This issue of the Review completes the sixth and final volume to appear with my name on the masthead. Over the last six years, our readers will have noticed and will, I hope, have admired the striking graphics adorning the cover of each issue (for which I continue to express my appreciation to Rob Hauck and Steve Yoder of the APSA office). Those who have taken the trouble to read the editorial comments that have opened every issue will also know that in each instance the cover graphic has been keyed to the theme of the “lead” article in an issue. This issue is the lone exception to that pattern—an exception born of a small bit of self-indulgence on the part of the departing editor.

How do Americans acquire the impression that their political foes have some understandable basis for their views, and thus represent a legitimate opposition? How do they come to believe that reasonable people may disagree on any given political controversy? Given that few people talk regularly to those of opposing perspectives, some theorize that mass media, and television in particular, serve as an important source of exposure to the rationales for oppositional views. A series of experimental studies suggests that television does, indeed, have the capacity to encourage greater awareness of oppositional perspectives. However, common characteristics of televised political discourse—incivility and close-up camera perspectives—cause audiences to view oppositional perspectives as less legitimate than they would have otherwise. I discuss the broader implications of these findings for assessments of the impact of television on the political process, and for the perspective that televised political discourse provides on oppositional political views.

What is the effect of democratic competition on the power of elites to frame public opinion? We address this issue first by defining the range of competitive contexts that might surround any debate over a policy issue. We then offer a theory that predicts how audiences, messages, and competitive environments interact to influence the magnitude of framing effects. These hypotheses are tested using experimental data gathered on the opinions of adults and college students toward two policy issues—the management of urban growth and the right of an extremist group to conduct a rally. Our results indicate that framing effects depend more heavily on the qualities of frames than on their frequency of dissemination and that competition alters but does not eliminate the influence of framing. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for the study of public opinion and democratic political debate.

Recent work in political economics has examined the positive relationship between legislative size and spending, which Weingast et al. (1981) formalized as the law of 1/n. However, empirical tests of this theory have produced a pattern of divergent findings. The positive relationship between seats and spending appears to hold consistently for unicameral legislatures and for upper chambers in bicameral legislatures but not for lower chambers. We bridge this gap between theory and empirics by extending Weingast et al.'s model to account for bicameralism in the context of a Baron–Ferejohn bargaining game. Our comparative statics predict, and empirical data from U.S. state legislatures corroborate, that the size of the upper chamber (n) is a positive predictor of expenditure, whereas the ratio of lower-to-upper chamber seats (k) exhibits a negative effect. We refer to these relationships as the law of k/n, as the two variables influence spending in opposite directions.

Civil war settlements create institutional arrangements that in turn shape postsettlement politics among the parties to the previous conflict. Following civil wars that involve competing nation-state projects, partition is more likely than alternative institutional arrangements—specifically, unitarism, de facto separation, and autonomy arrangements—to preserve the peace and facilitate democratization. A theory of domestic political institutions as a constraint on reescalation of conflict explains this unexpected relationship through four intermediate effects—specifically, the likelihood that each institutional arrangement will reinforce incompatible national identities, focus the pursuit of greed and grievance on a single zero-sum conflict over the allocation of decision rights, empower the parties to the previous conflict with multiple escalatory options, and foster incompatible expectations of victory. The theory's predictions stand up under statistical tests that use four alternative datasets.

We investigate whether political institutions can promote attachment to the state in multiethnic societies. Building on literatures on nationalism, democratization, and conflict resolution, we discuss the importance of attachment, understood as a psychological identification with, and pride in, the state. We construct a model of state attachment, specifying the individual-, group-, and state-level conditions that foster it. Then, using cross-national survey data from 51 multiethnic states, we show that, in general, ethnic minorities manifest less attachment to the states in which they reside than do majorities. Combining the survey data with minority group attributes and country-level attributes, we show that the attachment of minorities varies importantly across groups and countries. Our central finding is that federalism and proportional electoral systems—two highly touted solutions to ethnic divisions—have at best mixed effects. These results have implications for state-building and democratic consolidation in ethnically heterogeneous states.

A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity to low levels of public goods provision. Yet although the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanisms through which this relationship operates. We identify three families of mechanisms that link diversity to public goods provision—what we term “preferences,” “technology,” and “strategy selection” mechanisms—and run a series of experimental games that permit us to compare the explanatory power of distinct mechanisms within each of these three families. Results from games conducted with a random sample of 300 subjects from a slum neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, suggest that successful public goods provision in homogenous ethnic communities can be attributed to a strategy selection mechanism: in similar settings, co-ethnics play cooperative equilibria, whereas non-co-ethnics do not. In addition, we find evidence for a technology mechanism: co-ethnics are more closely linked on social networks and thus plausibly better able to support cooperation through the threat of social sanction. We find no evidence for prominent preference mechanisms that emphasize the commonality of tastes within ethnic groups or a greater degree of altruism toward co-ethnics, and only weak evidence for technology mechanisms that focus on the impact of shared ethnicity on the productivity of teams.

Political theorists from Martha Nussbaum to Amitai Etzioni appeal to compassion as a basis that liberalism otherwise lacks for refraining from exploiting and even for helping others. However, critics like Clifford Orwin and Richard Boyd have raised this question: is compassion too weak and undiscriminating to rely on in politics? Jean-Jacques Rousseau's account of compassion helps answer it. Rousseau understands compassion as a useful manifestation of the otherwise dangerous desire to extend the self and show signs of power. Consequently, he considers compassion's relative weakness a strength and explains how it can be supplemented and complemented by other, independent motives for serving others, including gratitude, friendship, and obligation. Compassion's weakness also makes it less likely than self-love, narrowly conceived, to overwhelm reason. Rousseau excels compassion's contemporary defenders in his awareness of the complex relationship between compassion and other social passions and of the dangers that his understanding of compassion addresses.

