This issue of Perspectives on Politics presents a disparate sampling of research from across the discipline. The papers are diverse in terms of substantive focus, methodological approach, and disciplinary subfield. They offer, in various creative combinations, historical analysis, theoretical exploration, policy advice, and informed prognostication. More importantly perhaps, the authors whose work you find here range across ranks from the very junior to full professors and across institutional affiliations from small liberal arts colleges to some of our most prominent public and private research universities, all with several stops in between. In these ways I hope the work we are publishing does not simply reflect or even celebrate the diversity of our discipline. I hope instead that our continuing to publish work of this quality and provenance goes some distance toward insuring that rich diversity will remain a central feature of our future.

Against the backdrop of a decade-long wait for a Supreme Court vacancy, legal academics from across the political spectrum have recently proposed or supported significant constitutional or statutory reforms designed to limit the terms of Supreme Court justices and increase the pace of turnover at the Court. Fearing a Court that is increasingly out of touch with the national mood and staffed by justices of advanced age, advocates of term and age limits contend that the trend in Supreme Court tenures is inexorably upward. But are Supreme Court justices really serving longer now than in the past? If so, why? And what might such trends mean for American constitutional democracy? In a debate otherwise dominated by law professors—and largely without careful empirical analysis—we place the issue of judicial tenure in historical perspective, with special attention to the institutional development of the Court, the changing politics of the appointments process and the types of individuals who emerge from it, and to a lesser extent, broader socio-demographic trends in technology and medicine. In the process, we show how proponents of reforms designed to end life tenure have ignored a significant factor influencing patterns in judicial service: the decline of the “short-term” justice. Trends in judicial tenure, we argue, cannot be explained by more justices serving unusually long terms; rather, they are driven at least in part by the fact that fewer justices are serving relatively short terms. In this article, we consider why justices have retired after only short service throughout much of history, why they rarely do so today, the conditions under which future justices might be compelled to serve shorter terms, and the democratic gains and losses associated with short-term service on the Court. In sum, by following the rise and fall of the short-term justice over the course of American political development, we offer a new perspective, grounded in political science, on an issue currently occupying the attention of lawyers, journalists, and policymakers alike.Justin Crowe is Assistant Professor of Politics, Pomona College ([email protected]). Christopher F. Karpowitz is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Brigham Young University ([email protected]). We thank Chris Achen, Steve Burbank, Chris Eisgruber, Mark Graber, Ken Kersch, Kevin McGuire, David Stras, Keith Whittington, and two anonymous reviewers for encouragement and helpful feedback. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Albuquerque, NM.

The counter-majoritarian difficulty has for many years framed constitutional scholarship for both law professors and political scientists studying judicial review. Unfortunately, shared attention has not led to shared insights, as these scholars have remained isolated in their respective academies. Recently scholars have begun targeting this disciplinary barrier, and questioning whether developing norms of judicial supremacy have importantly raised the stakes of determining the legitimacy of courts setting policy in a democracy. This article proposes a new approach to the study of judicial review aimed at understanding systemic change rather than institutional legitimacy, using recent concerns over the drift from judicial review to judicial supremacy as a point of departure for study. I recommend, to both normative and positive scholars, a new and integrated focus on the relationship between judicial policymaking and wider transformations of the constitutional order that have previously been obscured by orienting constitutional scholarship around the counter-majoritarian difficulty.Allison M. Martens is: Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Louisville ([email protected]). She thanks Jeffrey Tulis, James Johnson and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions

Scholars have long expressed concern that the ascendance of the modern presidency since the New Deal and World War II, by hastening the decline of political parties and fostering the expansion of the administrative state, portended an era of chronically low public engagement and voter turnout and an increasingly fractious and impotent national politics. Presidents' inattentiveness to the demands of party-building and grassroots mobilization, coupled with their willingness to govern through administration, were seen as key obstacles to the revitalization of a politics based in widespread political interest and collective responsibility for public policy. This article argues that George W. Bush's potent combination of party leadership and executive administration, foreshadowed by Ronald Reagan's earlier efforts, suggests the emergence of a new presidential leadership synthesis and a “new” party system. This new synthesis does not promise a return to pre-modern party politics; rather, it indicates a rearticulation of the relationship between the presidency and the party system. The erosion of old old-style partisan politics allowed for a more national and issue-based party system to develop, forging new links between presidents and parties. As the 2006 elections reveal, however, it remains to be seen whether such parties, which are inextricably linked to executive-centered politics and governance, can perform the critical function of moderating presidential ambition and mobilizing public support for party principles and policies.Sidney M. Milkis is Professors of Politics ([email protected]) and Jesse H. Rhodes is a doctoral student ([email protected]) at the University of Virginia. The authors would like to thank the anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript for their thoughtful and constructive comments.

As reflected in theory, laboratory evidence, and field studies, altruistic punishment of defectors promotes cooperation. Costly self-enforcement of socially optimal behavior has a number of independent links in political science, economics, psychology, sociology, computer science, and biology. This paper integrates the study of sanctions-based provision of public goods in the social sciences with the research on evolutionary adaptedness of altruistic punishment in the life sciences. Altruistic punishment appears to be (1) economically rational, (2) evolutionarily robust as an individual propensity and as a cultural norm, (3) normatively more appealing than tit-for-tat, which is a reciprocal punishment by defection, and (4) socially common. The theoretical and empirical importance of altruistic punishment has immediate policy implications. Examination of commons around the world suggests that privatization and centralized coercion are not the only solutions to the tragedy of the commons. A viable policy alternative is to facilitate the evolution of the commons as a common-property regime with its own norms and a certain degree of independence.Oleg Smirnov is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stony Brook University ([email protected]). He would like to thank Terry Anderson, Daniel Benjamin, James Fowler, Tim Johnson, John Orbell, Tony Smith, Wally Thurman, and anonymous referees for helpful comments. This research was supported by the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), Bozeman, MT.

The international relations field has recently taken a communicative turn. Social constructivists, for instance, regularly examine frames, persuasion, and other discursive mechanisms by which actors reach intersubjective agreement. Critical theorists add an overtly normative dimension by embracing the transformative potential of public deliberation. In contrast, realists and neorealists claim that outcomes are determined by the distribution of material power—political communication and discursive ideals are virtually meaningless elements in international politics. Put simply, talk is cheap. Given this view, it is puzzling that many prominent realists participate actively in national foreign policy debates and in that context both implicitly and explicitly embrace views about political discourse that are remarkably consistent with those held by constructivists and critical theorists. In the recent Iraq debate, the realists reveal lies, political spin, and other distortions of the debate promulgated by government elites and their allies. They challenge the legitimacy of established policies and critique excessive secrecy. Most importantly, these neorealists seek to transform public and elite consciousness so as to produce social pressures for alternative outcomes. Realists have apparently rejected their own theoretical presuppositions about the meaning and role of political communication, which has important implications for both policy debate and IR theorizing.Rodger A. Payne is Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville and Director of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order ([email protected]). He would like to thank Josh Busby, Peter Dombrowski, Peter Howard, Jacques Hymans, Piki Ish-Shalom, Avery Kolers, Doug Lemke, John Mearsheimer, Tom Mowle, Stan Scott, and the three anonymous reviewers for offering valuable comments and suggestions. Portions of this paper were previously delivered at the Annual Meetings of the International Studies Association, at Montréal in 2004 and at Honolulu in 2005. Financial and institutional support was provided by a President's Research Initiative Project Initiation Grant from the University of Louisville and by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard.

