This is the first issue of Perspectives to contain material nearly all of which began the review process under my editorship. It also is the first issue under my editorship to contain contributions to the somewhat ill-defined section called “Perspectives.” To the best of my knowledge this also is the first time a symposium has run in this section. As our Submission Guidelines state, essays that fit this genre are not meant to be full-fledged academic research papers but rather “short, sharp commentaries on a political phenomenon or policy problem; dialogues or debates to highlight methodological or substantive disagreements; or insights into or evaluation of other works of interest to political scientists.”

Professional journals provide one crucial tool for communicating our ideas. They largely determine the range of those to whom we speak and and the terms in which we speak to them. Among the daunting tasks of editing a journal, especially a relatively new one, is determining who the audience for the publication might be. To whom is the journal meant to speak? What sort of forum do we hope it will provide?

This is the first issue of Perspectives on Politics to appear under my editorship. In the relatively short time I have been working on the journal it has become clear that the enterprise can be no better than the people who work on it. So, rather than leaving the acknowledgments and introductions for last, I want to make them up front.

The masthead of Perspectives articulates our mission in these words: “Perspectives on Politics is a journal of political science that seeks to provide political insight on important problems, as it emerges from rigorous, broad based, and integrative thought.” Although I inherited this mission statement, I find it broadly in keeping with my own aspirations for the journal. I also recognize that there are broad and deep disagreements among political scientists about such things as what counts as “political,” what is “important,” whether the discipline ought to be driven by “problems,” and what it means to be “rigorous,” to say nothing of “broad” or “integrative.” Indeed, it might fairly be said that the journal itself exists in large measure as a result of the ferment generated by such disagreement.

This essay starts with an observation, proceeds to an exhortation, and concludes with a set of suggestions.

Congress has been situated on the outside edge of the subfield of American Political Development (APD) despite the institution's centrality both to the political history of the United States and to political science as a discipline. Apart from an important but limited number of works—including a long-term research enterprise on the role of sectionalism conducted by Richard Bensel, a study of the antebellum Senate by Elaine Swift, an assessment of the alliance between farmers and workers in the half-century after 1877 by Elizabeth Sanders, a major work on institutional transformations in the House and Senate by Eric Schickler, and a small number of emergent inquiries—“scholars in the American Political Development tradition,” as Keith Whittington has noted, “have never fully integrated Congress, as they have other important institutions such as the bureaucracy, the presidency, political parties and the courts.”Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University ([email protected]). John S. Lapinski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University ([email protected]). This article reflects the work of the American Institutions Project located at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, the support of the National Science Foundation (SES 0318280 and SES 03188289), and the conducive environment for research and writing provided by the Russell Sage Foundation. We particularly wish to thank Rose Razaghian for her reading and suggestions, Eldon Porter for his assistance, and the three anonymous readers for this journal.

In this article, I attempt to integrate the study of citizenship into debates in comparative politics, in two different ways. First, I justify the real-world importance of the topic, and thereby encourage other scholars to grapple with its manifestations and implications. Second, I present some suggestive evidence, based on the 15 “older” countries of the European Union (EU). The findings not only illustrate the extent of cross-national variation in citizenship policies at two different time periods, but they help to demonstrate the applicability of comparative analysis to categorizing and explaining both long-lasting cross-national differences and more recent change in some countries. In explaining the historical variation within the EU, I consider whether or not a country had a prior experience as a colonial power, as well as whether it became a democracy in the nineteenth century. In accounting for continuity or change over the last few decades, I argue that while various international and domestic pressures have led to liberalization in a number of countries, these usually occurred in the absence of public discussion and involvement. In contrast, when public opinion gets mobilized and engaged on issues related to citizenship reform—usually by a well-organized far right party, but also sometimes by a referendum or petition campaign—liberalization is usually blocked, or further restrictions are introduced. This finding raises important, paradoxical, and troubling questions about the connection between democratic processes and liberal outcomes.Marc Morjé Howard is Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University ([email protected]). Research for this article has been supported by a Research Fellowship from the German Marshall Fund of the United States. In addition to three anonymous reviewers, I am grateful to the following people for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article: David Art, Seyla Benhabib, Mark Blythe, Randall Hansen, Martin Heisler, Dick Howard, Wade Jacoby, Christian Joppke, Evan Lieberman, Adam Luedtke, Willem Maas, Kathleen McNamara, Craig Parsons, Martin Schain, Rogers Smith, and Maarten Vink. I also appreciate the research assistance of Hamutal Bernstein, Aspen Brinton, Anamaria Dutceac, Sean Eudaily, Leah Gilbert, and Sara Beth Wallace on various parts of this project.

