In the past 40 years an extensive literature has grown up around aggregate political economy models of elections, but few articles have focused on the German case. Initially, Kirchgässner (1977; 1991), developed vote-popularity (VP) functions, with the unemployment rate as the dominant economic variable predicting the German ruling parties' performance. Thereafter, using vote functions (VF) from 1961 to 1994, Jérôme, Jérôme-Speziari, and Lewis-Beck (2001) tested the “yardstick” competition existing between French and German economic votes.

More than two years after the heady days of protest and uprising that characterized the Arab Spring, the glow of revolution has given way to the intricacies and complications of regime building. Coalitions are being formed, constitutions written, judiciaries vetted, and security services (re)built. As collective attention focuses on these complexities of regime restructuring, it is worth noting that a fundamental security paradox sits at the heart of transitions in the Middle East and North Africa. On one hand, individuals who hit the streets or battlefields in support of revolution in 2011 did so in the belief that a new form of government would improve their political, social, and economic security over the long term. On the other hand, subsequent (and ongoing) efforts to draft new rules of the political game have triggered internal conflicts and, on occasion, those conflicts have compromised citizens' physical security over the short term.

The Middle East has been treated as exceptional in much of the scholarly literature. It was entirely absent from comparative studies of political transitions until the late 1990s, and even in the early 2000s some of the literature on resilient authoritarianism reproduced a narrative of a region seemingly immune to normal (that is, happening elsewhere) forces of political change. Following this trend, the politics and history of the region are routinely taught in region-specific courses, but they are far less frequently integrated into thematic courses except when the teacher is an area specialist. Unfortunately, the absence of Middle East cases from many broader courses reinforces popular conceptions of regional exceptionalism and deprives possibilities for comparative theorizing. Even worse, our years of teaching undergraduates have taught us that images of harems, pyramids, and desert warriors wielding sabers on camelback still shape many Americans' perceptions of the region. Obviously our classrooms challenge these images, but demand for specialized courses consistently exceeds capacity at a time when sensational images from the region saturate the news media. For those students who do not take or cannot gain a seat in those courses, images of harems, camels, and violence are likely to endure. Worse, the analytical implications of one-dimensional portrayals in political science have been grave, notably when the preoccupation with “culture” as a singular explanatory variable prejudices against exploring other influences on political practices and institutions.

As others have done before me, I am honored to receive the APSA John Gaus Award. As I prepared this lecture, I realized that the Gaus award has been given by APSA 26 times; mine is the 27th. The first was awarded to Herbert Kaufman whose work set a very high standard for this honor. Reviewing the list of the other Gaus award recipients provides a picture of the development of our field. It includes a variety of individuals who represent different approaches to the intersection of public administration and political science. Among the recipients are seven individuals who had a major and personal influence on my work: Aaron Wildavsky, Frank Rourke, George Frederickson, Martha Derthick, Lou Gawthrop, Larry Lynn, and David Rosenbloom. Others are people who have been important to my own intellectual development.

The struggle to shape the narrative of Libya's postwar transition is being fought more intensely outside of the country than within it. The legitimacy of the military intervention in Libya by the West, supported by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has become tied to the perceived success or failure of the transition process: A positive outcome (i.e., the installation of liberal democracy) would legitimize NATO's intervention and, with it, the merits of interventionist military doctrines more broadly; a failure chastens such a policy. Putting aside questions about whether the legitimacy of the intervention should be primarily judged by the outcome of the transition, the practical consequence of this ulterior motive for judging the success or failure of the transition has warped international coverage of Libya. It has created incentives for observers to cherry-pick their portrayal of events so that they can present unambiguous conclusions about the progress of reforms and the transition in general (Rubin 2013; Wagner and Cafiero 2013). This myopia is unhelpful; it distorts international policy on Libya and results in scant analysis of the underlying (and often antithetic) social, political, or security dynamics shaping the transition. To remedy this, the following analysis examines the micropolitics of violence undergirding Libya's transition. As its basis John Gledhill's tripartite framework is used for understanding the causal pathways to collective violence during political transition (see “Editor's Introduction”). The contributions on Yemen and Egypt, which follow this article, also adopt Gledhill's framework, permitting comparison among these cases.

