For more than half a century, realist scholars of international relations have maintained that their world view is inimical to the American public. For a variety of reasons—inchoate attitudes, national history, American exceptionalism—realists assert that the U.S. government pursues realist policies in spite and not because of public opinion. Indeed, most IR scholars share this “anti-realist assumption.” To determine the empirical validity of the anti-realist assumption, this paper re-examines survey and experimental data on the mass public's attitudes towards foreign policy priorities and world views, the use of force, and foreign economic policy over the past three decades. The results suggest that, far from disliking realism, Americans are at least as comfortable with the logic of realpolitik as they are with liberal internationalism. The persistence of the anti-realist assumption might be due to an ironic fact: American elites are more predisposed towards liberal internationalism than the rest of the American public.Daniel W. Drezner is Associate Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University ([email protected]). Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2007 International Studies Association meeting in Chicago, IL, and at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He is grateful to Bethany Albertson, John Brehm, Joshua Busby, Jon Caverley, Richard Eichenberg, Benjamin Fordham, Nikolas Gvosdev, Don Green, Jacob Hacker, Lawrence Kaplan, Andrew Moravcsik, John Mearsheimer, Gideon Rose, Bruce Russett, Gregory Sanders, Stephen Teles, and John Schuessler for their comments and suggestions. Luisa Melo performed valuable research assistance, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States provided generous support during the drafting of this paper.

Amidst rising levels of ethnic diversity in the United States, scholars struggle to understand how group consciousness functions among other non-black minority groups such as Asian Americans and Latinos. Most of the literature in this area focuses on the relationship between identity and immigration incorporation or the debate between national origin and panethnicity. We argue that the Asian American community offers an important case study to understand how social context and one's perceived racial position influence an individual's sense of group attachment. Thus, the Asian American case presents new insight beyond the black politics model into how racial identification influences individual political attitudes and behavior. We present findings from a unique embedded survey experiment conducted in 2004 that reveals a surprising degree of malleability in Asian American racial group attachment. This is a striking contrast to the findings demonstrated by blacks whose racial identification is relatively more stable over various contexts. We seek to explain these findings by advocating for a more explicit consideration of the structural incentives and costs of adopting racial and ethnic identities by highlighting the significance of U.S. immigration policy and its role in creating group-based stereotypes and racial tropes.

This article offers an anti-naturalist philosophical critique of the naturalist tendencies within qualitative concept formation as developed most prominently by Giovanni Sartori and David Collier. We begin by articulating the philosophical distinction between naturalism and anti-naturalism. Whereas naturalism assumes that the study of human life is not essentially different from the study of natural phenomena, anti-naturalism highlights the meaningful and contingent nature of social life, the situatedness of the scholar, and so the dialogical nature of social science. These two contrasting philosophical approaches inspire, in turn, different strategies of concept formation. Naturalism encourages concept formation that involves reification, essentialism, and an instrumentalist view of language. Anti-naturalism, conversely, challenges reified concepts for eliding the place of meanings, essentialist concepts for eliding the place of contingency, and linguistic instrumentalism for eliding the situatedness of the scholar and the dialogical nature of social science. Based on this philosophical framework, we subject qualitative concept formation to a philosophical critique. We show how the conceptual strategies developed by Sartori and Collier embody a reification, essentialism, and instrumentalist view of language associated with naturalism. Although Collier's work on concept formation is much more flexible and nuanced than Sartori's, it too remains attached to a discredited naturalism.

In this article we aim to return labor (particularly the most vulnerable members of the labor market) to the core of the comparative political economy of advanced democracies. We formulate a framework with which to conceptualize cheap labor in advanced democracies. We propose that to understand the politics of cheap labor, the weakest members of the labor market need to be divided into two structural groups: those in standard and those in nonstandard employment. Standard cheap labor includes “regular jobs” while nonstandard cheap labor includes low-cost, flexible, and temporary jobs. We show that the use of cheap labor is significant in all industrialized democracies but that there are important contrasts in how different economies use cheap labor. We argue that there is a trade-off between standard and nonstandard cheap labor. Countries that satisfy their need for cheap labor through standard employment do not develop large nonstandard sectors of their economies. Countries that do not promote cheap labor in the standard sector, on the other hand, end up relying on an army of nonstandard workers to meet their cheap labor needs.

