No clear theme runs through all of the articles in this issue, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to introduce another theme that encompasses these articles as well as, we hope, everything published in Perspectives on Politics. That is the issue of good writing. Perspectives aims to present articles that are accessible to all social scientists and political actors, regardless of their training or background. More ambitiously, Perspectives aspires to stylistic excellence—all articles should be written clearly, concisely, and with logical development and elegant, even passionate, phrasing. The managing editor is a professional editor (not a professional manager), and the editor and associate editors spend probably more time than we should in working with each manuscript to ensure that it is not only excellent substantively, but also well written. Our immodest goal is to set an example for all other academic journals so that there are no excuses for dull, turgid, or unclear publications. Good writing is not easy. As Roger Angell (one of the best current writers) wrote of the efforts of E. B. White (one of the best writers of the past), “writing almost killed you, and the hard part was making it look easy” (New Yorker, February 14 and February 21, 2005).

To be considered for publication in the Counterpoint section of the journal, letters must be relatively short (fewer than 1,000 words). Submit letters directly to [email protected]. The editors will choose which letters to publish. All letters may be lightly edited for style and length.

Although James Madison is best known for the views he expressed in the Federalist, as he gained greater experience in the new American political system he rejected some of these early views and increasingly emphasized four propositions: (1) the greatest threat in the American republic comes from a minority, not the majority; (2) to protect their rights from minority factions, members of the majority faction must organize their own political party; (3) the danger that majorities might threaten property rights could be overcome by enabling a majority of citizens to own property, a feasible solution in America; and (4) in a republic, majorities must be allowed to prevail. Even Madison's post-1787 constitutional views, however, were flawed in at least three serious ways: (1) as an empirical proposition, his conjecture that increased size reduces the danger of factionalism is contradicted by subsequent experience; (2) in his conception of basic rights, Madison excluded more than half the adult population: women, African Americans, and American Indians; and (3) he actively supported the provision in the Constitution that gave to slave states an increase in representatives amounting to three-fifths of the slave population.Robert A. Dahl is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University ([email protected]). A past president of the American Political Science Association, his numerous publications include A Preface to Democratic Theory; Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City; Democracy and Its Critics; and How Democratic is the American Constitution? The author expresses his appreciation to the Political Science Departments of the University of Indiana and Stanford University for providing opportunities to offer a lecture on the subject of this essay and to profit from the discussions that followed. Thanks also to Professors Jack Rakove, Richard Mathews, and Lyman T. Sargent for their helpful criticisms and suggestions on a draft of this paper.

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine household market inequality, redistribution, and the relationship between market inequality and redistribution in affluent OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. We observe sizeable increases in market household inequality in most countries. This development appears to have been driven largely, though not exclusively, by changes in employment: in countries with better employment performance, low-earning households benefited relative to high-earning ones; in nations with poor employment performance, low-earning households fared worse. In contrast to widespread rhetoric about the decline of the welfare state, redistribution increased in most countries during this period, as existing social-welfare programs compensated for the rise in market inequality. They did so in proportion to the degree of increase in inequality, producing a very strong positive association between changes in market inequality and changes in redistribution. We discuss the relevance of median-voter theory and power resources theory for understanding differences across countries and changes over time in the extent of compensatory redistribution.Lane Kenworthy is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Arizona ([email protected]). Jonas Pontusson is a professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University ([email protected]). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Conference of Europeanists (March 2002), a workshop on the Comparative Political Economy of Inequality at Cornell University (April 2002), the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (June 2002), and a seminar at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University (December 2003). For criticisms and suggestions the authors thank Richard Freeman, Janet Gornick, Alex Hicks, Torben Iversen, Larry Kahn, Tomas Larsson, Jim Mosher, Nirmala Ravishankar, David Rueda, Tim Smeeding, John Stephens, Michael Wallerstein, Christopher Way, Erik Wright, and the Perspectives on Politics reviewers.

