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Notes from the Editor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2004

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Each year at this time it is my pleasure to acknowledge the contributions that hundreds of reviewers have made to the APSR and, through it, to the profession. The individuals whose names are listed in “APSR External Reviewers 2003–2004” later in this issue served as reviewers—some of several papers—between mid-August, 2003 and mid-August, 2004. They have my sincere gratitude for their service, sine qua non.

Type
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR
Copyright
© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

Each year at this time it is my pleasure to acknowledge the contributions that hundreds of reviewers have made to the APSR and, through it, to the profession. The individuals whose names are listed in “APSR External Reviewers 2003–2004” later in this issue served as reviewers—some of several papers—between mid-August, 2003 and mid-August, 2004. They have my sincere gratitude for their service, sine qua non.

It is also my pleasure to acknowledge the contributions of the six Editorial Board members who have served as the APSR's Executive Committee for the past three years: Neta Crawford, Darren Davis, Robert Goodin, Kirstie McClure, James Morrow, and Sven Steinmo. These worthies have taken considerable time away from their own endeavors to serve as the first line of defense when the beleaguered editor needs various forms of help, of which their wise counsel has stood out as much needed and much appreciated. For their generous contributions, I am greatly in their debt. They now return to the ranks of the Editorial Board. As they do so, a new shift, six-strong, replaces them on the Executive Committee. Over the next three years, I look forward to working with Ruth Grant, Edward Mansfield, K.C. Morrison, Thomas Remington, M. Elizabeth Sanders, and Robert Stein in this capacity; each has earned my gratitude for serving on the Editorial Board and now for being willing to serve on the Executive Committee. I am also pleased to announce the appointment of two new Editorial Board members, James Adams and Daniel Treisman, on whose reviewing versatility and prowess I have relied heavily during the past three years—good deeds for which they will now be appropriately punished. Finally, the changing of seasons has also brought a new crop of Editorial Assistants to our operation: Jennifer Deets, Beth Franker, Lee Michael (a recidivist), and Jenny Schulze. Our best wishes and thanks for valuable services rendered go to the departing Todd Andrews and Lan Chu.

IN THIS ISSUE

The first three articles in this issue have little in common temporally, theoretically, or methodologically. They share, however, an underlying interest in spatial distribution, and more particularly in the de jure or de facto borders and boundaries that separate people; hence this issue's cover graphic of apples, oranges, and other produce divided into adjoining bins. In “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi,” Daniel N. Posner confronts this theme head-on. Posner's point of departure is the international border that splits two African tribes into different countries. His research question is how this imposed barrier shapes ethnic politics in each country. Drawing on his extensive field research, Posner provides new theoretical and empirical perspectives on issues that, though of long standing, remain especially timely in venues far removed from Zambia and Malawi.

Despite their numerous dissimilarities, Claudine Gay's analysis has much in common with Posner's. In Gay's study, the “bins” into which people are divided—neighborhoods rather than nation-states—are smaller and not enshrined in law, but the research question is exactly the same. Prior research on the link between where Americans live and their attitudes concerning racial issues has focused largely on the racial composition of the residential area. American residential life continues to be highly racially segregated, but neighborhoods are becoming more and more diverse economically. This economic diversity is the central element of Gay's analysis of African Americans' attitudes on racial issues. The results presented in “Putting Race in Context: Identifying the Environmental Determinants of Black Racial Attitudes” have potentially far-reaching implications for understanding the impact of shifting residential patterns and the future of political consensus and group-based mobilization among African Americans.

Colin Elman's “Extending Offensive Realism: The Louisiana Purchase and America's Rise to Regional Hegemony” focuses on a vastly different case of borders and boundaries—the transfer of territory from one nation-state to another. The story of the Louisiana Purchase has often been told. Elman revisits it not merely because it was a fascinating and crucial episode in American and world history, but because it constitutes such a promising site for testing a prominent interpretation of international relations. How could the French have failed to foresee America's rise to regional hegemony? If they did foresee it, why did they fail to counter it? Elman contends that instead of responding to a rising hegemon by acting as a balancer, per standard offensive realism accounts, French officials were preoccupied by local concerns, which took priority over any structural incentive to balance. Thus a vast expanse of the North American continent was moved into a different bin and thus, too, Elman argues, a widely held proposition about the conduct of international relations must be modified or extended to account for such situations.

An ongoing debate about the impact of International Monetary Fund programs in Africa echoes Elman's analysis in some respects—particularly by focusing on the interplay between domestic and international considerations. In “The Political Economy of IMF Lending in Africa,” Randall W. Stone investigates the determinants of IMF lending practices. Stone downplays the importance of economic factors and instead invokes interactions among domestic and international political factors, such as the probability of a coup and relations with major powers, to explain both program interruptions and punishment intervals. This analysis provides new perspective on the debate that is currently raging over IMF programs and their effectiveness.

Comparative and international policy economy also provide the context for the next article, Cathie Jo Martin and Duane Swank's “Does the Organization of Capital Matter? Employers and Active Labor Market Policy at the National and Firm Levels.” Since Marx, the prevailing tendency has been to view the interests of big business and big labor as incompatible. Based on a combination of statistical analyses spanning 18 nations and interviews with representatives of firms in two nations, Martin and Swank provide a powerful challenge to conventional wisdom by showing that where businesses are organized along societal corporatist lines, business and labor share an interest in the extension of effective social programs.

As in the Martin-Swank article, business firms occupy center stage in Daniel P. Carpenter's “Protection Without Capture: Product Approval by a Politically Responsive, Learning Regulator.” Political scientists and economists have long held that government regulation favors large, well-established firms because their tremendous political influence enables them to “capture” the market and impede entry by smaller, newer competitors. Carpenter imagines an alternative political world where policymaking is free from political influence. In “Protection Without Capture: Product Approval by a Politically Responsive, Learning Regulator,” he considers whether factors other than “capture,” such as the regulatory agency's reputation among consumers, can account for some of the advantages that large, established firms enjoy.

Rather than regarding stability and change as phenomena that require different modes of explanation, in “A Theory of Endogenous Institutional Change” Avner Greif and David D. Laitin propose a common theoretical framework for analyzing both. The key to this enterprise is the bridge they build between historical institutionalist and game theoretic approaches, which enables them simultaneously to address the questions of how and why institutions change and how and why they persist within changing environments. Greif and Laitin's contextual accounts of formal governing institutions in early modern Europe and of cleavage structures in the contemporary world provide backdrops for their introduction of concepts like “quasi-parameters” and “self-reinforcement.” Collectively, these concepts promise to enrich understandings of institutional dynamics and to push future analyses in new directions.

Humorous faux historical plaques that read “In 1776, nothing happened here” inadvertently raise a methodological issue that is quite serious for many political scientists: how to identify “negative” cases— nonoccurrences—in order to foster theoretically productive comparisons. For analytic purposes, researchers trying to account for, say, the outbreak of war, presumably need to isolate a set of instances in which war did not break out. But that can be an extremely tricky undertaking in the absence of clear guidelines. In “The Possibility Principle: Choosing Negative Cases in Comparative Research,” James Mahoney and Gary Goertz come to the aid of researchers beset by this issue. Whereas existing work on case selection treats the population of pertinent cases as already known, Mahoney and Goertz emphasize that the definition of the population of cases must be settled before issues concerning case selection enter the picture. By sharply differentiating the “possibility principle”—roughly speaking, the idea that the outcome of interest must have been possible for the negative case to be pertinent—from alternative ways of thinking about the issue, they contribute to a systematization of social science methodology that has important implications for researchers engaged in both quantitative and qualitative modes of analysis.

In “Political Preference Formation: Competition, Deliberation, and the (Ir)relevance of Framing Effects,” James N. Druckman brings ideas about two of the trendiest topics in the political behavior subfield—framing and deliberation—to bear on the long-running debate about the rationality of decision making. Research in the Kahneman-Tversky tradition has posed some formidable challenges to those who work in the rational choice-based tradition. By examining conditions under which framing effects do and do not occur, Druckman provides theoretical reasons and experimental grounds for not abandoning rationality as an important component of explaining political behavior. His analysis should attract considerable attention not only from political scientists, but from economists and psychologists as well, and it holds out promise for helping to integrate ideas drawn from diverse theoretical perspectives.

That Americans and citizens of other “advanced” democracies tend to be largely uninformed about political issues is well known. Rather than cursing the darkness of such ignorance, Jason Barabas offers up a potential candle of enlightenment: deliberation. The results that Barabas reports in “How Deliberation Affects Policy Opinions” suggest that people learn from new information and diverse perspectives only when they deliberate on, not merely discuss, the issues. Here, then, is a study that not only speaks to theoretical questions of intense interest to political scientists, but also offers practical applications to improve real-life public discourse.

Dovetailing with Barabas' consideration of public opinion formation, the final article in this issue focuses on another aspect of “textbook” democracy, this time from a vantage point other than the United States. Strong parties are often seen, from a “responsible parties” perspective, as providing voters with distinct and coherent programs that can be readily translated into policy. Whether that perspective is borne out in practice is less clear, however, as Brian F. Crisp, Kristin Kanthak, and Jenny Leijonhufvud establish in their analysis of the behavior of Chilean legislators. In “The Reputations Legislators Build: With Whom Should Representatives Collaborate?,” Crisp and his colleagues provide a new theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of the linkage between electoral rules and legislative decision making. This study's underlying ideas and methods should be applicable in multiple institutional settings, extending the study's significance beyond the immediate case of Chile.

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