This project expands upon social construction studies by critically examining the discourse patterns of two very different groups as they discuss their problems with the child support enforcement system: fathers' rights members (mostly white, middle class fathers who are organizing for emotional support and to reform the child support system) and fathers with children on welfare (mostly poor, African-American fathers). We use standard, qualitative analytical methods on primary, in-depth interview data collected from fathers' rights members, and compare that with in-depth interview data drawn from fathers with children on welfare. In brief, we find three overlapping perceptions in this policy area: child support awards are economically hurtful to fathers, child support obligations are not adjusted for other types of support, and child support enforcement discourages parental cooperation. However, we also show that while there is broad overlap in terms of the general nature of these complaints, each group's members use very different language to describe their difficulties. Fathers' rights members are much more likely to remain connected to the system, and while challenging current policy, do not champion lawbreaking as a viable means of demonstrating their opposition. Fathers with children on welfare, on the other hand, speak in terms that reflect their disconnection from these policies, and frequently reveal their subsequent choice to engage in evasive and even illegal behavior as viable means of expressing their dissatisfaction. Finally, we conclude that these different ways of speaking about public policy problems can have important implications for policymaker responsiveness, and ultimately, each group's political inclusion in a democratic society.Jocelyn Elise Crowley is Associate Professor of Public Policy at The Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey ([email protected]). Margaret Watson has her Master's Degree in Public Policy from The Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey ([email protected]). Maureen R. Waller is Assistant Professor of Policy Analysis & Management, Cornell University ([email protected]). The authors would like to thank Joe Soss, Sandy Schram, Anne Schneider, Helen Ingram, M.B. Crowley, the Columbia University School of Social Work Seminar Series participants, the University of Washington West Coast Poverty Center Seminar Series participants, the NICHD Transition to Fatherhood Project, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this manuscript.

There is a trend among behavioral scientists to view ever more complex attitudes or systems of belief as in some sense genetically determined (or “heritable”). Consistent with this trend is the recent article of Alford, Funk, and Hibbing titled “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?” in which the authors claim to have demonstrated that when it comes to the transmission of political ideologies, genes count for more than environment. Their article has received an enormous amount of attention among political scientists and in the popular press. I critically evaluate the research technique on the basis of which the authors' support their claims and argue that it suffers from significant methodological flaws. Such flaws notwithstanding, I demonstrate that the authors' data do not clearly support their conclusions. I then question the cogency, from an historical and theoretical perspective, of proposing the existence of “liberal” and “conservative” “phenotypes” and “genotypes.” My argument has implications beyond the findings of Alford, Funk, and Hibbing, and applies to all studies that claim to have demonstrated the heritability of complex and politically relevant attitudes.

The past decade has brought an unprecedented boom in the study of courts as political actors in Latin America. We examine the extraordinary diversity of academic research on judicial politics in the region, identifying the key questions, findings, and theoretical debates in the literature, highlighting important conceptual disjunctions, and critiquing the research methods scholars of judicial politics in Latin America have employed in their work. We close by suggesting new avenues of inquiry to help advance the collective effort to understand the roles courts play in Latin American politics.

We have independently analyzed the effects of the G.I. Bill's widely-utilized education and training benefits, and reached different conclusions. One of us argues that the implementation of these benefits, especially in the South, helped widen the income and wealth gaps between whites and blacks and further marginalized many African Americans; the other considers them to have been a rare example of a relatively inclusive policy, one that fostered equal citizenship. Because we are both historical institutionalists and we both share interests in matters of social policy, equality, and race, these dissimilar accounts require explanation. This dialogue first considers methodological issues, explaining our decisions about which forms of data to use and to emphasize, and how we made sense of contradictory findings. It next discusses interpretive matters, examining the processes through which we sometimes reached different conclusions even when we confronted the same evidence. Finally, the exchange considers some implications of our findings, probing the lessons they convey both about policy research and practice.

In the past, most political scientists have been oblivious to the growing empirical evidence challenging environmental determinism. Professor Charney, apparently as a result of the fact that genes and the environment interact in a complex fashion, advocates that this passive unawareness be replaced by active denial. Science, however, does not advance by avoiding important relationships merely because they are complicated and, fortunately, science is not heeding Charney's ideologically-based fears. Molecular geneticists, often working in tandem with political scientists, are quickly moving beyond twin studies to identify the specific suites of genes and biological systems that predict variation in core political preferences, whatever labels those preferences might be given in a particular culture at a particular time. We sympathize with the fact that our empirical findings, like those of so many behavioral geneticists, make Charney uncomfortable; still, his critique serves up nothing new—empirically or otherwise. Just as analyses of the roots of sexual preferences cannot presumptively ignore genetics, neither can analyses of the roots of political preferences.