Wars have been underexamined as causal factors in American political history. The nation's freestanding hot wars seem to have generated at least four kinds of major effects: policy changes of lasting consequence, new issue regimes, durable changes in electoral alignments, and durable changes in party ideologies. Considered here are the War of 1812, the War with Mexico, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.David R. Mayhew is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University ([email protected]). His publications include Party Loyalty among Congressmen; Congress: The Electoral Connection; “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals”; Placing Parties in American Politics; Divided We Govern; America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through Newt Gingrich; and Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre. The author thanks Alan Gerber, Matthew Green, Jacob Hacker, Sonam Henderson, Rogan Kersh, Philip Klinkner, Heinz Kohler, Joseph LaPalombara, Bruce Russett, Abbey Steele, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

I offer a critical view of the social capital thesis, which frequently argues that more is better (and less is worse), by examining the ethics of social capital, using Pierre Bourdieu's understanding of networks as defined by their limits. I argue that social capital only assumes conceptual coherence when distinguished from its complementary opposite. I illustrate these theoretical points with a discussion of political reform in Thailand and the 2001 general election. The election exemplifies the benefits of the circulation of social capital: voter turnout and party membership were up, and civil society was active. Yet democratic achievements in Thailand were intimately tied to political corruption. In Thailand, democracy and vote buying are intimately related as examples of the productive dynamic of social capital and corruption; the civil and the uncivil often produce each other. This essay thus expands social capital theory's focus on the relations of people by examining the relationality of concepts. One has to examine the quality of social capital and the ethics of each network's inside/outside distinction. Thus rather than being a political solution, social capital is a theoretical problem, warranting further comparative research that examines how civil social capital interacts with the uncivil social capital of corruption, ethnocentrism, and sectarianism.William A. Callahan is a professor of international politics at the University of Manchester, England. He worked in Thailand for five years as a journalist and a lecturer at Rangsit University (Bangkok). His most recent book is Contingent States: Greater China and Transnational Relations. For sharing information and commenting on this essay, the author thanks Gothom Arya, Michael Kelly Connors, Kevin Hewison, Laddawan Tantiwittayaphitak, Naruemon Thabchumpon, Duncan McCargo, Sukanya Bumroongsook, Sumalee Bumroongsook, Somchai Phatharathananunth, Frederic Schaffer, Teera Vorrakitpokatorn, Thavesilp Subwattana, Viengrat Netipho, and Stephen E. Welch. Special thanks to Jennifer L. Hochschild, the Perspectives reviewers, Frederic Schaffer, and Andreas Schedler for encouraging me to think about corruption and social capital in a new way.

What are the general costs associated with a U.S. shift toward unilateralism? According to the overwhelming majority of international relations (IR) scholars, the costs are very high. We evaluate the key arguments that underlie this assessment, namely that increased U.S. unilateralism will: (1) spur the formation of a coalition to check U.S. power; (2) reduce efficiency gains through lost opportunities for institutionalized cooperation; and (3) undermine the legitimacy of the American-led international order. We conclude that the theoretical arguments that IR scholars advance do not show that a shift toward unilateralism necessarily has high costs. Our analysis reveals the need to, first, distinguish clearly between criticisms of unilateral policies based on procedure and those based on substance and, second, to recognize the weakness of current procedural arguments.Stephen G. Brooks is assistant professor ([email protected]), and William C. Wohlforth is professor ([email protected]) in the Department of Government at Dartmouth. They are currently writing a book entitled The Challenge of American Primacy. The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers forPerspectives on Politics and, especially, Erik Voeten for detailed critical comments. They are also grateful to Mlada Bukovansky, Ian Hurd, Martha Finnemore, Ben Valentino, Nina Tannenwald, Alex Wendt, and participants at seminars at the Dickey Center at Dartmouth College, the Olin Institute at Harvard University, the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Thanks also to Dartmouth's Rockefeller and Dickey Centers for supporting research on which this article draws.

