This article presents an interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's political theory based on a prominent feature of his thought: the claim that Islamic law and human nature (fitra) are in perfect harmony, and that the demands of Islamic law are easy and painless for ordinary human moral capacities. I argue that Qutb is not only defending Islamic law as true and obligatory, but also as a coherent “realistic utopia”—a normative theory that also contains a psychological account of that theory's feasibility. Qutb's well-known fascination with the earliest generation of Muslims (the salaf) is an integral part of this account that serves two functions: (1) as a model of the feasibility and realism of an ideal Islamic political order, and (2) as a genealogy of the political origins of moral vice in society. Qutb's project is thus an account of exactly why and how Islam requires politics, and how modern humans can be both free and governed.

How should inquiry into ethical-political life come to terms with “depth experience?” By this, I mean extraordinary experience that breaks into the familiar frames of meaning and reasoning that undergird everyday life, bringing some sort of transformation or significant solidification of basic commitments or identity. Stated in this abstract fashion, my question is likely to seem rather bewildering or uninteresting for the study of politics. But its potential significance becomes apparent if one mentions George W. Bush and being “born again.” This article speculates more broadly about such experience, expanding the focus beyond theists and “limit” experiences. When one does this, depth experience need not be thought of as anathema to political theory. Rather, I show that it can be cultivated in such a way as to animate an admirable “bearing” on the part of citizens of affluent, late-modern societies and cohere with certain fundamentals of deliberative democracy.

Protocorporatist West European countries in which economic interests were collectively organized adopted PR in the first quarter of the twentieth century, whereas liberal countries in which economic interests were not collectively organized did not. Political parties, as Marcus Kreuzer points out, choose electoral systems. So how do economic interests translate into party political incentives to adopt electoral reform? We argue that parties in protocorporatist countries were “representative” of and closely linked to economic interests. As electoral competition in single member districts increased sharply up to World War I, great difficulties resulted for the representative parties whose leaders were seen as interest committed. They could not credibly compete for votes outside their interest without leadership changes or reductions in interest influence. Proportional representation offered an obvious solution, allowing parties to target their own voters and their organized interest to continue effective influence in the legislature. In each respect, the opposite was true of liberal countries. Data on party preferences strongly confirm this model. (Kreuzer's historical criticisms are largely incorrect, as shown in detail in the online supplementary Appendix.)

What explains cross-national patterns of international portfolio and foreign direct investment (FDI)? While existing explanations focus on the credibility of a policy maker's commitment, we emphasize the role of diaspora networks. We hypothesize that diaspora networks—connections between migrants residing in investing countries and their home country—influence global investment by reducing transaction and information costs. This hypothesis is tested using dyadic cross-sectional data for both portfolio and FDI. The findings indicate that even after controlling for a multitude of factors, disapora networks have both a substantively significant effect and a statistically significant effect on cross-border investment.

A major puzzle in the open economy literature is why some countries have persistently higher real exchange rates than others. Even more puzzling is the fact that countries with high real exchange rates are strong export performers. We solve both puzzles with a model that integrates two central debates in the comparative political economy of advanced economies: one linking wage bargaining, incomes policy, and competitiveness, and the other linking partisanship, political institutions, and redistribution. We bring the two together by emphasizing the role of skill formation. We argue that union centralization is necessary for wage restraint and training on a large scale, but this in turn requires a political coalition that subsidizes such training. When both are present, wage restraint generates external competitiveness, whereas wage compression pushes up sheltered prices and hence the real exchange rate, and vice versa. We test the argument on data on export performance and real exchange rates.

Contact with the criminal justice system is greater today than at any time in our history. In this article, we argue that interactions with criminal justice are an important source of political socialization, in which the lessons that are imprinted are antagonistic to democratic participation and inspire negative orientations toward government. To test this argument, we conduct the first systematic empirical exploration of how criminal justice involvement shapes the citizenship and political voice of a growing swath of Americans. We find that custodial involvement carries with it a substantial civic penalty that is not explained by criminal propensity or socioeconomic differences alone. Given that the carceral state has become a routine site of interaction between government and citizens, institutions of criminal justice have emerged as an important force in defining citizen participation and understandings, with potentially dire consequences for democratic ideals.

Following Kreuzer's (2010) methodological pleas, I first reflect, at the conceptual level, on the ways in which historical research and political science should be related to each other. I then apply some of those considerations to examine two key “moments” in the theory (and history) of institutional choice that I first presented in Boix (1999): the underlying conditions that shaped the interests of different parties toward proportional representation, and the process through which those interests were translated into actual legislative decisions.

The American Political Science Review peer review process relies on the professionalism and generosity of those who contribute their time to read and evaluate the work of others. The Co-editors thank the following scholars for serving as manuscript reviewers between September 1, 2009, and August 31, 2010.

In their article in the February 2010 issue of APSR, Jens Hainmueller and Michael J. Hiscox (2010) asserted that they had “conducted a unique survey experiment that, for the first time, explicitly and separately examine[d] individuals’ attitudes toward highly skilled and low-skilled immigrants.” That claim was in error. A prior survey experiment, also published in the American Political Science Review, in February 2004, examined attitudes toward highly skilled and low-skilled immigrants in the Netherlands and assigned respondents randomly to alternative questions (Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior 2004).