The Arab uprisings, like the fall of the Berlin Wall more than two decades ago, are watershed events that have raised fundamental questions about our understanding of the processes of political change, the emergence and diffusion of contentious collective action, and the role of the international context in facilitating or hindering political change. The uprisings have further strengthened a growing focus within Middle Eastern studies on framing questions about the social, economic, and political dynamics in the region in ways that allow for more robust linkages with comparative theorizing about the dynamics of contentious collective action and the processes of political change. In other words, the Arab uprisings have injected new energy into the comparative study of contentious politics. In addition to new research agendas the uprisings have also provided opportunities for introducing students in survey and theory courses to the region's political dynamics, enriching students' engagement with theoretical concepts and honing their critical thinking and analytical skills while making the Middle East less “exceptional” for the students. Here, I focus on how incorporating of Middle Eastern cases allows instructors to raise questions and engage students in discussions about the emergence and diffusion of contentious collective action.

Climate change represents one of our greatest public policy challenges. A broad, well-established and international scientific consensus exists that our planet is undergoing climate change. The question is not whether there is climate change, but how best to respond to it. Climate change is a global phenomenon that requires a global effort unlike anything previously attempted. This global challenge is complicated by related and more controversial questions about causal responsibility. Although convincing evidence shows that climate change is a result of human behavior, much less agreement exists on how this should factor into policy.

Our political economy model has correctly forecasted the 1998 and 2005 elections. However, in 2002 we predicted a tight race to the benefit of the Christian Democrats(CDU)/Christian Socialists(CSU)-Free Democratic Party (FDP) opposition, so underestimating the narrow defeat of the FDP by the Green Party. In the German political system, proportional representation makes single-party domination almost impossible. On the contrary, the big parties, Social Democratic Party (SPD) or CDU/CSU, are pushed to build a majority coalition. In this competition, the FDP has been the “pivotal party” in German political life, at least until 2002. Since then, the Greens have challenged the FDP, with the Ecologists allowing the SPD to form a red-green coalition in 1998 and in 2002. Similarly, in 2005 the FDP was not associated with the grand coalition driven by Angela Merkel.

In January 2011, youth and civil society activists, inspired by protests in Tunisia, took to Yemen's streets calling for regime change. As in other Arab Spring countries, conditions were ripe for mobilization as large sections of the population had become increasingly frustrated with corruption, dwindling economic prospects, and a concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the ruling clique. Following Hosni Mubarak's resignation in Egypt, protests mounted across Yemen, and, although President Ali Abdullah Saleh promised reform, it was too little, too late, to satisfy the demonstrators (see ICG 2011a). After proregime gunmen fired on unarmed protesters in Sanaa on March 18, 2011—killing more than 50 demonstrators—a series of high-level defections began, including long-time regime insider and powerful military commander, Major General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar.

In 2011 the protests in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) were not only unprecedented in terms of scale and political consequences for the region, they also highlighted a number of long-standing analytical and theoretical misconceptions about Arab politics. In particular, the conventional thesis privileging the idea of a “durable authoritarianism” in the Arab world was partially undermined by a cross-regional civil society that confronted the formidable security and military apparatus of the state. Although in some countries democratic transitions have continued, since they first occurred in Tunisia, other Arab states continue to witness a resilient authoritarianism and strong state repression of civil society activism. These historic events have also set the stage for a new teaching agenda in important ways. Specifically, an agenda for teaching the “new Middle East” must incorporate two important general components: first, a critical review of the influential scholarship on persistent authoritarianism with the objective of addressing past theoretical and methodological misconceptions, and second, the introduction of new conceptual and analytical frameworks relevant to contemporary political developments in the Arab world and the MENA region more generally.

In the German national election this fall, based on the forecast of the Chancellor Model, the governing coalition will score a resounding victory. Chancellor Angela Merkel enjoys a high approval rating, which puts her at a 2-1 advantage over the challenger, Peer Steinbrück. Although Germany is not a presidential system, where voters elect the chief policymaker, chancellor support has proved to be a strong predictor of vote choice in German national elections. Our forecast model also includes long-term partisanship, which provides a broad base for the governing parties in this election, and length of tenure, which exacts a modest penalty after two terms of office. Since its premiere in 2002, the model has predicted the winner in each election. In a case of perhaps beginner's luck, the 2002 forecast scored a bull's-eye with 47.1%, the exact share of the governing parties; the forecast was posted three months before Election Day. No poll or other model, not even the Election-Day exit polls, came close to this performance; in fact, most people predicted a defeat for Schröder's red-green coalition (Norpoth and Gschwend 2003).