We suggest that the 2003 war in Iraq received high levels of public support because the Bush administration successfully framed the conflict as an extension of the war on terror, which was a response to the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our analysis of Bush's speeches reveals that the administration consistently connected Iraq with 9/11. New York Times coverage of the president's speeches featured almost no debate over the framing of the Iraq conflict as part of the war on terror. This assertion had tremendous influence on public attitudes, as indicated by polling data from several sources.Amy Gershkoff ([email protected]) and Shana Kushner ([email protected]) are graduate students in the Department of Politics, Princeton University. The authors thank Larry Bartels, Gary Jacobson, Douglas Foyle, seminar participants at Princeton University, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Authors' names listed in alphabetical order.

In the winter of 2005 I invited an array of scholars to respond to a variant of the same question: What do you predict about some important political phenomenon or process over the next decade, and why? What leverage do political scientists' theories, evidence, or concepts give us in understanding a given situation, such that you have grounds for prediction beyond those of an informed journalist or political actor? I urged authors to “really go out on a limb and make a clear prediction that can be analyzed, argued with, and supported (or falsified!) after a decade.” I then wrote a specific query to each of the people invited, beginning “Ten years from now …”

Ten years from now, what will be the dominant terms of public discourse in politics? At a dinner party in March (2005), I offered a spur-of-the-moment prediction: that the U.S. would have troops in Iraq, all told, for twenty years, by which point we (I spoke as a citizen) would have forgotten why we were there in the first place. Until then, we would stay in Iraq, I continued, in order to keep a Shiite Iraq from growing too close to a Shiite Iran. Another guest countered that the language and cultural barriers between Iraq and Iran would trump shared religious doctrine and practice. On one level, my comment was a watered-down Platonicism—an eyebrow raised at democratic fickleness: democrats, to paraphrase Plato, are people who don't stay the course. On another level, however, our exchange made note of the fact that much of world politics these days is about the interaction not between states but between ethnoi and states.Danielle Allen ([email protected]) is dean of the humanities and professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

If history is any judge, Republicans should lose control of Congress or the White House during one of the five elections to come between now and 2015. Since Democrats and Republicans became national competitors in 1855, unified party control has lasted on average just 5.9 years. Unified Republican control has endured a bit longer, averaging 6.3 years. Even at its longest (with the onset of the 1896 realignment), Republican control of government has lasted just fourteen years. With the current Republican regime emerging from the elections of 2000, Republican control of Congress and the White House should have run its course by the elections of 2014.Sarah A. Binder is professor of political science at George Washington University ([email protected]) and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

Time for a true confession: I'm skeptical of predictions in social and political life. Talk of causal generalizations and Hempel's covering laws strikes me as science fiction and fantasy in drag; talk of the unfolding of the immanent logic of modernity makes me dyspeptic. I usually think that structural considerations are context, not cause, and that weird combinations of stray contingencies explain what happens. Worse, now I'm called on to predict how political theorists will be discussing democracy ten years hence. Images of herding cats and Brownian motion come to mind. Nonetheless, duty calls. I dust off my crystal ball and discover it has three channels.Don Herzog teaches law and political theory at the University of Michigan ([email protected]).

While it is hard to predict where the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will be in ten years, one thing is certain: a peaceful reconciliation between Israel and Palestine, based on a two-state solution that guarantees Palestinians and Israelis territorial integrity and security, would have a positive impact on economic and democratic developments in the Arab world. These developments, however, will not occur easily; such transitions are often chaotic, shocking, and painful.Amaney Jamal is assistant professor of politics at Princeton University ([email protected]).

In the next ten years, who will win and who will lose from globalization? In thinking about this question, I avoid speculating on the broad impact of globalization on economic outcomes. Instead, I limit my treatment to the impact of multinational corporations (MNCs) on developed and developing countries, especially how competition to attract firms affects domestic politics and national economies.Nathan Jensen ([email protected]) is assistant professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. The author thanks Sophie Fortin, Geoff Garrett, Quan Li, René Lindstädt, Bill Lowry, Guillermo Rosas, Andy Sobel, and Jana von Stein for their comments and suggestions.

Will China's expected emergence as the predominant state in East Asia result in hierarchy or balancing? At least three major bodies of literature predict that a rising China will be destabilizing. Realpolitik pessimists see China's rise as inherently so. John Mearsheimer writes that if China threatened to dominate the entire region, “It would be a far more dangerous place than it is now … Engagement policies and the like would not dull China's appetite for power.” Power transition theorists also see rapidly rising power as a likely cause of conflict. Robert Powell writes that, “A rapidly shifting distribution of power combined with the states' inability to commit to an agreement can lead to war.” Finally, those who focus on signaling emphasize that an authoritarian state has more difficulty in making credible statements about its intentions than a democratic state.David C. Kang is associate professor of government at Dartmouth College ([email protected]).

In the coming decade religion will become an increasingly salient issue in European politics. This prediction runs counter to the conventional wisdom that Europeans are “post-Christian.” When comparing Europe to the United States, observers note that church pews are empty, that fewer people profess to believe in God, and that Europeans are moral relativists who shy away from principled positions against authoritarian countries. In the European view, modernization implies secularization, and by this standard Europeans are modern while Americans are, depending on who the observer is, either postmodern or irrational. Why then are we flooded with evidence of the “re-Christianization” of Europe?Jytte Klausen is associate professor of comparative politics at Brandeis University ([email protected]).

Much has been made of the dramatic influx of immigrants to the United States since the mid-1960s. This “Fourth Wave” of migration is remarkable not just for its sheer numbers, but also for its ethnic diversity, with newcomers disproportionately arriving from Asia and Latin America. Much too has been made of the changes in how the state classifies and counts by race and ethnicity. Most recently, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued Directive No. 15 in 1977, requiring all federal agencies to collect data for at least five groups—American Indians and Alaska Natives, Asians and Pacific Islanders, non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic whites, and Hispanics—then revised this directive in 1997 to include “mark one or more” responses that would allow for self-identification with multiple races/ethnicities. The face of America is changing before us.Taeku Lee is assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley ([email protected]).

The year is 2015, and across Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean there are social movements demanding racial justice as political parties jockey to incorporate candidates of African and indigenous descent. Textbooks are being rewritten to highlight the contributions and unique experiences of indigenous and black Latin Americans and affirmative action programs are being debated and implemented. W. E. B. DuBois's famous line, “The problem of the twentieth century will be the problem of the color line,” applies to Latin America in the twenty-first century. What led us to this moment? And what tools does political science have to explain it?Mark Q. Sawyer ([email protected]) is associate professor of political science and African American studies at UCLA.

Although International Organizations (IOs) have the ability to promote economic and political development throughout the world, political imperatives ensure that they will fail to meet their potential. This essay is a response to the editor's kind request to speculate as to the role of IOs over the next decade. Although my arguments apply broadly, here I consider development, and so I focus on organizations such as the World Bank and IMF. Over the coming decades these organizations will fail in their attempts to alleviate poverty. On a more positive note, political science is rapidly advancing our understanding of the pathologies of IOs. Unfortunately, the failure of IOs to alleviate poverty is, I believe, a politically stable circumstance: intellectual advances will not translate into better-performing IOs. I focus on a specific set of theoretical arguments as to why IOs fail to promote development, concluding that we should anticipate more of the same rather than the radical reforms that are necessary if IOs are to achieve their stated goals.Alastair Smith is professor of politics at New York University ([email protected]).

With the economic rise of India and China, a new question has entered the international public sphere: How will the polities of India and China be shaped by their continuing economic march over the next decade or so? More specifically, will politics get in the way of their steady economic rise, or will political liberalization continue as the market forces are embraced ever more vigorously? Will economic liberalization, in short, promote further political liberalization? This question is more relevant to China than to India, where economic liberalization has been pursued within the framework of a long-established democracy.Ashutosh Varshney ([email protected]) is professor of political science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The author thanks Mary Gallagher and Anna Grzymala-Busse for their comments on a draft of this essay.