Each year at this time it is my pleasure to acknowledge the contributions that hundreds of reviewers have made to the APSR and, through it, to the profession. The individuals whose names are listed in “APSR External Reviewers 2003–2004” later in this issue served as reviewers—some of several papers—between mid-August, 2003 and mid-August, 2004. They have my sincere gratitude for their service, sine qua non.

Readers of a certain age who are still able to summon up memories of those thrilling days of yesteryear may recall that the previews for Hollywood movies used to feature such come-ons as “Years in the making!,” “With a cast of thousands!,” and “In living color!” The articles in this issue of the APSR may or may not have been years in the making, though I am pleased to attest that the review and production phases of their creation fell well short of epic proportions. Nor, although some of these articles are co-authored, did their dramatis personae ever exceed a sub-DeMillean three. As Louis B. Mayer might have said, though, color we've got. As usual, our cover shimmers. But this time the color comes in multiple hues rather than the normal monochrome, and the color can be found not just on the cover but in our lead article as well, where the cover graphic reappears along with several multi-color accompaniments. Where, the traditionalists among us may wonder, will it all end? Brightly colored covers were bad enough—but when the next issue of the APSR arrives, should three-dimensional scattergrams be expected to pop up out of its pages? Will question-wording appendixes be intoned in the basso profundo of James Earl Jones? Will the textual analyses self-deconstruct? The mind boggles; the slope is slippery; a little color is a dangerous thing.

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.

For more than a century and a half, Democracy in America has been an indispensable starting point for understanding American politics. After the second volume of Democracy was published in 1840, Tocqueville continued to monitor political developments in this country and committed many of his thoughts to paper, in letters to friends in America. Unfortunately, his epistolary ruminations have never been translated into English, and their very existence seems to have largely been ignored until now. In “The Third Democracy: Tocqueville's Views of America after 1840,” Aurelian Craiutu and Jeremy Jennings use the post-1840 letters to tell the rest of the story—or, as they put it, to “reconstruct what Volume Three of Democracy might have looked like if it had ever been written.” (The portrayal of party canvassing on the cover of this issue commemorates that period in American politics.) Craiutu and Jennings's creative reconstruction reveals a significant change in Tocqueville's perspective, and more specifically a growing disenchantment with America occasioned by his sense that such problems as corruption, slavery, imperialism, and the encroachment of the economic sphere upon the political would jeopardize freedom and stability in America. Thus, rather than the relatively sunny picture that emerged from the first two volumes of Democracy, Craiutu and Jennings argue that the excesses of democracy in America would have been the central focus of the final volume of Tocqueville's seminal work.

Institutional frameworks powerfully determine the goals, violence, and trajectories of identitarian movements—including secessionist movements. However, both small-N and large-N researchers disagree on the question of whether “power-sharing” arrangements, instead of repression, are more or less likely to mitigate threats of secessionist mobilizations by disaffected, regionally concentrated minority groups. The PS-I modeling platform was used to create a virtual country “Beita,” containing within it a disaffected, partially controlled, regionally concentrated minority. Drawing on constructivist identity theory to determine behaviors by individual agents in Beita, the most popular theoretical positions on this issue were tested. Data were drawn from batches of hundreds of Beita histories produced under rigorous experimental conditions. The results lend support to sophisticated interpretations of the effects of repression vs. responsive or representative types of power-sharing. Although in the short run repression works to suppress ethnopolitical mobilization, it does not effectively reduce the threat of secession. Power-sharing can be more effective, but it also tends to encourage larger minority identitarian movements.

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.

Tocqueville's Democracy in America offered the image of an accomplished and successful democratic regime. Although Tocqueville never wrote a third volume, he continued to be interested in American political events and exchanged a number of important letters with his American friends after 1840. Did Tocqueville change his views on America outlined in the two volumes published in 1835 and 1840? If so, did the evolution of his views of America affect his theory of democracy? The paper answers these questions by examining Tocqueville's unduly neglected correspondence with his American friends. It seeks to reconstruct what Volume Three of Democracy in America might have looked like if it had ever been written. In these letters, Tocqueville addressed important topics such as the instability of the market and the immaturity of American democracy, issues that did not loom large in the two published volumes. The paper shows that in the last years of his life Tocqueville became very disenchanted with American political life and reassessed some of his previous views of American democracy.

