Only connect….” E. M. Forster's admonition in Howards End resonates with this issue of Perspectives on Politics in several ways. The connection that Forster pushes most insistently is “building … the … bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion.” Writing, reviewing, and editing an article for Perspectives is mostly about the prose. But the sorts of articles that belong in Perspectives have a passion—for politics, for inquiry, for a particular population or problem or region of the world—not too far below the surface. The trick, of course, is to use the passion to inspire, but not to control, the prose.

The Council of the American Political Science Association approved the appointment of a Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy in the fall of 2002. A fifteen-member task force was convened in January 2003 and collectively worked during the subsequent eighteen months to prepare extensive reviews of research on inequality and American democracy. (The research reviews are available on the APSA Web site—as are materials for undergraduate and graduate teaching—http://www.apsanet.org/inequality.) Based on three reviews, the task force prepared a short report, which forms the basis of the present text. It concludes that progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled—and in some arenas reversed. The task force's work was extensively and rigorously debated among its members, scrutinized by three distinguished independent peers, and reviewed by the APSA Council. This report is ultimately the responsibility of its authors; no opinions, statements of fact, or conclusions should be attributed to the American Political Science Association or to the Russell Sage Foundation, which provided some support to the task force. The members of the task force are: Lawrence Jacobs (Chair, University of Minnesota), Ben Barber (University of Maryland), Larry Bartels (Princeton University), Michael Dawson (Harvard University), Morris Fiorina (Stanford University), Jacob Hacker (Yale University), Rodney Hero (Notre Dame University), Hugh Heclo (George Mason University), Claire Jean Kim (University of California, Irvine), Suzanne Mettler (Syracuse University), Benjamin Page (Northwestern University), Dianne Pinderhughes (University of Illinois, Champagne–Urbana), Kay Lehman Schlozman (Boston College), Theda Skocpol (Harvard University), and Sidney Verba (Harvard University).

Post–World War II political science in America has been described (by me, that is) as an excuse, concocted by college professors, for avoiding actual political engagement while not actually achieving science. Too much work by too many colleagues over too many decades deserves that dismissive characterization, but not so for the report penned by the professors who led the American Political Science Association Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy. Theirs—ours!—is arguably the most important and timely report ever produced by APSA. As I told the task force when I served as one of its discussants, the report is terrific and makes me proud to be a card-carrying member of APSA.At Penn, John J. DiIulio Jr. serves as faculty director of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society. In 2001 he served as the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He is coeditor with E. J. Dionne of What's God Got to Do With the American Experiment?

According to the APSA report, “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” in the United States economic and political inequality are feeding on each another. Since the 1970s, earnings, income, and wealth have become more unequal, while politics is becoming more elitist. Rising inequality is corrupting our democracy, especially through the rising role that money plays in politics. At the same time a more exclusive government exacerbates, or at least tolerates, growing inequality.Lawrence M. Mead testifies regularly to Congress on poverty, welfare, and social policy and has written many books and articles on the politics of poverty and welfare reform, most recently Lifting up the Poor (with Mary Jo Bane) and Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin.

Together, the final reports of the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy and its three working groups constitute a remarkable resource for students of contemporary American politics. Most striking in these materials is the depiction of a reinforcing cycle of political and economic inequality. The task force report argues that inequalities in political voice reverberate in patterns of governance, which in turn give rise to public policies that reinforce political inequalities.Margaret Weir has written widely on social policy and politics in the United States and is the author of several books, including Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States. The author would like to thank Jennifer Hochschild for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Does deepening economic inequality in the United States threaten our democracy? This is the fundamental question posed by the APSA task force report, and the answer is a resounding Yes. The critical synthesis of the literature on participation, governance, and policy is intellectually provocative, and the forceful presentation of recent trends in political inequality that support this conclusion underscores important practical implications for the nation's political economy.Linda Faye Williams' book The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America won the 2004 W. E. B. DuBois award for best book of the year (National Conference of Black Political Scientists); the Best Book of 2004 on Public Policy (APSA's Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics); and the 2004 Michael Harrington Award (APSA's Caucus for a New Political Science).

