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.

In my “Notes” in the March 2002 issue, I announced several modifications that we have introduced into the APSR's review process. Here I will simply refer again to two new procedures that are included in our “Instructions to Contributors”; I highlight these, not because they are the most important of the new procedures, but because they seem to have escaped the notice of many authors. First, when you submit a paper to the APSR, you are also invited to suggest the names of appropriate reviewers. Of course, we do not guarantee that we will follow your suggestions, but so far we have found these suggestions quite helpful. A second, and more mundane, instruction is to submit an electronic (i.e., diskette), anonymous version of your manuscript along with the requisite number of paper copies; having an electronic version on hand can greatly expedite the review process in certain circumstances.

Because I spend so much time reviewing potential APSR articles, it pains me to admit what is undeniably true: that a great deal of the important intellectual work in our discipline comes packaged not as journal articles, but as books. Many disciplines help their members stay abreast of new books in their field by maintaining “official” single-purpose book review journals. In political science, this function has long been performed by the APSR, which despite its name is primarily an outlet for research, not for reviews. That long-standing arrangement is about to change, for book reviews will bid farewell to the APSR after the current issue. Hereafter, the book review section, which has occupied approximately one-third of our pages, will migrate to the APSA's new journal, Perspectives on Politics, where it will reappear in volume 1, number 1, in March 2003. Gone from the APSR but not forgotten will be the invaluable contributions made by book review co-editors Susan Bickford and Gregory McAvoy, the long line of APSR book review editors who preceded them, and, of course, the thousands of scholars who over the years have taken on the thankless (and often cursed at) task of writing book reviews for the APSR. The APSR, sans book reviews, will continue to be published on a quarterly basis, but beginning in 2003, our new cover dates will be February, May, August, and November.

By the standards of the ancient Chinese curse (“May you live in interesting times”), my transition into the position of Editor of the APSR was cursed. Only a few days into these new duties, I looked up one morning from the stack of manuscripts on my desk, glanced out of the window at the beautiful blue sky, and beheld smoke billowing from the Pentagon.

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.

The reassessment of Plato's stance toward democracy has made his understanding of the relationship between philosophy and politics a salient issue. To gain clarity on this issue, I examine the central passage of Plato's Theaetetus, which treats the conflict between the philosopher and the orator–politician. Located in a dialogue devoted to the meaning of knowledge and often dismissed as a digression, the passage has received relatively scant attention regarding this issue. A careful consideration of the passage and its context, however, shows that the question of the meaning of knowledge requires a consideration of the more comprehensive question of good and that this question is properly investigated through an examination of political life. Socrates thus focuses on politics not to guide political life but rather to vindicate the philosophic life. An appreciation of this motive should inform reflection concerning Plato's view of the relationship between philosophy and politics.

The motor of international politics has been war among the leading states. The most developed states in the international system—the United States, Western Europe, and Japan—form what Karl Deutsch called a security community, which is a group of countries among which war is unthinkable. These states are the most powerful ones in the world and, so, are traditional rivals. Thus the change is striking and consequential. Constructivists explain this in terms of changed ideas and identities; liberals point to democracy and economic interest; realists stress the role of nuclear weapons and American hegemony. My own explanation combines the high cost of war, the gains from peace, and the values that are prevalent within the security community. Whatever the cause, the existence of the community will bring with it major changes in international politics and calls into question many traditional theories of war.

Institutional approaches to explaining political phenomena suffer from three common limitations: reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and excessive emphasis on order and structure. Ideational approaches to political explanation, while often more sensitive to change and agency, largely exhibit the same shortcomings. In particular, both perspectives share an emphasis on discerning and explaining patterns of ordered regularity in politics, making it hard to explain important episodes of political change. Relaxing this emphasis on order and viewing politics as situated in multiple and not necessarily equilibrated order suggests a way of synthesizing institutional and ideational approaches and developing more convincing accounts of political change. In this view, change arises out of “friction” among mismatched institutional and ideational patterns. An account of American civil rights policy in the 1960s and 1970s, which is not amenable to either straightforward institutional or ideational explanation, demonstrates the advantages of the approach.

This essay makes a case for an anthropological conceptualization of culture as “semiotic practices” and demonstrates how it adds value to political analyses. “Semiotic practices” refers to the processes of meaning-making in which agents' practices (e.g., their work habits, self-policing strategies, and leisure patterns) interact with their language and other symbolic systems. This version of culture can be employed on two levels. First, it refers to what symbols do—how symbols are inscribed in practices that operate to produce observable political effects. Second, “culture” is an abstract theoretical category, a lens that focuses on meaning, rather than on, say, prices or votes. By thinking of meaning construction in terms that emphasize intelligibility, as opposed to deep-seated psychological orientations, a practice-oriented approach avoids unacknowledged ambiguities that have bedeviled scholarly thinking and generated incommensurable understandings of what culture is. Through a brief exploration of two concerns central to political science—compliance and ethnic identity-formation—this paper ends by showing how culture as semiotic practices can be applied as a causal variable.

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.

Building on the separation-of-powers approach in American politics, this article develops a new micro-level account of judicial decision-making in contexts where judges face institutional insecurity. Against conventional wisdom, I argue that under certain conditions the lack of judicial independence motivates judges to “strategically defect” against the government once it begins losing power. The result is a reverse legal–political cycle in which antigovernment decisions cluster at the end of weak governments. Original data on more than 7,500 individual decisions by Argentine Supreme Court justices (1976–1995) are used to test hypotheses about why, when, and in which types of cases judges are likely to engage in strategic defection. Consistent with the theory's predictions, the results of the analysis show a significant increase in antigovernment decisions occurring at the end of weak dictatorships and weak democratic governments. Examining subsets of decisions and controlling for several additional variables further corroborate the strategic account.