We are at a turning point when it comes to the political implications of climate change. Given the reality of a future in a climate-changed world, it is time for us—broadly as a species, but particularly as academics—to move beyond the foci of the last few decades on the politics of preventing climate change through global agreements. There is a growing literature on the obvious need to slow the impacts of climate change, develop postcarbon energy systems, and design new forms of global environmental governance. Beyond these immediate needs, however, climate change poses a range of new problems and requires a broader research agenda for a climate-challenged politics.

For more than four decades, Louis Fisher has been writing about, speaking to, and teaching scholars and political practitioners. His intellectual range has been remarkable (he moves easily from institutional research on all three federal branches to historical studies to detailed legal analyses) and his scholarly output intimidating.

In nearly three years, Egypt has transitioned from a large-scale uprising against one of the region's longest-standing rulers to an even more massive revolt that led to the military ousting the country's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. Between the two popular uprisings, new pacts and unlikely alliances emerged, deepened, and, in some cases, then disappeared. For its part, the army evolved from being an accomplice of the old regime, to then being an uneasy partner of the ascendant Muslim Brotherhood and, most recently, on to rebranding itself as an ally of non-Islamists and a protector of the popular will. Loosely aligned liberals, leftists, and nationalists, meanwhile, shifted from offering support for democratic elections to backing a “democratic” coup out of fear that the elected Islamists might monopolize and never relinquish power in a conservative new regime. That fear came in response to the Brotherhood's own shifting position, which moved from a commitment to “participation not domination” to a strategy of controlling the legislature and the presidency, although they were ultimately forced back into hiding before they could neutralize the judiciary and the army. And finally, the other Islamist movement, the ultraconservative Salafists, initially displayed no interest in the political process, but then mobilized and ultimately enjoyed striking success in the elections of 2011–12. Surprisingly, however, despite their presumed ideological proximity to the Brotherhood, many Salafists went on to back the military's removal of Morsi in July 2013, but then did not lend support to the interim government that was constructed in wake of Morsi's fall. In this multilayered, fast-paced political environment, mass protests, arrests, and violence have become routine.

Scholars of justice theory often refuse to apply their principles to concrete social or political issues; instead, they develop those principles in abstraction from contemporary value conflicts or policy debates, preferring to remain silent on how justice might inform controversial political decisions. Rawls, for example, casts questions concerning the application of his “justice as fairness” conception across national, generational, and species boundaries as among the several “problems of extension” for which his theory may or may not be equipped, noting that “the idea of political justice does not cover everything, nor should we expect it to” (1993, 20–21). Even where he applies his justice theory to problems of international relations in his The Law of Peoples, Rawls describes its application as merely “an extension of a liberal conception of justice for a domestic regime to a Society of Peoples” (1999, 9), as though constructing and applying justice principles are entirely discrete steps, with its application to concrete social or political issues a unidirectional project of wielding static principles as practical tools, offering nothing of importance to a normative theory's development.

Whether it was bread-wielding Tunisians, marching Suez workers, or Yemeni protestors chanting against corruption, the 2011 Arab uprisings put political economy issues front and center. Indeed, a critical thread throughout the region's uprisings has been the simple question: “where has the money gone?” And though the field of political economy is multifaceted, the basic refrain “follow the money” unites most of it. Having students engage and debate political economy issues helps counteract much of the popular media's fixation on violence, terrorism, and sectarianism that too often exclusively frames how Americans understand the Middle East. Political economy gets at some of the most important (but certainly not all) factors and dynamics that define social and political life in the Middle East. A political economy approach also reinforces the critical disposition and tools of inquiry to instill in university undergraduates. In particular, the approach stresses to students that the realms of the economy and the political are hardly distinct, and therefore a more complete explanation for the events of 2011, and after, require grasping that interaction (Lindblom 1982; Polanyi 2001).