Today, more than 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and well over 20 million more have died since the first case was diagnosed in 1981. When we include families and loved ones in the raw demographics, HIV/AIDS has touched a population at least equal to that of the United States. This collection of essays examines the complexity of the mobilization against HIV/AIDS, from the perspective of social action on one hand and the state on the other.

It was with great pleasure that I recently assumed the reigns as Book Review Editor of Perspectives. I am fortunate to have had excellent predecessors—Greg MacAvoy and Susan Bickford—who themselves had an excellent staff. This has made the transition relatively painless and successful. But, like all transitions, this one has involved glitches and has required patience and perseverance. We greatly appreciate the cooperation and flexibility that so many of our colleagues have shown.

Some analysts have raised serious concerns about the foreign and domestic policy implications of the large numbers of Muslims living in Western Europe. The fear is that Muslims as a bloc will co-opt the domestic and foreign policy of various European states, subsuming it to those of Muslims from a variety of Islamic states in the Middle East and Asia, and transform the secular nature of most European states. The historic and ingrained fear of Islam present in the populations of Europe (and, for that matter, the United States) has produced an inability to see the political nature of Islamic groups, especially outside the Islamic world. For example, both Europeans and Americans were quick to question the political motives and actions of Muslims in Europe and the U.S. when there was no organized and orchestrated condemnation of the attacks of September 11, 2001. What such critics fail to take into account is precisely one of the themes analyzed in the paper: the myriad divisions found among the Muslims of Europe. Western fears and criticisms are partly based on serious ignorance of the characteristics of Islam and of the people in Europe who adhere to it. Because Islam is a highly decentralized religion, it is structurally biased against facilitating large-scale collective action by its adherents. The one version which is hierarchically organized, the Shi'a, is barely present in Europe. In addition, Muslim immigrants are divided by their ethnic differences. Islam, being decentralized, allows for a myriad of practices in the different countries from which the immigrants came. Divided by ethnicity and by their own religious beliefs, Muslims in Europe will not constitute a group which will be able to impose its goals on European foreign and domestic policy. Muslims will, instead, be a diverse population with which European states find it difficult to negotiate, because of Islam's decentralized structure.Carolyn M. Warner is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Studies, Arizona State University ([email protected]). Manfred W. Wenner is Visiting Scholar, Department of Political Science, Arizona State University ([email protected]). The authors wish to thank Guity Nashat Becker, Jocelyne Cesari, Colin Elman, Miriam Fendius Elman, Roger Finke, Paul Froese, Anthony Gill, Phillip Hardy, Michael Hechter, Jennifer Hochschild, Kevin Jacques, Ramazan Kilinc, Timur Kuran, Peter McDonough, Michael Mitchell, Christopher Soper, Hendrik Spruyt, Robert Youngblood, three anonymous reviewers, the participants at the University of Washington Center for European Studies/European Union Center “September 11, Immigration and Nationalism in Europe” seminar, and the participants at the University of Wisconsin Madison “East and West: the Experience of Islam in an Expanding Europe” conference for their critical comments and suggestions. Errors and shortcomings remain our responsibility. The authors thank Beatrice Buchegger, Anita Clason, Katie Jordan, Megan McGinnity, and Seth Turken for research assistance, and the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict for financial support.

The positive literature on judicial behavior has not received nearly the attention it deserves. That literature has a great deal to offer, both to legal scholars and to those who are concerned about the role of legal institutions generally. For example, the literature has the potential to help shed light on the ability of courts to protect rights and foster economic development. This article argues that the positive literature has failed to see its due in large part because positive scholars often do not take law and legal institutions seriously enough.