China's national power is growing rapidly, but what China will do with its newfound capabilities remains an issue of contentious debate among scholars and policymakers. At the heart of the problem is the difficulty of divining future intentions. Two arguments have dominated the debate. One focuses on power and likely Chinese revisionism. The other highlights China's growing interdependence and likely future satisfaction. Both are problematic in terms of logic and evidence. They offer linear projections that ignore the way that China's future is likely to be contingent—especially on the interaction of foreign policy ideas and events. Relative power and interdependence are important but their impact is mediated through the doctrines leaders use to justify action and establish authority: those ideas are prone to change in regular ways—and with them China's intentions. If this argument is right, policy prescriptions that advocate containing, engaging, or some mix of the two (i.e., hedging) in relations with China need to be reconfigured.Jeffrey W. Legro is Professor and Chair in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics and Co-Director of the Governing America in a Global Age Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia ([email protected]). The author thanks Robert Ross, Tang Shiping, Brantly Womack, and Zhu Feng for helpful comments and Daniel Aaron Weir for excellent research assistance.

In countries where citizens have strong grievances against the regime, attempts to address these grievances in the course of daily life are likely to entail high costs coupled with very low chances of success in any meaningful sense; consequently, most citizens will choose not to challenge the regime, thus reflecting the now well-known collective action problem. When a regime commits electoral fraud, however, an individual's calculus regarding whether to participate in a protest against the regime can be changed significantly. This argument yields important implications for how we interpret the wave of “colored revolutions” that swept through Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan in the first half of this decade. Applying the collective action framework to the colored revolutions also yields a parsimonious contribution to the political science literature on social protest: electoral fraud can be a remarkably useful tool for solving the collective action problems faced by citizens in countries where governments are not, to use Barry Weingast's language, appropriately restrained by the populace. While modest, such an observation actually can speak to a wide-ranging number of questions in the literature, including why people choose to protest when they do, how protests at one place and time can affect the likelihood for future protests, and new aspects of the relationship between elections and protest.Joshua A. Tucker is Associate Professor of Politics at New York University ([email protected]). He would like to thank participants in the First and Second Danyliw Research Seminars in Contemporary Ukrainian Studies hosted by the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa and the Kennan Institute Workshop on Ukrainian Civil Society for many helpful comments and suggestions on developing the arguments contained in this article. He would also like to thank Dominique Arel, Jessica Allina-Pisano, Mark Beissinger, Valerie Bunce, Paul D'Anieri, Jerry Hough, Jason Lyall, Grigore Pop-Eleches, Lucan Way, and William Zimmerman for their time in commenting on earlier drafts of the paper, as well as the anonymous reviewers at Perspective on Politics. Marc Berenson and Matthew Berner provided excellent research assistance.

Studies of women in legislatures indicate that achieving a “critical mass” of women may have the effect of changing the legislative priorities of women, increasing the number of legislative initiatives dealing with women and the passage rate of such initiatives, and altering the legislative priorities of men. In the absence of a critical mass, “token” women may be so constrained by their minority status as to be unable to respond proactively to their environment. Popular wisdom suggests that a critical mass may be necessary for women to make a difference as women in a legislature.

Yet, critical mass is both problematic and under-theorized in political science research. The critical mass threshold is debated, the mechanism of effect is unspecified, possible negative consequences are overlooked, and the potential for small numbers of elected women to effect political change on behalf of women is neglected. Beyond sheer numbers, what are the conditions that govern the ability of women legislators to make a difference? We argue that two major contextual factors beyond the sheer numbers are likely to govern the extent to which female legislators serve to represent women. Relying on the secondary literature, this article maps parliamentary and civil society contexts to sheer numbers of women to locate conditions in which female legislators are most likely to have policy successes.Karen Beckwith is the Flora Stone Mather Professor of Political Science at Case Western Research University and Editor, with Lisa Baldez, of Politics & Gender ([email protected]). Her published work includes Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State (Cambridge 2003, with Lee Ann Banaszak and Dieter Rucht), Political Women and American Democracy (forthcoming, with Christina Wolbrecht and Lisa Baldez), and articles on gender and politics in the European Journal of Political Research, Politics & Society, and Signs, among others. Kimberly Cowell-Meyers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at American University ([email protected]). She is author of Religion and Politics: The Party Faithful in Ireland and Germany (Greenwood, 2002) and articles published in Women & Politics, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and Irish Political Studies among others. She has worked in the British Parliament and the United States Institute of Peace.

Despite widespread disagreement about democratic deficits in the European Union (EU), most critics begin by conceiving democracy as a problem for the EU. Seeing the EU as undemocratic or insufficiently democratic, they devise institutional innovations to democratize it. These innovations seem to require breaking the traditional link between democracy and the nation-state, which in this context appears outmoded or inappropriate. This article challenges that approach, arguing that it gets the relationship between democracy and the sovereign state wrong—or at least, incomplete—by stressing modern democratic theory's empirical ties to the state while underestimating their normative significance. The complex interdependence of normative and empirical assumptions informing modern democratic theory means that detaching democracy from the state is much less straightforward than critics often imagine. The essay argues instead for conceiving the EU as a problem for democratic theory. Doing so reveals that democratic theory is ill-equipped to address recent changes in the configuration of rule and new structures of governance associated with Europeanization, European integration, and globalization more broadly. This change in perspective highlights important limits in recent democratic theorizing about the EU and clarifies the role of European debates in reinterpreting and reconstructing democracy in the age of globalization.Michael Goodhart is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds a secondary appointment in Women's Studies ([email protected]). He is grateful to Chris Bonneau, Mark Hallerberg, Andrew Lotz, John Markoff, Guy Peters, Alberta Sbragia, Dan Thomas, and to anonymous reviewers of this essay for their kind help and advice. He is also grateful to the European Union Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh for the chance to present an earlier version of this essay and appreciates the suggestions he received at that time.

This is an interesting time to be a political scientist. The sixth anniversary of 9/11 is fast approaching. The United States continues to deal with the mammoth challenges of “nation building” in post-Taliban Afghanistan, and remains mired in what by virtually all accounts is a quagmire-like civil war in Iraq. As every issue of this journal attests, we in this rich and diverse discipline possess an array of intellectual resources for understanding current events. And if there is anything that unites us as social scientists, it is the bedrock belief that it is possible to offer deeper and more complex understandings of events than those furnished by sound bites and slogans.

Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis. Edited by Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis. 2 vols. Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2003. 800p. $60.00; $40.00 Vol. 1, $40.00 Vol. 2.

The Logic of Violence in Civil War. By Stathis Kalyvas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 508p. $70.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. By Jeremy M. Weinstein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 428p. $70.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. By Elisabeth Jean Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 328p. $70.00 cloth, $25.99 paper.

“Inside Insurgencies”? An odd title for a review of four books that deal with one of the most wide-ranging, violent, and protracted forms of contentious politics the world has known—civil wars. Should we not care more about their impact on citizens at large, their effects on national politics, and their creation of instability in the international system than on their interior lives? But think of the conflicts among communists, anarchists and others in the Spanish Republic: They inhibited the republic's capacity to resist the assaults of Franco's forces. No adequate understanding of that country's civil war could have excluded these “internal” relations.

Psychology and the Natural Law of Reparation. By C. Fred Alford. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 182p. $70.00.

What is evil, why do people do it, and what might restrict or remedy its harms? C. Fred Alford's answers here derive from Melaine Klein's ideas about the psychic lives of infants. Unfortunately, even for a reader sympathetic to psychoanalytic approaches, his argument is unpersuasive. Alford orchestrates interactions among his favorite intellectual objects. In addition to Klein, these include St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Maritain, Wilfred Bion, D. W. Winnicott, John Milton (Paradise Lost) and Sophocles (Antigone). However, to an external other, often the salience of his objects or their congruence appears more a function of Alford's attachment to them than to their logical cogency. Furthermore, despite his attempts to reconcile their disparities, his simultaneous use of conflicting discourses of “natural” and “narrative” render the epistemological and ethical status of his “natural law” of reparation ambiguous. His treatment of the political as merely a larger-scale version of the psychic obviates unique qualities of and important differences between these spheres.

Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship. By Michael D. Chan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. 248p. $44.95.