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court drew attention to and made considerable efforts toward eliminating intrastate malapportionment among U.S. House districts with the one-person, one-vote rule. Today, this rule is significantly, and more severely, violated by a rarely discussed or analyzed form of malapportionment, interstate malapportionment. We identify and discuss its causes and consequences, as well as possible remedies. We argue that changing the fixed size of the U.S. House membership is the only solution that meets normative, constitutional, and practical standards. We demonstrate that the current fixed size of the chamber unreasonably corrupts the popular basis of the U.S. House, which is necessary for the proper functioning of American representative democracy.Jeffrey Ladewig is an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Political Science ([email protected]). Mathew Jasinski is an attorney at Robinson & Cole in Hartford, Connecticut ([email protected]). We would like to thank Oksan Bayulgen, Larry Bowman, Robert Darcy, Virginia Hettinger, David Jones, and Howard Reiter for their suggestions and assistance. We also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their extraordinarily in-depth and helpful reviews. Any remaining errors are our own.

The Congressional Fellowship Program of the American Political Science Association charted new territory in the 1950s when it opened the internal workings of Congress to subsequent generations of political science scholars. Numerous programs incorporating a “Hill” experience into a variety of academic disciplines have imitated it since then. However, scholarship in the subfield of international relations has not benefited from the opportunities the program offers to the same extent as other disciplines and subfields have. I use a sample of legislative and policy matters that I encountered as a fellow in the 2006–2007 year to argue that a wide spectrum of theoretical work in international political economy would profit from insights generated by the type of direct participation the program affords. Specifically, I connect literature across subfields on institutional change, and relate how my experiences with Darfur divestment legislation, Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) legislation, and politics in a financial crisis hold the potential to enrich our understanding of the international political economy. I suggest where more direct experience with other issues by other scholars could prompt additional insights for research on U.S. foreign policy and international relations.

More political scientists should engage in the debates surrounding regulation of communications networks, the infrastructure on which telecom, media, and Internet services ride. In 1990 there were 14 communications regulators worldwide, by 2007 there were 148. To fulfill World Trade Organization Agreement on Basic Telecommunications commitments, many countries aim to create regulatory agencies that are “independent.” What characterizes independence? Regulators are embedded in a political context that includes three main constituencies : other government institutions, industry, and consumers. Independent regulators are able to take action autonomously from other government institutions and industry while serving as advocates for consumers. In a survey of 18 countries, several traits emerge; a leader who cannot be dismissed arbitrarily, regulatory authority clearly distinct from policymaking, independent funding, minimal staff exchange between regulator and regulated firm, and dedicated support for consumers. It is usually easier for a regulator to be independent if operators are privatized. In a study of 4 countries, independent regulators follow decision-making procedures that give the public notice about proposed rule changes, opportunities to provide comments, and final decisions with explanation. Also, independent regulators have gift, conflict of interest, and post-employment rules, which set ethical standards and expectations for staff.

The National Constitution Center (NCC) in Philadelphia orients its representation of the Constitution around the role of “We the People” in the conduct of constitutional politics. The self-presentation of the NCC explicitly connects its participatory interpretation of the Constitution to the interactivity of the museum experience itself, and announces its aspiration that visitors “get involved!” In so doing the NCC draws upon an emerging edge in museum theory that emphasizes the capacity of museums to support political citizenship. Although the museum's aspiration to enact participatory citizenship is laudable, its exhibits—because of their technologies, use of space, and content—subvert, rather than sustain, the participatory ideal.

This comment addresses the growing controversy over the effects of implicit racial messages in politics. Many scholars find evidence that these implicit messages work and that they have racializing effects. However, the biggest study to date finds that racial messages—implicit or explicit—have no effects. In this paper I conduct a thorough review of several relevant literatures in order to adjudicate between these competing claims. I find that the large study's null findings conflict with 17 public opinion experiments involving over 5,000 subjects, 2 aggregate studies, and a large social psychology literature. Using different methods, samples, and settings, these studies show that racial cues do in fact racialize opinion. I explain the large study's null results by noting that its participants perceived only small differences across messages, that racial predispositions were measured just before exposure to the ad, thereby neutralizing the effect of the ad's racial cue, and that WebTV studies such as this one have failed to provide many subjects with their assigned ad. Thus, the weight of the evidence heavily favors the racial effect of racial cues and messages. I offer several directions for future research on racial communication and politics.Tali Mendelberg is Associate Professor of Politics at Princeton University ([email protected]). She is the author of The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton University Press, 2001). She wishes to thank Oleg Bespalov and Dan Cassino for research assistance, Adam Berinsky, Claudine Gay, Martin Gilens, Vince Hutchings, Jon Krosnick, Shawn Rosenberg, and Nick Valentino for helpful feedback, and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for research support.