The article identifies three specific sets of problems with the positive scholarship, offering detailed suggestions on how positive scholars can avoid them. The first is the problem of normative bite: Too often positive scholars of judicial behavior seem to be trapped in their own disciplinary debates, without pausing to examine why it is that they are studying what courts and legal institutions do. Second, positive scholars need to pay greater attention to the norms of the law, i.e., how law and legal institutions operate. A skeptical stance toward law is fine, but that skepticism should not get in the way of accurately understanding properly the mechanics of law and legal institutions. Finally, empiricists in particular must take great care regarding the data upon which they rely. It is difficult to obtain good data on the workings of legal systems. Data that are readily available often present a distorted picture of the system being studied.Barry Friedman is Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at New York University School of Law ([email protected]). The author thanks Chuck Cameron, Lee Epstein, Jennifer Hochschild, Jeff Lax, Stefanie Lindquist, Liam Murphy, Jeff Segal, Seana Shiffrin, Jim Spriggs, and three anonymous reviewers for invaluable comments on prior drafts. All errors are the author's own. Jane O'Brien and Kathleen O'Neill provided terrific research assistance.

In the 1970s I was among a group of scholars endlessly debating theories of the state. Others in the discussion were my recent predecessor as APSA President, Theda Skocpol, and my immediate successor, Ira Katznelson. What intrigued us was a vast literature, grounded in neo-Marxism and covering huge swaths of history and geography. Nearly all the important books and articles were by sociologists and historians, but with Structure and Change in Economic History, my then-colleague, economist Douglass North, transformed the debate by using economic models of transaction costs and property rights to model the state's role in economic prosperity over time. Most political scientists now acknowledge the importance of this perspective, but it nonetheless helped precipitate twenty years of divergence between historical and new economic institutionalists.Margaret Levi is Jere L. Bacharach Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle ([email protected]). Among her books are the single-authored Consent, Dissent and Patriotism (1997) and Of Rule and Revenue (1988) and the co-authored Cooperation Without Trust? (2005) and Analytic Narratives (1998). Many people offered me comments. I did not always take their advice, but I am grateful to Amit Ahuja, Paloma Aquilar, Marcelo Bergman, Maureen Eger, Ann Gryzmala-Busse, Bea Kelleigh, Bob Kaplan, Edgar Kiser, Victor Lapuente-Giné, Michael Lipsky, Kenneth Kollman, José-Maria Maravall, Peter May, Leonardo Morlino, Steve Pfaff, Kate Pflaumer, Frances Fox Piven, Christoph Pohlmann, Nancy Rosenblum, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Bo Rothstein, Susan Stokes, Katherine Stovel, Joan Tronto, and Ashutosh Varshney. My greatest debt is to the two graduate students who read and commented on several drafts as well as located the materials I needed to write this presentation: John Ahlquist and Audrey Sacks.

On June 5, 1981, an obscure public health bulletin published by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta first reported that five young men—“all active homosexuals”—had contracted a very rare pneumonia, the cause of which was entirely unknown. The report went on to note that two of the five men had died and that the other three were very ill. These were the first five reported cases in the United States of a deadly disease soon to be known around the world as acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The public health and scientific communities have since learned that cases of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) were also emerging simultaneously in Africa, Europe, and other parts of North America, but the 1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the first scientific documentation of HIV, marked the beginning of a global public health crisis. And it did so in ways that would shape the form and content of political discourse and dissent for decades to come.Andrea Densham, Principle of Densham Consulting in Chicago, is a health policy advocate and former health policymaker ([email protected]). She has written on social movements and health policy as they relate to LGBT health, HIV, and breast cancer.

After 25 years, there is a broad though sometimes superficial awareness of state responses to HIV/AIDS in the global South, where the spread of disease is said to be fueled by inept or failed states, those so poor or whose officials are so indifferent that they lack public health services or even a minimal health care infrastructure. But this narrative ignores the failed responses among states struck in the first wave of the pandemic in the early 1980s. In the long run, generally between 1986 and 1990, the industrialized democracies where a new illness was first identified did implement comprehensive disease prevention, blood safety, and treatment and care regimes specifically targeting AIDS; in the short run, these same countries struggled over—and more often then not failed to implement—appropriate measures to stem the spread of the epidemic. And in the long run, tens of thousands contracted HIV and died.Michael J. Bosia, Assistant Professor at Saint Michael's College in Vermont, has been an activist and policymaker ([email protected]). He thanks the Fulbright fellowship program, a Blaine J. Yarrington Fellowship from Northwestern University, and Saint Michael's College for financial support.

