Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics. By Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 345p. $35.00.

One inevitable result of the recent U.S. military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq has been renewed scholarly interest in the determinants of wartime public opinion. In a recent influential article, Christopher Gelpi, Peter Feaver, and Jason Reifler (“Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq,” International Security 30 [Winter 2005/6]: 7–46) argue that casualty tolerance is primarily shaped by prospective beliefs about likely success and retrospective judgments regarding the “rightness” of the decision to initiate the conflict. This rationalist account of wartime public opinion suggests that the mass public will accept the costs of war if they are exceeded by attainable and important benefits.

Relevant No More? The Catholic/Protestant Divide in American Electoral Politics.

We live in a world laced with forms of political violence. Kristen Renwick Monroe's latest work develops an interesting social psychological account of the conduct of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders of the most extreme form of violence—genocide. It also employs an interesting narrative approach that contributes to broad methodological discussions in political science about the ways in which subjective experience can best be understood. We have thus invited a diverse group of political scientists and historians to comment on the book's analysis of political violence and on its broader approach to the study of politics.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

The economist Amartya Sen has said that world development ought to focus on the capabilities that people achieve, and not simply on aggregate economic indicators. In that spirit, the United Nations since 1990 has published several Human Development (HD) reports that assess nations in terms of health and education conditions, as well as income or wealth. Many countries have assessed their own HD. In The Measure of America, Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, and Eduardo Borges Martins apply this approach to the United States. They describe variation in health, education, and income conditions across American states, congressional districts, and social groups.

Reinoud Leenders has written a thoughtful assessment of my book, and I am thankful for the insights he provided. In my response I focus on the main issues raised in the review.

What has the discipline that calls itself “political science” to do with literary studies, anthropology, the philosophy of language, structural linguistics, or hermeneutics? With postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cultural studies, and other such pursuits? Anne Norton's 95 Theses raises these questions at the nexus of “Politics, Culture, and Method.” Asked to consider this work both generally and with an eye to its potential impact on the discipline of political science, the subfield of political theory and disciplinary or subfield divisions, I find myself caught between the terms of the invitation and the implosion of those terms for which the Theses offer no small spark. Curiously though, its most incendiary aspects appear not in Norton's own measured prose, but rather on its dust jacket. The back cover, for example, dubs it “an attack on the social science establishment,” while an inner flap applauds Norton as a “political scientist” who has launched “a polemic against the orthodoxy of her own field.” There, too, strident phrasing names the polemical target: “the antiquated and stultifying models in the textbooks on method, in courses on methodology, championed by the self-appointed gatekeepers of a narrow and parochial political science.” Norton, we're told, “opens the gates to more new practices, new principles, new questions, more methods, and more demanding ethical and scientific criteria.”Kirstie M. McClure is Associate Professor of Political Science and English at University of California, Los Angeles ([email protected]).

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.

Voter Turnout and the Dynamics of Electoral Competition in Established Democracies Since 1945. By Mark N. Franklin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 294p. $70.00 cloth, $24.99 paper.

According to Mark Franklin, “As the vexing questions of political science can be regarded as puzzles, the particular topic of voter turnout could be called the ‘grand enchilada’ of puzzles of political science…. [A]lmost everything about voter turnout is puzzling, from the question of why anyone bothers to vote at all to the question of why certain variables appear to explain voter turnout in some circumstances but not in others.” He makes this bold but true statement in the preface (p. xi) of his comparative study of turnout in more than 20 established democracies since World War II. Voter turnout is one of the more frequently studied topics in political science, but the results of all these scholarly efforts remain rather poor and unsatisfactory. We still know distressingly little about why some people vote and others do not, why turnout is much higher in some countries than in others, and why in so many countries there seems to be a steady and irrevocable decline in turnout in national elections.

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. By James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 464p. $35.00.

The book under discussion is James C. Scott's latest contribution to the study of agrarian politics, culture, and society, and to the ways that marginalized communities evade or resist projects of state authority. The book offers a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia, a 2.5 million–kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. It offers a kind of “area study.” It also builds on Scott's earlier work on “hidden transcripts” of subaltern groups and on “seeing like a state.” The book raises many important theoretical questions about research methods and social inquiry, the relationship between political science and anthropology, the nature of states, and of modernity more generally. The book is also deeply relevant to problems of “state-building” and “failed states” in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. As Scott writes, “The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes it an anarchist history” (p. x).

In this symposium, I have invited a number of prominent political and social scientists to comment on the book, its historical narrative, and its broader theoretical implications for thinking about power, state failure, state-building, and foreign policy. How does the book shed light on the limits of states and the modes of resistance to state authority? Are there limits, theoretical and normative, to this “anarchist” understanding of governance and the “art of being governed”?

—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor