In February 1957 Lloyd Rudolph and I set forth into the “heat and dust” villages of Thanjavur district, South India, with 10 Indian graduate students from Madras Christian College. Our objective was to conduct a survey on political consciousness. Six hundred urban and rural Tamils scattered across three districts constituted the random sample we had selected from the first electoral rolls of recently freed India. V. O. Key, that witty and groundbreaking doyen of electoral behavior analysis, had enticed us into survey research. Upon our return, the Michigan Survey Research Center provided a methodologically intense summer.Susanne Rudolph is the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Chicago and past president of the American Political Science Association ([email protected]). She studies comparative politics with special interest in the political economy and political sociology of South Asia, state formation, Max Weber, and the politics of category and culture. An earlier version of this address was presented at the annual meeting of the association on September 2, 2004.

This article argues that international regime complexity has shaped Europe's politics of human rights trade conditionality by creating opportunities for various types of “forum shopping,” and, consequently, that some of the most significant politics of human rights enforcement have occurred in an entirely separate issue area—trade—which are being worked out partly during lawmaking and partly during implementation. The presence of nested and overlapping institutions creates incentives for rival political actors—whether states, institutions, or policymakers—to (1) forum shop for more power, (2) advantage themselves in the context of a parallel or overlapping regime, and (3) invoke institutions á la carte to govern a specific issue but not others. Each tactic creates competition between institutions and actors for authority over the rules, setting hurdles for IO performance. Even so, (4) regime complexity can make enforcement of rules that are impossible to implement in one area possible in another area.

The Million Mom March (favoring gun control) and Code Pink: Women for Peace (focusing on foreign policy, especially the war in Iraq) are organizations that have mobilized women as women in an era when other women's groups struggled to maintain critical mass and turned away from non-gender-specific public issues. This article addresses how these organizations fostered collective consciousness among women, a large and diverse group, while confronting the echoes of backlash against previous mobilization efforts by women. We argue that the March and Code Pink achieved mobilization success by creating hybrid organizations that blended elements of three major collective action frames: maternalism, egalitarianism, and feminine expression. These innovative organizations invented hybrid forms that cut across movements, constituencies, and political institutions. Using surveys, interviews, and content analysis of organizational documents, this article explains how the March and Code Pink met the contemporary challenges facing women's collective action in similar yet distinct ways. It highlights the role of feminine expression and concerns about the intersectional marginalization of women in resolving the historic tensions between maternalism and egalitarianism. It demonstrates hybridity as a useful analytical lens to understand gendered organizing and other forms of grassroots collective action.

Although the use of models has come to dominate much of the scientific study of politics, the discipline's understanding of the role or function that models play in the scientific enterprise has not kept pace. We argue that models should be assessed for their usefulness for a particular purpose, not solely for the accuracy of their predictions. We provide a typology of the uses to which models may be put, and show how these uses are obscured by the field's emphasis on model testing. Our approach highlights the centrality of models in scientific reasoning, avoids the logical inconsistencies of current practice, and offers political scientists a new way of thinking about the relationship between the natural world and the models with which we are so familiar.Kevin A. Clarke is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Rochester ([email protected]) and David M. Primo is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Rochester (david.primo@ rochester.edu). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and at the 2005 Annual Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and the Canadian Political Science Association; we thank the participants for their comments. We thank Chris Achen, Jim Alt, Jake Bowers, Henry Brady, Bear Braumoeller, John Duggan, Mark Fey, Rob Franzese, John Freeman, Gary Goertz, Miriam Golden, Jim Granato, Gretchen Helmke, John Jackson, Keith Krehbiel, Skip Lupia, Scott de Marchi, Andrew Martin, Becky Morton, Bob Pahre, Kevin Quinn, Curt Signorino, Randy Stone, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion. We also thank Matt Jacobsmeier for research assistance. Support from the National Science Foundation (Clarke: Grant #SES-0213771, Primo: Grant #SES-0314786) is gratefully acknowledged.

While many find cause for optimism about the use of law and rights for progressive ends, the academic literature has long been skeptical that courts favor the poor. We show that, with the move toward a robust “new constitutionalism” of social and economic rights, the assumptions underlying the skepticism do not always hold. Our theories must account for variation in the elite bias of law and litigation. In particular, we need to pay closer attention to the broad, collective effects of legal mobilization, rather than focusing narrowly on the litigants and the direct benefits they receive. We support the claim by showing that litigation pursued in legal contexts that create the expectation of collective effects is more likely to avoid the potential anti-poor bias of courts. On the other hand, policy areas dominated by individual litigation and individualized effects are more likely to experience regressive outcomes. Using data on social and economic rights cases in four countries, we estimate the potential pro-poor impact of litigation by examining whether the poor are over- or under-represented among the beneficiaries of litigation. We find that the impact of courts is positive and very much pro-poor in India and South Africa, and slightly negative in Indonesia and Brazil. Overall, we challenge the tendency in the literature to focus on the direct effects of litigation, find that the results of litigation are more positive for the poor than the conventional wisdom would lead us to expect, and offer an explanation that accounts for part of the variation while raising a number of questions for future research.

From Aristotle to Acemoglu and Robinson, scholars have argued that democracy possesses powerful redistributive impulses, and imperils itself accordingly. We challenge the validity of the redistributive model of democratic breakdown in the postcolonial world—the only cases where democracies have collapsed since World War II—because its assumptions regarding state power are questionable or even inapplicable in postcolonial settings. Our correlative analysis of cross-sectional time series data from 139 countries between 1972 and 2007 indicates that, contrary to the expectations of the redistributive model, redistributive taxation is negatively associated with the incidence of military coups and the likelihood of democratic breakdown. Furthermore, authoritarian takeovers do not appear systematically to result in reduced redistribution from the rich. More fine-grained historical evidence from Southeast Asia—a region where the redistributive model should be especially likely to hold true—further affirms that authoritarian seizures of power are neither inspired by successful redistributive policies nor followed by their reversal. Taken together, these quantitative and qualitative data offer significant support for our central theoretical claim: contemporary democratic breakdowns have political origins in weak states, not economic origins in class conflict.

Although female candidates have achieved parity on some dimensions, political institutions remain deeply gendered in how they structure the parameters of electoral competition. We rely on a new data set of gubernatorial races from the 1990s to address the theoretical and empirical challenges created by the interaction of gender, media content, and electoral institutions. Based on an analysis of 1,365 newspaper articles for 27 contests in which a woman held a major party nomination, we uncover evidence of continuing bias in media coverage. Yet significant coefficients on candidate sex tell only part of the story. Gendered contextual factors linked to the contest and state in which candidates compete, as well as the newspapers that cover their races, also affect women's experiences on the campaign trail. The major finding, however, is the presence of a powerful baseline effect favoring male candidates that is deeply embedded in U.S. politics. All else equal, women gubernatorial candidates suffer a substantial vote deficit that results from non-observable influences. The results support the emerging consensus among feminist theorists that greater focus on the political context is likely to produce bigger scholarly payoffs than is continued attention to observable differences between male and female candidates.

Why are women and people of color under-represented in U.S. politics? I offer a new explanation: strategic discrimination. Strategic discrimination occurs when an individual hesitates to support a candidate out of concern that others will object to the candidate’s identity. In a series of three experiments, I find that strategic discrimination exists, it matters for real-world politics, and it can be hard to overcome. The first experiment shows that Americans consider white male candidates more electable than equally qualified Black and white women, and to a lesser extent, Black men. These results are strongly intersectional, with Black women rated less electable than either Black men or white women. The second experiment demonstrates that anti-Trump voters weigh Democratic candidates’ racial and gender identities when deciding who is most capable of beating Donald Trump in 2020. The third experiment finds that while some messages intended to combat strategic discrimination have no effect, diverse candidates can increase their perceived electability by showing that they have a path to victory. I conclude by arguing that strategic discrimination is especially salient in contemporary U.S. politics due to three parallel trends: increasing diversity among candidates, growing awareness of sexism and racism, and high levels of political polarization.

Using the news controversy over the community group ACORN, we illustrate the way that the media help set the agenda for public debate and frame the way that debate is shaped. Opinion entrepreneurs (primarily business and conservative groups and individuals, often working through web sites) set the story in motion as early as 2006, the conservative echo chamber orchestrated an anti-ACORN campaign in 2008, the Republican presidential campaign repeated the allegations with a more prominent platform, and the mainstream media reported the allegations without investigating their veracity. As a result, the little-known community organization became the subject of great controversy in the 2008 US presidential campaign, and was recognizable by 82 percent of respondents in a national survey. We analyze 2007–2008 coverage of ACORN by 15 major news media organizations and the narrative frames of their 647 stories during that period. Voter fraud was the dominant story frame, with 55 percent of the stories analyzed using it. We demonstrate that the national news media agenda is easily permeated by a persistent media campaign by opinion entrepreneurs alleging controversy, even when there is little or no truth to the story. Conversely, local news media, working outside of elite national news media sources to verify the most essential facts of the story, were the least likely to latch onto the “voter fraud” bandwagon.

Debates over the extent to which racial attitudes and economic distress explain voting behavior in the 2016 election have tended to be limited in scope, focusing on the extent to which each factor explains white voters’ two-party vote choice. This limited scope obscures important ways in which these factors could have been related to voting behavior among other racial sub-groups of the electorate, as well as participation in the two-party contest in the first place. Using the vote-validated 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, merged with economic data at the ZIP code and county levels, we find that racial attitudes strongly explain two-party vote choice among white voters—in line with a growing body of literature. However, we also find that local economic distress was strongly associated with non-voting among people of color, complicating direct comparisons between racial and economic explanations of the 2016 election and cautioning against generalizations regarding causal emphasis.

Penn State's decision to eliminate political theory set off existential angst about the status of political theory in the discipline. The organized, defensive responses to that decision failed to answer the central question it posed: Is “political theory” social science, and if not, why does it belong? I argue that social scientific political theory is political science and its many strains—conceptual, normative, and explanatory—belong in the discipline on their own terms. Humanistic research, like dermatology or music theory, is not political science and as such it should find another home. By explaining why (and what kinds of) political theory is political science this article may wind up being offensive in both senses of the word. But it is meant to be in service to a more secure, stable, and productive interdisciplinary future for all kinds of political theory going forward.

Democratic theory assumes that successful democratic representation will create close ideological congruence between citizens and their governments. The success of different types of election rules in creating such congruence is an ongoing target of political science research. As often in political science, a widely demonstrated empirical finding, the greater congruence associated with proportional representation election rules, has ceased to hold. I suggest that systematically taking account in our theories of conditional effects of local context can often provide a remedy. The systematic incorporation of levels of political party polarization into theory of election laws and ideological congruence extended the temporal and spatial range of the theory. Data from the Comparative Manifesto research program and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) research program are used to test the revised theory empirically. Suggestions for generalizing our theories of political context are offered. The results of this research continue the interactions between substantive research, ongoing political events, and the great normative issues of representation and democracy.

The debate over same-sex marriage in the United States is fundamentally a disagreement about the nature of democratic citizenship and the meaning of full inclusion of adult citizens in the polity. The facts that marriage has both private and public dimensions, and is described by policy makers as natural and unchanging even as they write laws to define it create confusion among those who publicly contest same-sex marriage. The feminist critique of marriage provides insight on the issue; its critique, along with the questions raised by same-sex marriage, indicates a need to rethink many aspects of the legal regulation of families and intimate life as they affect democratic citizenship.Jyl Josephson is an associate professor of political science and director of women's studies at Rutgers University, Newark ([email protected]). She is coeditor, with Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, of the second edition of Gender and American Politics; coeditor, with Cynthia Burack, of Fundamental Differences: Feminists Talk Back to Social Conservatives, and author of Gender, Families, and State: Child Support Policy in the United States. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild for her editorial guidance. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers, and to Cynthia Burack, David Foster, and Stacy VanDeveer, whose questions helped me to clarify my arguments.