On February 2, 2005, newly elected Florida Senator, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Mel Martinez, a Cuban-American immigrant, “shattered a 216-year tradition of the U.S. Senate … when he used the ceremonial occasion of his first floor speech to speak three sentences in Spanish.” This event represents the first time a language other than English was entered in the Congressional Record. He did so in support of Mexican-American Alberto Gonzales' nomination to the post of Attorney General. Martinez was rhetorically addressing his remarks to immigrants, whom he described as having come to America to seek a better life. He described Gonzales as “uno de nosotros,” or “one of us.”

Pragmatism, decentralization, and pluralism are typically associated with modern democracies. Yet these are also the attributes that make Islam a widely accessible political-cultural resource. Indeed, such attributes allow for multiple activisms while sparing activists the macro-coordination challenges that often hamper growing movements, and the inertia that can seize vertical organizations. But while Islamists across the spectrum have increasingly deployed this resource, secularists of various stripes have mostly eschewed it. The aggregate effect has been to amplify the voices and to raise the profiles of Islamist groups at the expense of self-described moderns and their secular ideologies. I call this Islamism's reverberation effect.

Deliberate integration of Islamic tradition with democratic thought and action holds substantial promise. Pro-democratic Muslims, backed by Islam's renovated classical principles and practices, can better counter supremacist claims as they arise in the plural contestations that Islam itself helps generate. They can also realistically seek a firm consensus on the inviolable status of Islamic tolerance, which in turn can serve as a functional equivalent to the central authority that Islam lacks. Most importantly, by reconsidering the modernist ideational boundary that separates religion and politics, pro-democratic Muslims can begin to reclaim the transformative power of tradition.Anna Seleny is Professor of the Practice of International Politics at Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy ([email protected]). She would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton University in the research and writing of this article. She is grateful to Hassan Abbas, Sheri Berman, Consuelo Cruz, Malik Mufti, Assaf Moghadam, and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Scholars seeking to understand the causes and consequences of political intolerance are now celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of Stouffer's pathbreaking research on intolerance and repression. Yet despite substantial advances in our understanding of intolerance, several major unanswered questions remain. The purpose of this article is to identify and discuss these tolerance enigmas, while proffering some ideas about how future research on intolerance might proceed. The article begins by documenting the significance of understanding intolerance and concludes with speculation about how resolving these enigmas might contribute to a more peaceful and democratic world.James L. Gibson is Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis and a Fellow at the Centre for Comparative and International Politics, Stellenbosch University, South Africa ([email protected]). This is a revised version of the Alexander George Award Lecture, delivered at the International Society for Political Psychology Annual Conference, Eden Hall, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, July 15–18, 2004. The author is indebted to many for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper, including Dennis Chong, Jamie Druckman, Leonie Huddy, Jim Kuklinski, Marc Peffley, Brian Silver, and John Transue, and especially Stanley Feldman and Donald Green. He also appreciates the research assistance of Marc Hendershot. Support for the research on which this paper is based has been provided by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis, and Steven S. Smith in particular. This paper makes use of data collected from Russia with the support of the National Science Foundation (SBR-9423614 and SBR-9710137). The South African data were collected with support from NSF's Law and Social Sciences Program (SES 9906576). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

On a beautiful tropical day, two women living thousands of miles apart enter public clinics. One walks past the neatly parked cars in the parking lot, to the front door of the newly built, well-equipped Ladymeade Reference Unit, which stands across from the largest public medical facility on the island of Barbados. Everything about this experience is neat and well-ordered, from the facilities the woman is entering, to the pill boxes bearing brand-name labels that she receives at the in-house pharmacy, to the referral system that sent her here after she delivered a baby across the street. The second woman's experience appears a bit less ordered. The clinic she enters, which sits on the outskirts of one of Brazil's slum-ridden cities, is shabby, with peeling paint and a utilitarian concrete structure. Inside, there are no shiny, manufacturer-sponsored posters to match the pills being dispensed, because these pills do not bear familiar brand-name labels. Though the pictures may appear quite different, they bear a crucial similarity—both women are living with HIV, and both are fortunate to live in countries that have committed themselves to providing universal treatment access for their HIV-positive citizens.Patricia Siplon is Associate Professor of Political Science at Saint Michael's College in Vermont ([email protected]). Jamila Headley is a student activist and member of the Student Global AIDS Campaign. She received her BA in political science from Saint Michael's College in 2006 ([email protected]). Both authors would like to thank the Provost's Office at Saint Michael's College for funding and support of this research.

The publication of Samuel Huntington's Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity provides an opportunity to consider several distinct underlying assumptions about American national identity, and to evaluate the claim that this identity is threatened by growth among native-born and immigrant populations of Latin American origin, particularly—but not exclusively—Mexicans.Luis R. Fraga is Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University ([email protected]). Fraga was a member of the APSA Standing Committee on Civic Engagement and Education that co-authored Democracy at Risk: And What to do About it (Brookings Institution Press 2005) and is co-author of Multiethnic Moments: The Politics of Urban Education Reform (Temple University Press, forthcoming 2006). Gary M. Segura is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Washington ([email protected]). Among his most recent publications are “Earth Quakes and After Shocks: Race, Direct Democracy, and Partisan Change,” in the American Journal of Political Science (2006), “The Mobilizing Effect of Majority-Minority Districts on Latino Turnout” in the American Political Science Review (2004), and the edited volume Diversity In Democracy: Minority Representation in the United States, published in 2005 by the University of Virginia Press. Fraga and Segura are both among the co-principal investigators of the Latino National Survey (LNS), an 8600 respondent state-stratified survey of Latinos in the U.S. scheduled for completion in the Spring of 2006.

A large body of research by political scientists, psychologists and historians suggests that “existential security”—the feeling that survival can be taken for granted—is conducive to tolerance of foreigners, openness to social change and a pro-democratic political culture. Conversely, existential insecurity leads to 1) xenophobia and 2) strong in-group solidarity. This article tests these hypotheses against evidence from a recent survey of Iraq—a society where one would expect to find exceptionally high levels of insecurity. We find that the Iraqi public today shows the highest level of xenophobia found in any of the 85 societies for which data are available—together with extremely high levels of solidarity with one's own ethnic group.Ronald Inglehart is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan ([email protected]), Mansoor Moaddel is Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University ([email protected]), and Mark Tessler is Professor of Political Science at University of Michigan ([email protected]).

Countless studies document the correlation between abundant mineral resources and a series of negative economic and political outcomes, including poor economic performance, unbalanced growth, weakly institutionalized states, and authoritarian regimes across the developing world. The disappointing experience of mineral-rich countries has generated a large body of scholarship aimed at explaining this empirical correlation and a list of prescriptions for combating the resource curse. The most popular solutions emphasize macroeconomic policies, economic diversification, natural resource funds, transparency and accountability, and direct distribution to the general population. The success of these solutions has been limited because they either presuppose strong state institutions, which are widely absent in the developing world, or assume state ownership over mineral wealth and thus the need for external actors to constrain the state. At the same time, domestic private ownership is rarely proposed and often maligned. Yet, in some countries, it would serve as a more viable way to avoid the resource curse by fostering institutions that more effectively constrain state leaders, encouraging them to invest in institution building, and enabling them to respond more successfully to commodity booms and busts.Erika Weinthal is associate professor of environmental policy in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University ([email protected]). Pauline Jones Luong is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Brown University ([email protected]). This article is part of a long-term joint project; the authors are rotating authorship on the articles they publish, sharing equal responsibility for the content and analysis herein. They gratefully acknowledge comments and suggestions from Richard Auty, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Victoria Murillo, Richard Snyder, the Colloquium on Comparative Research at Brown University, and three anonymous reviewers.