In the terms of the debate over the relative liberalism and republicanism of the American founders, Alexander Hamilton's advocacy of manufacturing, public credit, and a national bank would seem to classify him as characteristically modern and liberal. Hamilton's unswerving dedication to an energetic and powerful central government oriented toward financial stability and military security contrasts with classical republican concerns about individual virtue, the nature of good lives, and the problem of individual and institutional corruption. As much by its neglect of classical topics like civic education as by its new treatment of perennial political subjects, the new political science he announced in The Federalist and elsewhere broke with the ideals of the good republic held by the ancients.

Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. By Joshua Foa Dienstag. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 314p. $35.00.

This stimulating book has two aims, one descriptive and one normative. Its first goal is to provide an “appraisal” of pessimism and recover it “as an important tradition in the history of political thought” alongside more familiar -isms. Its second goal is to offer an “endorsement” of this neglected tradition and “reanimate” it by presenting its “appeal” in such a way as to “recreate it” in us (pp. ix, xii–xiii, 265, 271).

Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge. By Roxanne L. Euben. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 330p. $29.95.

Travel narratives, as Mikhail Bakhtin once noted, have a dialogic quality. Putting the unfamiliar into conversation with the familiar, they have the capacity to deepen our understanding of each. Travelers themselves have a third voice in this exchange, at times standing in each culture but never becoming located completely in either. At their best, then, travel narratives reflect multiple positions, connect multiple traditions, and speak to multiple audiences. They transgress the boundaries that most people take as given or fixed, and in the resulting blur of borders, they open new conceptual and imaginative spaces.

Naming Evil, Judging Evil. Edited by Ruth W. Grant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 232p. $35.00.

Interdisciplinarity is much praised and rarely practiced. Too often, it boils down to a sociologist adding a few anthropological works to a bibliography, or a geographer applying for a political science grant. The ideal of learning from and engaging with other intellectual traditions and conceptualizations is easily lost.

Poverty and Inequality. Edited by David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 200p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Capabilities Equality: Basic Issues and Problems. Edited by Alexander Kaufman. New York: Routledge, 2005. 224p. $125.00.

Two trends, each a generation in the making, have affected the recent study of poverty and inequality. In 1979, Amartya Sen asked “Equality of What?” in his Tanner Lecture at Stanford University. There, and in numerous articles and books since, Sen and his collaborators developed a rich account of poverty, inequality, and of human well-being more generally considered. This work, though its original basis was in the classical political economy of subsistence and human freedom, grew to be buttressed by a wide range of ethical, social, and other economic matters. In so doing, it encouraged the development of the second trend, the greater interweaving of developments in the different social sciences and in political and philosophical theory that might be brought to bear on the consideration of poverty and inequality. There has come to be a greater understanding by economists, sociologists, political theorists, and philosophers of what they might learn from one another.

Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism. By Janet Halley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 418p. $29.95.

Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking. Edited by Lori Jo Marso and Patricia Moynagh. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 136p. $50.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.

Dispelling the myth of the given, probing the tacit presuppositions of dominant discourses, challenging the naturalization of oppressive relations, investigating processes that produce invisibility, demonstrating the deficiencies of reductive arguments, and engaging difference and plurality have been hallmarks of feminist scholarship in general and of feminist theory in particular. Through sustained engagement with canonical texts, disciplinary discourses, and historical and contemporary events, feminist theorists have enabled new ways of seeing and thinking. Has feminist theory exhausted its potential, or worse, become an impediment to emancipatory projects? These two works provide markedly different responses to these questions.

Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought. By Michael Hanchard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 352p. $35.00.

“What does contemporary political and social theory look like when viewed from a vantage point of a black life-world?” (p. 8). Crucial though this question is—particularly at a moment when U.S. citizens are deeply divided across racial lines on a wide array of political issues—it remains largely neglected by political scientists. Michael Hanchard responds to this inattention by presenting a dazzling, learned tour of the contours of contemporary black political thought. Moving fluently from the local to the national to the hemispheric to the global and traversing disciplinary lines at the same time, Party/Politics has much to offer scholars in multiple fields, both within political science and beyond. At the risk of understating this larger contribution, this review will focus on the example it sets for the practice of political theory.