How can we conduct cross-cultural inquiry without reproducing the ethnocentric categories that prompt critique in the first place? Postcolonial and comparative political theorists have called into question the “universal” applicability of Western liberal political norms, but their critiques are drawn most often from competing Western discourses (e.g., poststructuralism) rather than from the culturally diverse traditions of scholarship whose ideas they examine. In contrast, I suggest attending to these culturally situated traditions of scholarship, especially their methods of inquiry, in addition to their substantive ideas. This method-centered approach reinterprets cross-cultural engagement, not as a tool for modifying existing parochial debates on the basis of “non-Western” cases, but as an opportunity to ask new questions through alternative frames of reference. Examining the interpretive methodologies of two Chinese classicists, I show how their methods offer not only new ideas but also new methods for the practice of political and cross-cultural theory.

Although turmoil characterized both the Middle East and East Asia in the two decades following World War II, the two regions looked dramatically different at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Since 1965 the incidence of interstate wars and militarized conflicts has been nearly five times higher in the Middle East, as was their severity, including the use of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons. By contrast, declining militarized conflict and rising intraregional cooperation has replaced earlier patterns in East Asia. There are no systematic efforts explaining this contrast between Bella Levantina and an evolving Pax Asiatica. This article traces these diverging paths to competing domestic models of political survival. East Asian leaders pivoted their political control on economic performance and integration in the global economy, whereas Middle East leaders relied on inward-looking self-sufficiency, state and military entrepreneurship, and a related brand of nationalism. I examine permissive and catalytic conditions explaining the models' emergence; their respective intended and unintended effects on states, military, and authoritarian institutions; and their implications for regional conflict. The final section distills conceptual and methodological conclusions.

Existing theories of labor protest depend on independent organizations representing workers. However, in many countries most workers are either not organized at all or are in labor unions intended for control, not representation. This is particularly the case in partially liberalized or hybrid regimes where, despite the introduction of electoral competition, autonomous, democratic organizations representing labor are not well developed. Yet such workers do protest. Drawing on an original new dataset from one hybrid regime, post-Communist Russia, I develop a theory of labor protest and of the institutional mechanisms used by elites to influence it. Instead of being a function of union membership or characteristics of the information environment, as the existing literature would have it, protest occurs when it is in the interest of powerful elements of the elite, or when economic conditions are truly desperate.

In many resources-allocation problems, strategic adversaries move sequentially and are likely to have private information about the effectiveness of their spending. A defender, for example, often has to allocate its defensive resources before an attacker (e.g., a terrorist group) decides where to strike. Defenders are also likely to have private information about the vulnerability of the things they are trying to protect. Sequential decisions and private information about effectiveness creates a dilemma for a defender. Allocating more to a highly vulnerable site reduces the expected losses should that site be attacked but may also signal that that site is more vulnerable and thereby increase the probability of an attack. Modeling this tradeoff as a signaling game, the analysis shows that secrecy concerns generally swamp vulnerability concerns when more vulnerable sites are weakly harder to protect on the margin. The defender pools in equilibrium, that is, allocates its resources in the same way, regardless of the level of vulnerability. If more vulnerable sites are easier to protect on the margin, vulnerability concerns may swamp secrecy concerns.

Over the last decade the scholarship on judicial politics has increasingly emphasized the strategic aspects of decision making in the United States Supreme Court. This scholarship, however, has struggled with two significant limitations—the restriction to unidimensional policy spaces and the assumption of binary comparisons of alternatives. These two assumptions have the advantage of implying stable, predictable outcomes, but lack a sound theoretical foundation and assume away potentially important aspects of strategic behavior on the Court. In this article, we identify institutional features of the Court that, under certain conditions, allow us to relax these two assumptions without sacrificing stable, predictable policy outcomes. In particular, we formalize the “part-by-part” opinion voting used by the justices, a feature that, together with separable preferences over policy issues, implies stable policy outcomes around the issue-by-issue median of the justices.

Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass—a barrier to coordination—must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of the alternatives respond to the underlying fundamentals of the party's environment. An individual's ability to assess the fundamentals is his sense of direction. These three factors—the barriers to coordination, the need for direction, and an individual's sense of direction—combine to form an index of both the desirability and the feasibility of leadership. We offer insights into Michels' Iron Law: a sovereign party conference gives way to leadership by an individual or oligarchy if and only if the leadership index is sufficiently high. Leadership enhances the clarity of intraparty communication, but weakens the response of policy choices to the party's environment. Our model can also be applied to the coordination problems faced by instrumental voters in plurality-rule elections, and so relates to the psychological effect of Duverger's Law.

Morelli (1999) provides a model of government formation in which the parties make payoff demands and the order of moves is chosen by the leading party. Morelli's main proposition states that the ex post distribution of payoffs inside the coalition that forms is proportional to the distribution of relative ex ante bargaining power. We provide a counterexample in which the leading party is able to obtain the entire payoff; furthermore, there are coalitions for which proportional payoff division does not occur for any order of moves.

In this reply, I will focus on the implications of Montero and Vidal-Puga's finding, acknowledging that their result is correct. Thus, what follows should not be interpreted as a defense of the Proposition 2 of Morelli 1999, but as a clarification of the impact of this correction for the demand bargaining research agenda as a whole.