I, who am half Yankee.

Tocqueville (1986, 185)

This paper explores the conditions under which cultural cleavages become politically salient. It does so by taking advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the division of the Chewa and Tumbuka peoples by the border between Zambia and Malawi. I document that, while the objective cultural differences between Chewas and Tumbukas on both sides of the border are identical, the political salience of the division between these communities is altogether different. I argue that this difference stems from the different sizes of the Chewa and Tumbuka communities in each country relative to each country's national political arena. In Malawi, Chewas and Tumbukas are each large groups vis-à-vis the country as a whole and, thus, serve as viable bases for political coalition-building. In Zambia, Chewas and Tumbukas are small relative to the country as a whole and, thus, not useful to mobilize as bases of political support. The analysis suggests that the political salience of a cultural cleavage depends not on the nature of the cleavage itself (since it is identical in both countries) but on the sizes of the groups it defines and whether or not they will be useful vehicles for political competition.

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 article examines the causes of the dispute between James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in the early 1790s. Though Hamilton initially believed that Madison's opposition to the Federalist administration was probably motivated by personal animosity and political advantage, in later years he concluded what Madison had long argued: the controversy between Republicans and Federalists stemmed from a difference of principle. For Madison, republicanism meant the recognition of the sovereignty of public opinion and the commitment to participatory politics. Hamilton advocated a more submissive role for the citizenry and a more independent status for the political elite. While Madison did not deny to political leaders and enlightened men a critical place in the formation of public opinion, he fought against Hamilton's thin version of public opinion as “confidence” in government. In 1791–92 Madison took the Republican lead in providing a philosophic defense for a tangible, active, and responsible role for the citizens of republican government.

Prior research on the contextual determinants of black racial attitudes has focused on the effects of residential segregation while overlooking differences in the socioeconomic character of neighborhoods. I posit that socioeconomic environments, in particular, the quality and socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods, may affect whether blacks view race as a defining interest in their lives. I test these propositions with a multilevel dataset that merges the 1992–1994 Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality with block-group–level demographic statistics from the 1990 Census. The results indicate that neighborhood quality and neighborhood socioeconomic composition work at cross-purposes in affecting black racial attitudes. The salience of race recedes with improvements in neighborhood quality yet advances with greater exposure to the race-oriented predispositions of high-status blacks. In closing, I discuss the implications of shifting residential patterns for the future of political consensus and group-based mobilization among African Americans.

Recent work across a wide range of issues in political economy as well as in American, comparative, and international politics tries to explain the inefficient use of power—revolutions, civil wars, high levels of public debt, international conflict, and costly policy insulation—in terms of commitment problems. This paper shows that a common mechanism is at work in a number of these diverse studies. This common mechanism provides a more general formulation of a type of commitment problem that can arise in many different substantive settings. The present analysis then formalizes this mechanism as an “inefficiency condition” that ensures that all of the equilibria of a stochastic game are inefficient. This condition has a natural substantive interpretation: Large, rapid changes in the actors' relative power (measured in terms of their minmax payoffs) may cause inefficiency.

Over the last decade, students of the welfare state have produced an impressive body of research on retrenchment, the dominant thrust of which is that remarkably few welfare states have experienced fundamental shifts. This article questions this now-conventional wisdom by reconsidering the post-1970s trajectory of the American welfare state, long considered the quintessential case of social policy stability. I demonstrate that although most programs have indeed resisted retrenchment, U.S. social policy has also offered increasingly incomplete risk protection in an era of dramatic social change. Although some of this disjuncture is inadvertent—an unintended consequence of the very political stickiness that has stymied retrenchment—I argue that the declining scope of risk protection also reflects deliberate and theoretically explicable strategies of reform adopted by welfare state opponents in the face of popular and change-resistant policies, a finding that has significant implications for the study of institutional change more broadly.