Although many scholars who study the role of racial animus in Americans’ political attitudes and policy preferences do so to help us understand national-level politics, (racialized) policy is largely shaped at the state level. States are laboratories of policy innovation whose experiments can exacerbate or ameliorate racial inequality. In this article, we develop state-level scores of racial resentment. By using linear multilevel regression and poststratification weighting techniques and by linking nationally representative survey data with US Census data, we create time-varying, dynamic state-level estimates of racial resentment from 1988 to 2016. These measures enable us to explore the extent to which subnational levels of racial attitudes fluctuate over time and to provide a comparative analysis of state-level racial resentment scores across space and time. We find that states’ levels of racial animus change slowly, with some exhibiting increases over time while others do just the opposite. Southern states’ reputation for having the highest levels of racial resentment has been challenged by states across various regions of the United States. Many states had their lowest levels of symbolic racism decades ago, contrary to the traditional American narrative of racial progress.

Some analysts have raised serious concerns about the foreign and domestic policy implications of the large numbers of Muslims living in Western Europe. The fear is that Muslims as a bloc will co-opt the domestic and foreign policy of various European states, subsuming it to those of Muslims from a variety of Islamic states in the Middle East and Asia, and transform the secular nature of most European states. The historic and ingrained fear of Islam present in the populations of Europe (and, for that matter, the United States) has produced an inability to see the political nature of Islamic groups, especially outside the Islamic world. For example, both Europeans and Americans were quick to question the political motives and actions of Muslims in Europe and the U.S. when there was no organized and orchestrated condemnation of the attacks of September 11, 2001. What such critics fail to take into account is precisely one of the themes analyzed in the paper: the myriad divisions found among the Muslims of Europe. Western fears and criticisms are partly based on serious ignorance of the characteristics of Islam and of the people in Europe who adhere to it. Because Islam is a highly decentralized religion, it is structurally biased against facilitating large-scale collective action by its adherents. The one version which is hierarchically organized, the Shi'a, is barely present in Europe. In addition, Muslim immigrants are divided by their ethnic differences. Islam, being decentralized, allows for a myriad of practices in the different countries from which the immigrants came. Divided by ethnicity and by their own religious beliefs, Muslims in Europe will not constitute a group which will be able to impose its goals on European foreign and domestic policy. Muslims will, instead, be a diverse population with which European states find it difficult to negotiate, because of Islam's decentralized structure.Carolyn M. Warner is Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Studies, Arizona State University ([email protected]). Manfred W. Wenner is Visiting Scholar, Department of Political Science, Arizona State University ([email protected]). The authors wish to thank Guity Nashat Becker, Jocelyne Cesari, Colin Elman, Miriam Fendius Elman, Roger Finke, Paul Froese, Anthony Gill, Phillip Hardy, Michael Hechter, Jennifer Hochschild, Kevin Jacques, Ramazan Kilinc, Timur Kuran, Peter McDonough, Michael Mitchell, Christopher Soper, Hendrik Spruyt, Robert Youngblood, three anonymous reviewers, the participants at the University of Washington Center for European Studies/European Union Center “September 11, Immigration and Nationalism in Europe” seminar, and the participants at the University of Wisconsin Madison “East and West: the Experience of Islam in an Expanding Europe” conference for their critical comments and suggestions. Errors and shortcomings remain our responsibility. The authors thank Beatrice Buchegger, Anita Clason, Katie Jordan, Megan McGinnity, and Seth Turken for research assistance, and the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict for financial support.