Recent advances in the neurosciences offer a wealth of new information about how the brain works, and how the body and mind interact. These findings offer important and surprising implications for work in political science. Specifically, emotion exerts an impact on political decisions in decisive and significant ways. While its importance in political science has frequently been either dismissed or ignored in favor of theories that privilege rational reasoning, emotion can provide an alternate basis for explaining and predicting political choice and action. In this article, I posit a view of decision making that rests on an integrated notion of emotional rationality.Rose McDermott is the author of Risk Taking in International Relations (1998) and Political Psychology in International Relations (2004) and works largely in the areas of political psychology, experimentation, and American foreign policy. The author is grateful to Jennifer Hochschild, Robert Jervis, and Stephen Rosen for generous and constructive advice and encouragement; and to Gerald Clore, Jonathan Cowden, Thomas Kozachek, Jonathan Mercer, Joanne Miller, Philip Zimbardo, the members of the Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop at Harvard, and anonymous reviewers for useful guidance and suggestions.

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

—William Penn, Fruits of Solitude (1693)

We consider affective processing to be an evolutionary antecedent to more complex forms of information processing; but higher cognition requires the guidance provided by affective processing.

—Ralph Adolphs and Antonio Damasio, “The Interaction of Affect and Cognition” (2001)

In this article we propose that evolutionary biology can supply political science with a theory of the ultimate causes of human preferences and behaviors that it otherwise lacks. For the most part, political scientists are either unfamiliar with the social side of evolutionary theory or misidentify its key features. Far from being genetically deterministic or leading exclusively to predictions that all human behavior will be selfish, modern evolutionary theories stress that adaptive behavior is frequently characterized by a guarded sort of cooperation. We describe modern biological theory, offer our own version of it, discuss new and potentially useful interpretations of political attitudes and public policies, and present scientific evidence, drawn from research on autistic individuals and monozygotic and dizygotic twins, of the startlingly important role genetics plays in shaping politically relevant attitudes and behaviors.The authors are grateful to Chris Larimer, Levente Littvay, David Rapkin, Kevin Smith, Jeff Spinner-Halev, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Mainstream comparative research on political institutions focuses primarily on formal rules. Yet in many contexts, informal institutions, ranging from bureaucratic and legislative norms to clientelism and patrimonialism, shape even more strongly political behavior and outcomes. Scholars who fail to consider these informal rules of the game risk missing many of the most important incentives and constraints that underlie political behavior. In this article we develop a framework for studying informal institutions and integrating them into comparative institutional analysis. The framework is based on a typology of four patterns of formal-informal institutional interaction: complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive. We then explore two issues largely ignored in the literature on this subject: the reasons and mechanisms behind the emergence of informal institutions, and the nature of their stability and change. Finally, we consider challenges in research on informal institutions, including issues of identification, measurement, and comparison.Gretchen Helmke's book Courts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina, will be published by Cambridge University Press. Steven Levitsky is the author of Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective and is currently writing a book on competitive authoritarian regimes in the post–Cold War era. The authors thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame for generously sponsoring conferences on informal institutions. The authors also gratefully acknowledge comments from Jorge Domínguez, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Dennis Galvan, Goran Hyden, Jack Knight, Lisa Martin, Hillel Soifer, Benjamin Smith, Susan Stokes, María Victoria Murillo, and Kurt Weyland, as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Perspectives on Politics.

In this article, I consider the claims made by those who advocate greater inclusion of religiously based organizations in the public realm. I examine two ostensibly “religion-blind” models—pluralist-accommodationist and noncognizant—used to justify inclusion, along with current jurisprudence, in the context of President Bush's faith-based initiative. I contend that corporate freedom of conscience in its state-sponsored applications often unfairly affects those who do not subscribe to the beliefs of religious organizations. I thus reject public funding of religiously based organizations, or those in which religious faith is a central organizing element, unless the recipients are required to adhere to the rules that govern secularly based organizations.Emily R. Gill has taught at Bradley University for 32 years. She has published a number of articles and book chapters. Her Becoming Free: Autonomy and Diversity in the Liberal Polity was published in 2001. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild, the associate editors, and anonymous reviewers for many constructive comments and suggestions.

Two years ago, a research team comprising two political scientists, Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn, and two legal academics, Pauline Kim and Theodore Ruger, set out to forecast the votes cast and outcome reached in each case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court during its 2002–3 term. To generate the predictions, the researchers turned to approaches to decision making dominant in their respective fields. The political scientists devised a statistical model, which assumes, in line with the vast disciplinary literature on the subject, that judicial decisions are largely a function of politics and case facts. The legal academics went in a different direction. To tap a common belief in their field—that Court decisions reflect law and jurisprudential principles—they asked appellate lawyers and legal scholars (“experts” in particular areas of the law) to predict the outcome of each of the term's decisions. The researchers then posted all the forecasts on the Project's Web site (http://wusct.wustl.edu), along with the actual votes and outcomes as the Court handed down its decisions. As it turned out, the statistical model produced far more accurate predictions of case outcomes than the experts (75 percent versus 59.1 percent), while the experts did marginally better at forecasting the votes of individual justices (67.9 percent versus 66.7 percent).Lee Epstein thanks Jennifer L. Hochschild, Nancy Staudt, and the journal's reviewers for their comments on her essay, as well as for their help in shaping the symposium.

Political scientists and legal academics have long scrutinized the U.S. Supreme Court's work to understand what motivates the justices. Despite significant differences in methodology, both disciplines seek to explain the Court's decisions by focusing on examining past cases. This retrospective orientation is surprising. In other areas of government, for example, presidential elections and congressional decision making, political scientists engage in systematic efforts to predict outcomes, yet few have done this for court decisions. Legal academics, too, possess expertise that should enable them to forecast legal events with some accuracy. After all, the everyday practice of law requires lawyers to predict court decisions in order to advise clients or determine litigation strategies.The authors thank Michael Cherba, Nancy Cummings, David Dailey, Alison Garvey, Nick Hershman, and Robin Rimmer for their assistance. Their project is supported in part by National Science Foundation grants SES-0135855 and SES 0136679. The foundation bears no responsibility for the results or conclusions.

The authors of this fascinating study modestly disclaim its significance, yet suggest that the results prove their model a success. As a legal expert, I have a rather different perspective on the results. I look at the numbers holistically, not statistically. And what I see tells a different story—if it tells any story at all.Suzanna Sherry thanks Rebecca Brown, Paul Edelman, and Erin O'Hara for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

One of my favorite political scientists (and mentors in graduate school) defined a great idea as one he would have liked to have had himself. The Supreme Court Forecasting Project is a great idea, one I wish I had hatched. It is such a good idea that it is a little surprising no one had attempted it earlier. I commend this team and urge them, as I shall say in more detail later, to continue, expand, and perhaps redirect this undertaking. That this team combines legal academics and political scientists is a happy sign of the more general recognition in both disciplines of the great things we have to offer each other.Gregory A. Caldeira was Jack N. Pritzker Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School when he wrote this commentary.

Scrolling through the results of the Supreme Court Forecasting Project in July 2003, I regarded nearly every prediction as within the realm of plausibility until I reached the statistical model's forecast of the outcome in Lawrence v. Texas, the gay rights case. The model predicted that the Supreme Court would affirm by a 5–4 vote the judgment of the Texas Court of Appeals that the state's law criminalizing gay sex was constitutional. This was such a gaffe that it led me to question whether all the fancy modeling was worth the effort. (Two of the three experts correctly predicted a 6–3 reversal; the third made the same mistake as the model.)For her coverage of the Court, Linda Greenhouse was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1998. In 2002 the American Political Science Association presented her with its Carey McWilliams Award “for a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics.”

The first Monday in October marks a ritual that has become as sacred in the United States as circumcision is in Judaism or sainthood and sacrament in Catholicism, as hajj is for Islam or the singing of “God Save the Queen” in Britain. First Monday in October is also the title of a popular 1981 Hollywood film starring Jill Clayburgh and Walter Matthau, in which the first woman appointed to the Court, a staunch conservative, spars with the Court's reigning liberal. Through several vapid comedic encounters they develop affection and collegial respect for each other.Susan S. Silbey thanks Tom Burke, Keith Bybee, Howard Gillman, Doug Goodman, and Jessica Silbey for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Are school desegregation proponents more likely to succeed in local political arenas in the South than in federal courtrooms? To raise that question on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education may seem absurd. Had local politics in the South been receptive to desegregation efforts, there would presumably have been scant need for the litigation leading to that landmark case. However, the legal environment, national political climate, and political situation in southern school districts have changed considerably in fifty years—in ways that make the question relevant. Today, we suggest, the answer may frequently be yes.Stephen Samuel Smith is the author of Boom for Whom? Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte. Karen M. Kedrowski is author of Media Entrepreneurs and the Media Enterprise in the U.S. Congress. Joseph M. Ellis is interested in Soviet and post-Soviet politics. The authors thank Manning B. Shaw III for skilled research assistance; Ted Arrington, William Crotty, Anita Earls, Ken Meier, Jennifer Hochschild, and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments; and the Spencer Foundation and the Winthrop University Research Council for grants to Smith. The authors bear sole responsibility for any errors.

In the March 2004 Perspectives on Politics Gabriel Almond, Kristen Renwick Monroe, and Michael Neblo discuss what made the Chicago Political Science Department of the 1920s great. I believe that my distinguished friend and erstwhile colleague, Gabriel Almond, set this important discussion off on a misleading note by talking about a Chicago school of politics, thus inducing an unconvincing discussion of what the leading figures of the department supposedly had in common. The character of the university and the innovative work of its leaders did indeed make the department great. But collective greatness does not in itself constitute a school.In addition to his work in political science, Morton A. Kaplan has published in philosophy.

Browsing the book exhibit room at any major political science conference these days, one notices what seems to be a bonanza of new edited volumes that examine political psychology as a discipline within political science or provide a variety of research essays aimed at introducing the reader to the subfield. Although psychology has always been an important component of political analysis, the prevalence of these books suggests a growing, or renewed, interest among political scientists in using insights from social and cognitive psychology to understand political phenomena—an interest that spurs these scholarly attempts to demarcate the conceptual and methodological structure of political psychology as a subfield. As Wendy Rahn, John Sullivan, and Thomas Rudolph have noted, this interest has emerged over the years partly in response to the rise of rational choice theory in political science. Regardless of the specific topic at hand, political psychology research often challenges the assumptions of rational choice models and adds nuance to the insights of rational choice theory. It offers rigorous empirical demonstrations of how systematic and predictable psychological processes affect whether traditional assumptions of rationality do or do not hold and, conversely, how the structure of political institutions affects psychological processes. These empirical critiques and modifications of rational choice theory make political psychology a compelling line of inquiry to scholars from a variety of methodological and substantive backgrounds.Deborah J. Schildkraut thanks Jennifer Hochschild, the staff at Perspectives on Politics, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous assistance.

Deliberation Day. By Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 288p. $30.00.

Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government. By Ethan J. Leib. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. 156p. $27.50.

Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy. By Henry S. Richardson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 328p. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Compelling theories of politics invite us to see the world differently. But once we see political life in different terms, what will we be moved to do? Redesign our political institutions? Or revise our reasons for supporting those that currently exist? As the authors of the three books reviewed here illustrate, those who have taken up deliberative theories of democracy are moved to engage in profoundly different kinds of projects, marked either by redesign or revision. Bruce Ackerman, James Fishkin, and Ethan Leib believe their commitments to theories of deliberative democracy require them to focus on drafting extensive plans for institutional redesign. By contrast, Henry Richardson, while endorsing institutional reforms, ranging from changing electoral law to opening administrative rule making to greater citizen participation (pp. 200–202, 219–22), devotes the majority of his book to showing how the ideals of his theory of deliberative democracy can make better and more complete sense of political life as it is. The deep contrast between how these authors understand what one ought to do with a commitment to deliberative democracy prompts us to consider whether they are simply committed to different things or are striking out on different paths from substantially similar starting points instead.