John Mearsheimer suggests that, whenever possible, great powers are constrained to seek regional hegemony, the safest feasible situation for a state. This objective is hard to achieve because other great powers want to block the attempt, but it is doable because buck-passing and other hurdles make balancing inefficient. Contra Mearsheimer, I argue that it is the absence of balancers, not balancing inefficiencies, that best explains when states can hope to dominate their neighborhoods. Regional hegemony is only achievable when it is easy. I use property space techniques to develop an extended version of offensive realism that clarifies why states will sometimes prefer not to block a hegemonic bid. In particular, I argue that local considerations will often prevent a continental great power from responding to a rising state in another region. I test my argument by process tracing the U.S. purchase of Louisiana and show that France's decision to sell is best explained by its pursuit of its own territorial ambitions. My extended version of offensive realism suggests that its single success story of the last 200 years, U.S. dominance of North America, provides no encouragement to contemporary states contemplating a bid for regional hegemony.

To what extent do the institutions of presidentialism allow voters to hold governments accountable? Powell and Whitten (1993) suggested that voter capacity to sanction is strong when “clarity of government responsibility” for outcomes is clear, and vice versa. I argue that clarity of responsibility functions differently under presidentialism and that presidentialism generates particular forms of accountability. In general, electoral sanctioning is weak in nonconcurrent elections, which do not occur under parliamentarism, but is stronger in concurrent elections. In concurrent executive elections the clarity of responsibility does not attenuate the economy's impact on the vote. Yet in concurrent legislative elections both partisan and institutional variables diffuse responsibility for economic performance. Thus under many common institutional and partisan formats, voters sanction presidents to a greater degree than legislators for the same phenomenon. These findings elucidate the conditions under which we might observe accountability similar to what we find in some parliamentary systems or a more uniquely presidentialist “dual democratic legitimacies” of the kind Linz (1994) imagined.

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.

This paper proposes and tests a new formal model of the competition for capital, using the analogy of a “tournament” as a substitute for the ”race-to-the-bottom” model. Our key insight is that political costs that accompany legislating have both direct and indirect effects on the likelihood and scale of reforms. While countries with higher political costs are less likely themselves to enact reforms, the presence of these costs also reduces competing countries' incentives to reform regardless of their own political costs. Domestic politics therefore mitigates the pressures for downward convergence of tax policy despite increased capital mobility. We examine the capital tax policies in OECD countries during the period from 1980 to 1997 and find that states are sensitive to tax reforms in competitor countries, although their responses to reforms are mediated by their own domestic costs to reform. We define two potential sources of political costs of reform: transaction costs, due to the presence of multiple veto players in the legislative process, and constituency costs, due to ideological opposition to policy changes that benefit capital. Our evidence reveals that a reduction in these costs either domestically or abroad increases the likelihood that a country enacts tax reforms.

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.

To explore systematic differences in economic reasoning and what might account for them, we investigate how sociocultural conditions affect transitions to market economies in the West African country of Benin. We probe the importance of several factors: basic economic norms, utility maximization behavior, individual-level personal capital, and individual-level social capital. The evidence, based on experiments embedded in an opinion survey, indicates that Beninese citizens widely share commitments to the basic foundations of economic interaction, e.g., property rights. The nature of social capital varies across cultural and political contexts and accounts for cross-contextual variation in the costs associated with cooperative behavior and in utility maximization behavior.

Why has IMF lending achieved such poor results in Africa? Is it because the Fund imposes the wrong conditions, or because it fails to enforce them? Analysis of monthly data on 53 African countries from 1990 to 2000 shows that the IMF's loans-for-reform contract lacks credibility because donor countries intervene to prevent rigorous enforcement. Countries that have influence with developed-country patrons—as measured by U.S. foreign aid, membership in postcolonial international institutions, and voting profiles in the UN—are subject to less rigorous enforcement (shorter program suspensions). They have more frequent program suspensions, because they violate their conditions more often. The IMF will have to become more independent in order to become an effective champion of reform.