The watershed Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education affected activist politics on issues that extend well beyond African-American civil rights or education. The apparent success of the Court decision in spurring social change encouraged activists in other social movements to emulate the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's litigation strategy, and to adapt organizational structures, political strategies, and rhetoric borrowed from the civil rights movement. We examine how a Supreme Court decision and its subsequent interpretation influenced the development of other social movements. Borrowing from work on social movements, we contend that the Court decision signaled judicial openness to stand up for minority points of view on questions of fundamental rights, and that the civil rights movement spilled over to affect other movements. Activists continued to respond to that signal decades after Brown, even when that signal of judicial responsiveness and openness did not reflect the real prospects for achieving influence through a litigation-based strategy.David S. Meyer is Professor of Sociology and Political Science ([email protected]) and Steven A. Boutcher is Doctoral Candidate ([email protected]) in Sociology, University of California, Irvine. We are grateful for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper from Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Stephanie DiAlto, Sharon Lean, Sharon Oselin, and Su Yang.

The two traditional justifications for bicameralism are that a second legislative chamber serves a legislative-review function (enhancing the quality of legislation) and a balancing function (checking concentrated power and protecting minorities). I furnish here a third justification for bicameralism, with one elected chamber and the second selected by lot, as an institutional compromise between contradictory imperatives facing representative democracy: elections are a mechanism of people’s political agency and of accountability, but run counter to political equality and impartiality, and are insufficient for satisfactory responsiveness; sortition is a mechanism for equality and impartiality, and of enhancing responsiveness, but not of people’s political agency or of holding representatives accountable. Whereas the two traditional justifications initially grew out of anti-egalitarian premises (about the need for elite wisdom and to protect the elite few against the many), the justification advanced here is grounded in egalitarian premises about the need to protect state institutions from capture by the powerful few and to treat all subjects as political equals. Reflecting the “political” turn in political theory, I embed this general argument within the institutional context of Canadian parliamentary federalism, arguing that Canada’s Senate ought to be reconstituted as a randomly selected citizen assembly.

Through a discussion of the 2008 mortgage crisis and its similarities to the Great Depression of the 1930's and the Great Recession of 2007–09, I argue that the very notions of economic “crisis” and “recovery” are politically and ideologically constructed, and that conditions of vulnerability, often simply taken for granted as part of the normal social landscape when they affect marginalized populations, become regarded as crises when they affect dominant groups. Each of these crises, I argue, reveals different facets of the ways in which the power, normativity, and privilege of those perceived to be affected by economic hard times serve (1) to construct some economic troubles as “normal” and others as “crises;' (2) to prevent economic problems related to structural inequalities from being treated as crises by dominant political actors and institutions; and (3) to shape ideas about the ostensible solutions and ends to economic crises. By calling attention to these features of economic “crisis,” I aim to demonstrate the relevance of scholarship on race, class, gender, and intersectionality to the understanding of fundamental questions of contemporary political economy not often viewed from this perspective.

All qualitative research faces fundamental hurdles in overcoming issues of access and ensuring the credibility of one's observations. These issues are particularly acute when conducting research in hybrid regimes when the area of investigation is explicitly political and local authorities are sensitive to scrutiny. In the study of Russian politics, growing authoritarianism has meant a shrinking of the field and a corresponding adjustment in fieldwork practices. The disciplinary silence concerning the impact of regime type on fieldwork further threatens the quality and usefulness of comparative research on non-democratic regimes beyond Eurasia. The danger is that interesting and necessary questions about hybrid regimes are sacrificed as scholars opt to conduct fieldwork in more congenial locales where high status methods may be utilized. One can already see this effect as Russianists leave Russia rather than risk isolation within the discipline.

Randomized field experiments have gained attention within the social sciences and the field of democracy promotion as an influential tool for causal inference and a potentially powerful method of impact evaluation. With an eye toward facilitating field experimentation in democracy promotion, I present the first field-experimental study of international election monitoring, which should be of interest to both practitioners and academics. I discuss field experiments as a promising method for evaluating the effects of democracy assistance programs. Applied to the 2004 presidential elections in Indonesia, the random assignment of international election observers reveals that even though the election was widely regarded as democratic, the presence of observers had a measurable effect on votes cast for the incumbent candidate, indicating that such democracy assistance can influence election quality even in the absence of blatant election-day fraud.