Using the “classical twin method,” political scientists John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing conclude that political ideologies are significantly influenced by genetics, an assertion that has garnered considerable media attention. Researchers have long used human twins in attempts to assess the degree of genetic influence on various behavioral traits. Today, this methodology has been largely replaced in favor of contemporary molecular genetic techniques, and thus heritability studies have seen a diminishing role in behavioral genetic research of the twenty-first century. One important reason the twin method has been superseded is that it depends upon several questionable assumptions, the most significant of which is known as the equal environments assumption. Alford, Funk, and Hibbing argue that this crucial assumption, and thus their conclusion, holds up under empirical scrutiny. They point to several studies in support of this assumption. Here, we review the evidence presented and conclude that these attempts to test the equal environments assumption are weak, suffering significant methodological and inherent design flaws. Furthermore, much of the empirical evidence provided by these studies actually argues that, contrary to the interpretation, trait-relevant equal environments assumptions have been violated. We conclude that the equal environments assumption remains untenable, and as such, twin studies are an insufficient method for drawing meaningful conclusions regarding complex human behavior.

In his essay, “Genes and Ideologies,” Evan Charney wrangles with the question of the role of genes in the formation of political attitudes via a critique of Alford, Funk, and Hibbing's 2005 American Political Science Review article. Although critical evaluations are necessary, his essay falls short of what is required of a scientific critique on both empirical and theoretical grounds. We offer a comment on his essay and further contend that it is naïve to proceed on the assumption that a barrier exists between the biological and social sciences, such that the biological sciences have nothing to offer the social sciences. If we look beyond our discipline's current theoretical models we may find a more thorough, and not just competing, explanation of political behavior.

Beckwith and Morris raise concerns about the value of twin studies for understanding the role of genetics in complex human behavior, but virtually all of their concerns have been raised and rebutted before. When it comes to the equal environments assumption (EEA), the best approach is to test for and control possible violations of the EEA on heritability estimates rather than merely rejecting all empirical evidence because of the possibility of EEA violations. In many respects, since the study of the genetic basis of complex human behaviors now includes many methods in addition to twin studies, Beckwith and Morris's critique applies more to the behavioral genetics of a quarter century ago than to today's multifaceted behavioral genetics. Twin studies establish that there is a sizeable genetic component to political orientations, thereby giving cause to look further at the nature of that role by using other methodologies, including molecular genetics. We conclude by pointing out that the normative implications of the relevance of genes to human behavior are not nearly as worrisome as Beckwith and Morris seem to believe.

The Implicit-Explicit (IE) model of racial priming posits that implicitly racial messages will be more effective than explicitly racial ones in priming racial predispositions in opinion formation. Is the Implicit-Explicit model supported by existing data? In “Racial Priming Revived,” Mendelberg responds to our analysis of a pair of experiments in which we found that “that implicit appeals are no more effective than explicit ones in priming racial resentment in opinion formation.” In this note we demonstrate that the concerns raised about our experiments are unfounded. Further, we show that the existing work supporting the IE model suffers from serious limitations of experimental design and implementation. Cumulatively, we find that the evidence questioning the IE model is far stronger than the evidence that supports it.Gregory A. Huber is Associate Professor of Political Science and resident fellow, Institute for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University ([email protected]). John S. Lapinski is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania ([email protected]). They thank the numerous colleagues who provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, including Alan Gerber, Don Green, Diana Mutz, Rogers Smith, Paul Sniderman and Lynn Vavreck.

I am writing this introduction from an internet café in Bucharest. Yesterday, courtesy of CNN, I watched Hillary Clinton officially suspend her Presidential campaign and throw her support behind Barack Obama. In Bucharest they are preparing for a second round of municipal elections, to be followed soon thereafter by parliamentary elections. Here in Bucharest—and also in Budapest, the first leg of my trip—my political science friends watch the U.S. election campaign with fascination and admiration. It seems, to most of them—hardly a representative sample of the population at large—that the U.S. elections are more open, competitive, and less oligopolistic than post-Communism, which some call a “partyocracy.”

I would like to thank Alford, Funk, and Hibbing, and Hannagan and Hatemi, for agreeing to write critical responses to my article, and I am grateful for the opportunity afforded me to respond.