not involved.

The extent to which political conflict over U.S. trade policy has led to clashes between broad-based class coalitions has varied significantly over time during the past two centuries. I argue that much of this variation can be explained by changes in economywide levels of interindustry factor mobility. Class distinctions between voters are more economically and politically salient when interindustry mobility is high; when mobility is low, industry distinctions become more critical and tend to split apart broader political coalitions. I report evidence indicating large changes in levels of labor and capital mobility over the last two centuries. These changes coincide with significant shifts in the character of American trade politics. Analysis of congressional voting on 30 major pieces of trade legislation between 1824 and 1994 provides evidence of large swings in coalition patterns.

C. S. Lewis claimed that he was a democrat because he believed in the fall of man. He went on to suggest that it was not that some men did not deserve to be slaves, but that none deserved to be masters. While not exactly the sort of uplifting proclamation that many partisans of democracy would hope to rally their followers around, it does provide those among us who are persuaded that human beings are limited in their capacities to reject vice and sin with an avenue and persuasive rationale to join their ranks. It is with this sort of view in mind that H. Lee Cheek, Jr.'s provocative and cogently argued book on the political thought of John C. Calhoun ought to be read.

In this work, G. A. Cohen presents his Gifford Lectures. He explains why he no longer believes in the inevitability of equality, why he rejects liberals' faith in the sufficiency of political recipes, and why he now believes “that a change in social ethos, a change in the attitudes people sustain toward each other in the thick of daily life, is necessary for producing equality” (p. 3). Both just rules and just personal choices are required for distributive justice. Good structural design is not enough: You cannot change the world without changing the soul, as it were. He discusses how closely this aligns him with Christian views he once utterly disparaged.

This book begins where The Politics of Community (1993), Elizabeth Frazer's previous book (coauthored with Nicola Lacey) left off. Having laid the groundwork for the analytical problems within both liberal and communitarian thought and proposed a new type of feminist communitarianism in the first book, Frazer turns her penetrating analytical mind in this book to considering in greater depth the nature of both communitarianism and community. Ironically, having spent so much time analyzing the community, Frazer's recommendation at the end of this book is to dispense with the term in many contexts in favor of a series of interlinked concepts such as family, locality, association, and group.

All societies contain some image or vision of their own perfection—of life, both individual and collective, free of the burdens of history and death. In the history of civilizations, these visions have often served as a fulcrum of radical change and social transformation. Just as often, they have served as the ideological underpinnings of more abortive movements of social change. Moreover, in the lives of individuals and groups, they have often led to a renunciation of the world and its concerns in search of a more private wholeness, in a life of contemplation and retreat.

The key argument of Robert Gottlieb's Environmentalism Unbound is that an integrated focus on pollution prevention and environmental justice can lay the groundwork for fundamental environmental and social change (p. xiii). The aim is to develop a common vision and a more “embracing language” for environmentalism that is more broadly appealing than a mainstream focus on nature and species and more broadly applicable to a range of environmental and social issues. Such an expanded environmental discourse—integrating the workplace, the social, and the ecological—would make for an unbounded and more successful environmentalism. This is another wonderful offering by Gottlieb, right up there with his Forcing the Spring (1993). The recognition of diverse discourses of environmentalism and social justice is a challenge to movement strategies, and Gottlieb takes on the issue with a focus on both a broad vision and everyday practice.

Clarissa Rile Hayward's book begins with the provocative claim that focusing on the relationship between the powerful and the powerless is not the best way to study power. Traditional theories of power have concentrated on the question of what it means for A to have power over B. By seeking to discern who possesses it and how their possession diminishes the freedom of others, researchers have tended to put a face on power. In contrast, Hayward “de-faces” power by arguing that it need not entail a relationship between A's and B's but can be understood entirely in terms of how the field of action of both the powerful and the powerless is defined.

With respect to markets, the twentieth century closed with a great deal more ebullience than it opened. Not that 1900 was a watershed in antimarket thinking—that was still to come. No, the contrast between fins de siecle is striking because whatever criticisms markets had to endure during the final century of the millennium seemed to have all but vanished by its close.

These 14 essays range as far and wide as the sprawling title of this collection implies. The papers originated at a 1999 interdisciplinary conference at Berry College on politics, religion, and community. Most of the authors teach at Southern colleges. They come not only from political science and government departments but also from philosophy, English, sociology, religion, and theology departments. Twelve of the 14 are male. On first glance the collection might appear to be “traditional.” Indeed, many of the essays, e.g., Daniel Mahoney's treatment of Solzhenitsyn on “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations,” explicitly raise religious themes and questions.

This very remarkable and most timely book differs from others on Solzhenitsyn by highlighting his “critique of ideology” and his “recovery of the ‘natural world’” (p. 3). Ideology, for Solzhenitsyn, is the name for the lie characteristic of the twentieth century: Human beings, through historical transformation, can end suffering and so make virtue or the distinction between good and evil superfluous. The state and God can wither away because we will no longer be political and spiritual beings. We know that ideology could not change human nature or what Daniel Mahoney calls “the ontological structure of the world,” but it could magnify human evil to genuinely monstrous dimensions. Solzhenitsyn's contention that communist ideology was responsible for the murder of tens of millions has become much less controversial in recent years. The Black Book of Communism, Mahoney shows, provides abundant evidence for what Solzhenitsyn already knew.

The Free and Open Press is an exceptionally satisfying first book. Robert W. T. Martin revitalizes a debate over the status of press rights in eighteenth-century America that had grown tiresome over the past 20 years. Challenging Leonard Levy, his critics, and the ongoing republic/liberalism divide in American political thought, Martin's work offers an interpretation of free speech thought that explains why early Americans sometimes fought for and sometimes fought against press rights. Though Martin claims too much for his thesis at times, all scholars of American political thought and constitutional development should read his book.