In late summer of 2008, there were clear objective signs of a weakening economy. Industrial production was negative (−1.5 in August), inflation was creeping up (+5.4 in August), the unemployment rate was rising (6.1% in September). Housing starts were at a near-record low, with mortgages getting hard to come by, and hard to pay for. Consumer sentiment, as measured in public opinion surveys, was dropping to levels not seen since the 1980s. But there was no talk of an “economic crisis,” and reported conditions still did not qualify officially as a “recession.” The disintegration of Wall Street financial giants, which began in September, quickly accelerated the scale of the perceived, and actual, decline. “At that point,” as Campbell (2009, 13–14) puts it, “the economy was in crisis, perhaps teetering on the brink [of] a deep recession or even a depression,” with the stock market experiencing about a 25% drop in value over one month. By October 3, a $700 billion Economic Stabilization Act had passed through Congress, and was signed by President Bush. Despite this unprecedented emergency measure, the stock market continued to tumble. During the 2008 presidential campaign, at least one voter saw the electoral relevance of these economic struggles. Francine Caruso wanted a president who would “fix the economy.” Francine, an administrative assistant who lost her job, couldn't sell her home, and watched her husband postpone retirement, declared that Obama and McCain “need to stop knocking each other and tell us what they can do for us” (Amon 2008). Our overarching question, in this collection of articles, is how other voters linked the economy to their 2008 candidate choice.

In the January issue of PS, papers by William Mayer and by Lonna Atkeson and Cherie Maestas investigate reforms of the party nomination procedure for presidential candidates. In order to avoid the amplification of name recognition and early fundraising advantages, as these effects resulted from the “frontloading” of state nominations ('08 Tsunami Tuesday), broader “spacing” between primary dates may be required. But such an expansion of the sequential voting principle carries an unfortunate disadvantage ignored in the papers. This disadvantage is the, however unintended, consequence of candidates manipulating their program in accordance to methods through which votes are being cast.

The articles in this symposium present politics as an important intervening variable in the relationship between inequality and development. They highlight the complex and contingent ways in which politics mediates this relationship. The articles examine three key issues: (1) the extent and nature of international inequality and domestic inequality in the developing world; (2) the process through which inequality becomes—or does not become—a salient issue on the political agenda; and (3) the relationship between inequality and development under democratic and authoritarian regimes.

October 2, 2008, the New York Times presidential campaign coverage carried the headline “Poll Finds Obama Gaining Support and McCain Weakened in Bailout Crisis.” Similarly, the headline on October 21 read “Obama Appeal Rises in Poll; No Gains for McCain Ticket.” The 2008 presidential election, more so than any previous campaign, was presented as a horse race between senators Barack Obama and John McCain. In the midst of president George W. Bush's plummeting approval ratings, a growing discontent among the American people about the continued U.S. presence in Iraq, and the largest economic recession since the Great Depression, the media did not cast the election as a debate about issues. Rather, the 2008 election was about the candidates' relative positioning, how they got there, and what strategies they would employ to secure victory.

In the fall of 2008, the world economy experienced a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami” (Greenspan 2008, 1). Centered in the market for homes and mortgages, the mechanisms that unleashed this financial tidal wave are many and complex. Indeed, an inadequate grasp of modern finance on the part of “the most sophisticated investors” and regulators “in the world” was itself a contributing factor (Greenspan 2008, 3).

At the same time that the world has reached unprecedented prosperity, issues of economic inequality have attained great political salience. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, there are major differences in opinion regarding the responsibility of the United States and other wealthy countries and what the proper response should be. In July 2008, the Doha round of negotiations at the WTO broke down after developing countries could not reach an agreement with wealthy countries on agricultural trade. The IMF is under pressure to reform its governance to provide better representation to middle-income and poor countries. And development experts admonish the world about the growing gap between the world's affluent countries and “the bottom billion” (Collier 2007). It used to be that economic-development strategies would target economic growth and “let the rising tide lift all ships.” Now, there is growing concern that growth be inclusive in order to make optimal use of societal resources and mitigate the political volatility that results when substantial segments of societies are excluded from the benefits of development.

This is a history of illegitimacy in America. And here is my text, drawn from three Russians, who understand illegitimacy better than anyone else.

Why did Obama defeat McCain in 2008? As with any national election outcome, the immediate culprit that comes to mind is economic performance. When the U.S. is prosperous, the electorate votes the incumbent presidential party back into office. When the U.S. economy sours, the incumbent (or incumbent party) loses. In 2008, the application of this rule led to a correct prediction once again. Economy up, Republicans out. It is difficult to challenge this conventional wisdom that the economy contributed to the transfer of the White House from the Republicans to Democrat Obama.

The American economy and financial system is experiencing upheaval on a scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. A number of the largest and most established banks and investment firms have declared bankruptcy (including Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers) or been taken over at fire-sale rates (as was the case, for example, with Merrill Lynch). In the fall of 2008, Congress and the U.S. Treasury along with the Federal Reserve Bank committed more than eight trillion dollars in payments, loans, and guarantees of various sorts to prop up financial institutions (including the semi-governmental mortgage entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) as well as the country's largest insurer, American International Group (AIG). The speed, number, and scope of these interventions lack historical precedent.

In June 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rocked the food industry—and food lovers—with its warning about tainted tomatoes. Consumers in New Mexico and Texas were contracting a rare, sometimes fatal strain of salmonella and the FDA feared that salmonella contamination from tomatoes was the cause. In the weeks that followed, a major outbreak spread across the country and worried consumers abandoned tomatoes. Fourth of July cookouts were not the same, and BLT lovers complained that their favorite sandwich was impossibly dry. By the end of July, the outbreak had infected more than 1,200 persons in 42 states.

John Echeverri-Gent's (2009) fine article in this symposium makes a compelling case for a greater focus on the study of inequality by political scientists. A topic we have too often neglected, its dynamics go to the core of our disciplinary concerns and we clearly should have more to offer to its understanding. APSA is to be commended for supporting the work of the Task Force on Difference, Inequality, and Developing Societies (2008), which Echeverri-Gent led, and which, in large part, informs his article in these pages. It should generate a renewed focus by political scientists on international inequality and on the role of domestic inequality in the development process.

In recent years political scientists and economists have spent considerable efforts investigating the impact of income inequality both on political institutions and social conflict (Boix 2003, 2008; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Geddes 2007) and on growth and development (Atkinson and Bourguignon 2000). In this article I focus on the latter question: I discuss the extent to which (that is, the conditions under which) inequality may hinder economic growth. I do so by moving away from the current literature, which models the relationship between development and inequality in a linear fashion—with the latter unconditionally distorting (or boosting) the incentives to invest and therefore reducing (or increasing) the rate of growth. Instead, I claim that the potential correlation between inequality and development will be always conditional on the (mostly political and institutional) causes that generate the existing income distribution to start with. Hence it is not surprising to find instances in which growth and (mostly temporary) inequality come hand in hand as well as other periods and countries where there is both high and persistent inequality jointly with economic stagnation.

The idea that economic conditions influence election outcomes and voting behavior is hardly novel and would appear to be close to uniformly accepted, especially in the case of American presidential elections. Beginning with the early aggregate studies (Arcelus and Meltzer 1975; Bloom and Price 1975; Kramer 1971; Tufte 1978) and the important individual-level work that followed soon thereafter (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Fiorina 1981), election scholars have devoted considerable attention to the influence of the economy on voting behavior and election outcomes. Although the findings are many and sometimes disparate, a few general conclusions have emerged: economic voting is incumbency oriented rather than policy oriented (Fiorina 1981; Kiewiet 1983); at the individual level, evaluations of the national economy are more closely tied to vote choice than are evaluations of personal finances (Kiewiet 1983; Kinder and Kiewiet 1979, 1981; Kinder, Adams, and Gronke 1989); and, with the exception of 2000, the incumbent party is habitually returned to office when economic times are good and tossed out when economic times are bad (Campbell and Garand 2000). In short, we know a lot about how the economy influences voters and elections, and it would seem that there are few issues left to resolve.