Analyses of the spread of the Arab uprisings have been dominated by three comparative angles. Single-country studies have emerged as the most common framework, often put to use in a second comparative approach of examining variation across cases. For example, studies explore which states have had major uprisings and which have not, which uprisings were peaceful and which were violent, and so on (Amar and Prashad 2013; Haddad, Bsheer, and Abu-Rish 2012; McMurray and Ufheil-Somers 2013; Sowers and Toensing 2013). A third approach explores comparisons with other waves of popular mobilization against authoritarian regimes, for example, in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century, Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and so on (Patel, Bunce, and Wolchik 2013 Weyland 2012). These literatures investigate the complex processes of mobilization, revolution, and transition unfolding in parts of the Middle East since the outbreak of the uprisings in late 2010. From the literature on revolutions, for example, we know that a popularly based movement that brings about some change in political leadership does not necessarily lead to a regime change resulting in a fundamental overturning of an economic, political, or social system. From past cases we have learned that at least some old institutions and alliances almost always reemerge, and what form the new institution will take eventually is often unknown for several years—for example, think of the Iranian revolution, let alone the French revolution. As events in postrevolutionary Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen continue to unfold—and it is questionable whether those revolutions are even over—and as the bloody civil war in Syria continues, these insights provide us with useful tools for examining how institutions, processes, and power relations are changing—and how they are not.

Geoengineering, the “deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change” (Shepherd et al. 2009, 1), is attracting increasing interest. As well as the Royal Society, various scientific and government organizations have produced reports on the potential and challenge of geoengineering as a potential strategy, alongside mitigation and adaptation, to avoid the vast human and environmental costs that climate change is thought to bring (Blackstock et al. 2009; GAO 2010; Long et al. 2011; Rickels et al. 2011). “Geoengineering” covers a diverse range of proposals conventionally divided into carbon dioxide removal (CDR) proposals and solar radiation management (SRM) proposals. This article argues that “geoengineering” should not be regarded as a third category of response to climate change, but should be disaggregated. Technically, CDR and SRM are quite different and discussing them together under the rubric of geoengineering can give the impression that all the technologies in the two categories of response always raise similar challenges and political issues when this is not necessarily the case. However, CDR and SRM should not be completely subsumed into the preexisting categories of mitigation and adaptation. Instead, they can be regarded as two parts of a five-part continuum of responses to climate change. To make this case, the first section of this article discusses whether geoengineering is distinctive, and the second situates CDR and SRM in relation to other responses to climate change.

The long-established authoritarian regimes in Libya, Yemen, and Egypt were very different in form. It is not surprising, therefore, that the way in which those regimes came to an end in 2011 varied significantly across cases. Nor is it surprising that the dynamics of transition in those cases have also varied since the Arab Spring. That said, the studies in this symposium have shown that, despite their many differences, processes of regime transition in Libya, Yemen, and Egypt have also shared two significant traits. First, disagreements among stakeholders over basic questions of institutional design have generated intense uncertainty about the nature of posttransition regimes. Second, political and military actors have occasionally turned to violence, in an effort to “resolve” their disagreements through force. In our symposium, we have tried to clarify the relationship between these shared traits of uncertainty and violence. To do this, we have disaggregated the concept of transitional uncertainty, considered the degree to which different forms of uncertainty have already fomented insecurity in post-Arab Spring states, and offered assessments of whether uncertainty may (continue to) prove destabilizing in those states going forward.

During the 1950s, Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous essay entitled “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” The point behind the title is that the hedgehog knows one big thing and the fox knows many things. From this distinction, Berlin suggests there are two intellectual types: one who relates everything to a single idea and the other who explores a diversity of ideas. It is difficult and unrealistic to pigeonhole Fisher as one or the other intellectual type. The reality is that Fisher combines both types. My sense is that Fisher's wide diversity of scholarly and policy-influencing accomplishments, and his skepticism of conventional wisdom, put him in Berlin's second category rather than first. However, my position at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) also prompts me to say, on the other hand, one big idea has animated Fisher's contributions to the academic and political/legislative worlds. That idea is highlighted in the title of one of his plethora of publications: Defending Congress and the Constitution (2011). Of course, when you write about the Congress and the Constitution, you analyze—like Berlin's fox—a host of interrelated ideas and relationships: history, law, the presidency, the judiciary, and more.