Is there a dictatorial peace that resembles the democratic peace? This paper uses a new data set compiled by Barbara Geddes to examine the conflict behavior of three types of autocratic regimes—personalist, military, and single-party dictatorships—in the post-World War II era. We find some evidence that specific types of authoritarian regimes are peaceful toward one another. No two personalist dictators or two military regimes have gone to war with each other since 1945. These dyads were not less likely to engage in militarized interstate disputes than were mixed dyads, however. Although single-party regimes were the only homogeneous dyad in this study to have experienced war, multivariate analyses of participation in militarized interstate disputes suggest that single-party states are more peaceful toward one another than are mixed dyads. Thus, while we have found no unambiguous evidence of a dictatorial peace to match the robustness of the democratic peace, there is substantial interesting variation in the conflict behavior of specific types of authoritarian regimes. The analysis presented here demonstrates that studies of the impact of regime type on conflict behavior must work from a more sophisticated conception of authoritarianism.

In this paper we investigate whether there are any tactical motives behind the distribution of grants from central to lower-level governments. We use a temporary grant program that is uniquely suitable for testing theories of vote-purchasing behavior of incumbent governments. The temporary grant program differs from traditional intergovernmental grants in several aspects, most importantly in the sovereign decision-making power given to the incumbent central government. We find support for the hypothesis that the incumbent government used the grant program under study to win votes. In particular, we find strong support for the Lindbeck–Weibull/Dixit–Londregan model, in which parties distribute transfers to regions where there are many swing voters. This result is statistically as well as economically significant. We do not, however, find any support for the model that predicts that the incumbent government transfers money to its own supporters.

We theorize that if law matters in Supreme Court decision making, it matters not as a mechanistic force that dictates decisions, but as an institutional construct created by justices who possess political attitudes. Jurisprudential regimes identify relevant case factors and/or set the level of scrutiny or balancing the justices will use. These jurisprudential regimes have the potential to make a significant difference in the decisions of the justices. We identify a candidate jurisprudential regime, content-neutrality, which appears to govern the general area of free expression law. The Court applies the strictest standard of review to regulations of expression that target the content or viewpoint of expression. Relying on a series of statistical tests using logistic regression, we find that the justices take seriously this jurisprudential regime.

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.

A body of theoretical literature has developed that explains why historically disadvantaged groups should be represented by members of those groups. Such representatives are commonly referred to as descriptive representatives. This literature has also endorsed various institutional reforms aimed at increasing the number of descriptive representatives, e.g., party list quotas, racial districting, and proportional representation. However, this literature does not articulate criteria that should guide the selection of descriptive representatives to serve in these institutional positions. Indeed, some thinkers claim that such criteria cannot, or at least should not, be articulated. I argue that some descriptive representatives are preferable to others and that criteria for selecting preferable descriptive representatives can, and should, be articulated. Moreover, I recommend one such criterion: Preferable descriptive representatives possess strong mutual relationships with dispossessed subgroups of historically disadvantaged groups.

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.

In pairwise voting, when a simple majority rule produces a winner, that winner is robust to the minority's preferences. The typical means of protecting the minority from the decisiveness of the majority is by increasing the required majority or by augmenting the simple majority rule with constitutional constraints. In the former case the required majority q becomes larger than one-half, and this implies that the q-majority rule becomes biased in favor of one of the alternatives, usually the status quo. In the latter case the augmented rule becomes biased in favor of the minority. The main issue examined in this paper is whether the amelioration of majority decisiveness can be attained by unbiased voting rules that allow some restricted expression of preference intensities. Our results clarify that the use of scoring rules provides a positive answer to the above question when voters resort to variable degrees of coordinated strategic voting. The results are illustrated in the special cases of the plurality and the Borda rules.

Why are government bureaus not necessarily organized to implement policy effectively? One view holds that a main culprit is political uncertainty. Elected officials know that they will not hold office forever, so they use “insulating” structures that constrain bureaucratic discretion, making bureaus less subject to sabotage but also less effective. I revise this theory by modeling how public officials choose administrative structures. I show that in systems with few veto points, groups will be most likely to act cooperatively on policy when political uncertainty is greatest. In contrast, in systems with many veto points, only electorally weak groups will insulate policies from future interference, therefore shifting focus from uncertainty to electoral strength. Because the conditions that lead to policy insulation are rare, electoral competition should not be thought of as a primary cause of bureaucratic inefficiency.

This paper reframes our inquiry into voter turnout by making aging the lens through which the traditional resource and cost measures of previous turnout research are viewed, thereby making three related contributions. (1) I offer a developmental theory of turnout. This framework follows from the observation that most citizens are habitual voters or habitual nonvoters (they display inertia). Most young citizens start their political lives as habitual nonvoters but they vary in how long it takes to develop into habitual voters. With this transition at the core of the framework, previous findings concerning costs and resources can easily be integrated into developmental theory. (2) I make a methodological contribution by applying latent growth curve models to panel data. (3) Finally, the empirical analyses provide the developmental theory with strong support and also provide a better understanding of the roles of aging, parenthood, partisanship, and geographic mobility.