Political scientists who have conducted research abroad experience excitement as well as great disappointment. Meeting and utilizing the help of knowledgeable, responsive interviewees can be exhilarating; yet a cancelled interview, illness, and lack of funds dampens the social scientific enterprise. In this symposium, we discuss the nuts and bolts of field research and we explore the constraints and opportunities that arise from the interaction of researchers' personal identities (gender, race, class, religion, nationality, and age) and their research context. We contend that most training received before fieldwork focuses little, if at all, on the personal consequences of leaving one's home for a year, trying to integrate into another culture, and facing (mis)perceptions based on one's identity. As the quotations above indicate, the symposium hopes to demonstrate how a researcher can be gutsy in the uncharted waters of fieldwork, especially with interactions pertaining to one's identities. Although we acknowledge that no preparation will entirely eradicate disappointing days in the field and misperceptions of identity, we encourage new field researchers and graduate students to be aware that the process of accessing data abroad is an intensely personal one. The symposium contributors are comparativists, mainly at the career stages of assistant professor and recently tenured professor, who have researched in Argentina, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Ethiopia, France, India, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

On September 8, 2008, the Trial-heat Forecasting Model predicted that in-party candidate Senator John McCain would receive 52.7% of the national two-party popular presidential vote. The forecast of a victory of modest proportions for Senator McCain reflected his having a five-percentage-point lead over Senator Barack Obama in Gallup's early September, post-convention poll (49% to 44%) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis' August report of a 3.3% GDP growth rate in the second quarter of the year, about average for a second quarter election year economy.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

The Primary Model predicted that Barack Obama would win a narrow victory with 50.1% of the major-party vote. Obama surpassed that forecast by just a little more than one standard error (2.5). How come the model came as close as it did with a forecast issued as early as January? What prevented it from coming even closer? And what might be done to improve the model?

We believe the economy was much on voters' minds in the 2008 presidential election. More formally, a traditional economic retrospective voting theory—electors disapprove of past economic conditions and vote against the government—should serve well as an explanation of Obama's victory (Fiorina 1981; Lewis-Beck 1988, 34).

Our symposium offers a variety of perspectives, such as on self-perpetuation of inequality in the international system, or on the consequences of inequality for economic growth or for social and political conflicts. This contribution discusses the determinants of domestic policy choices that affect inequality and the consequences of these policy choices. The empirical focus is on Latin American countries, which collectively are characterized by the highest regional levels of inequality in the world, but individually show considerable variation. Different analyses have emphasized different causes of income inequality and of the variation in inequality, such as historical structural roots in land distribution and natural-resource endowments, geography, ethnic divisions, the economic context, demographics, and state action or lack thereof. The role of the state has not received much systematic attention until rather recently, though, despite its essential role in the allocation of resources.

After an exhausting 22-hour trip from St. Louis, I landed in Maputo, Mozambique, alone, for the first time in July 2003 to begin my dissertation research on women and women's organizations in Mozambique since democratization. I spent an hour talking to a young man who was returning home (to Maputo) from Brazil. Seeing it as an opportunity to practice my Portuguese with someone who spoke English, I did not realize that an hour had passed and my “welcoming party” still had not arrived. The young man and I switched from Portuguese to English as he began telling me the “cool places to hang out and get a drink” in Maputo. I had no idea who was coming to pick me up as I was armed only with the information that it was my in-country advisor's brother who would be there. As this young man and I were talking someone came up to me and asked, “Are you Frances?” With a sigh of relief, I said yes, and he replied, “I was here all of the time and I did not realize that you were here until I heard you speaking English with this young man. I did not recognize you; we thought you would be white.”