This article shows that judicial review has a democratic justification, although it is not necessary for democratic government and its virtues are controversial and often speculative. Against critics like Waldron and Bellamy, it shows that judges, no less than legislators, can embody democratic forms of representation, accountability and participation. Hence, judicial review is not undemocratic simply because it enables unelected judges to over-rule elected legislators when people disagree about rights. Against recent defenders of judicial review, such as Eisgruber and Brettschneider, it shows that democratic arguments for judicial review do not require judges to be better at protecting rights than legislators. Hence a democratic justification for judicial review does not depend on complex and inevitably controversial interpretations and evaluations of judicial as opposed to legislative judgments. Democratic government does not demand special virtue, competence or wisdom in its citizens or their leaders. From a democratic perspective, therefore, the case for judicial review is that it enables individuals to vindicate their rights against government in ways that parallel those they commonly use against each other. This makes judicial review normatively attractive whether or not it leads to better decisions than would be made by other means.

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.

Do political outcomes respond more strongly to the preferences of the rich? In an age of rising inequality, this question has become increasingly salient. Yet, although an influential literature has emerged, no systematic account exists either of the severity of differentials in political responsiveness, the potential drivers of those differentials, or the variation across democracies. This article fills that gap. We analyze 1,163 estimates of responsiveness from 25 studies and find that, although this research collectively suggests that political outcomes better reflect the preferences of the rich, results vary considerably across models and studies. The divergence in results is partly driven by partisanship and the model specification, while we find no significant variation across either policy domains or general/specific measures of political outcomes. Finally, and against theoretical expectations, published research suggests that differentials in responsiveness are weaker in the United States compared to other developed democracies. The article contributes to our understanding of differential responsiveness by clarifying the main debates and findings in the literature, identifying issues and gaps, and pointing to fruitful avenues for future research.

It is commonplace to equate the arrival of a new conservative administration in Washington, DC, with the “rolling back” of the federal activities. We disagree with this conventional perspective, and seek to demonstrate that the equation of conservative Republicanism and retrenchment elides a critical change in the relationship between party politics and State power—a relationship that Donald Trump seems determined to nurture. Drawing on primary research, we argue that partisanship in the United States is no longer a struggle over the size of the State; rather it is a contest to control national administrative power. Since the late 1960s, conservative administrations have sought to redeploy rather than dismantle or roll back state power. Through “redeployment,” conservative presidents have sustained previous levels of State spending or State activity, but in a way reflecting a new administration’s ideology.

How does the everyday politics behind scientific inquiry impact what we come to know about the world? Here I consider this question in the context of my own fieldwork on the human rights response to children born of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. First, I reflect on how the academy functions to direct researchers' attention and skill sets to certain types of human rights problems in certain ways, inevitably affecting what we can know about our subject matter. Second, I consider the practical politics by which human rights scholars interface with policy-makers, the media, and the public, and the extent to which members of the human rights scholarly community constitute nodes in the wider networks we are studying.

The comparative study of women's movements is developing within the political science subfield of women and politics, largely by drawing on concepts and findings from several disciplines. From political science it borrows theories of the state, political development, democracy, and democratization. Sociology offers insights on social movements and the gendered nature of societies. Women's studies scholarship enables us to understand systematic gendered arrangements of power and privilege, including those fragmented or reinforced by class, race, sexuality, and ethnicity. The subfield of women and politics contributes both feminist theoretical insights and scholarship on elected women, female leaders, and women's policy preferences; these contributions inform comparative research on women's movements.Karen Beckwith is a professor of political science at the College of Wooster ([email protected]). She is coeditor, with Lee Ann Banaszak and Dieter Rucht, of Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State and author of American Women and Political Participation. Beckwith is the founding editor, with Lisa Baldez, of Politics & Gender, the journal of the Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association. The author thanks Jeff Lantis and Kent Kille for extensive comments on earlier versions of this article.

I assess several politically powerful ways of drawing on the past in the search for solutions to problems in the present. To probe these dynamics, I turn to the American jeremiad, a longstanding form of political rhetoric that explicitly invokes the past and laments the nation's falling-away from its virtuous foundations. I begin by focusing on the Christian Right's traditionalist jeremiad, which offers both nostalgic and Golden Age rhetoric in its assessment of the United States' imperiled national promise. I argue that, despite differences in the historical location of their ideals and the significant rhetorical power that they bring to political life, such nostalgic and Golden Age narratives represent a constraining political ideal, one ultimately incapable of doing justice to an increasingly diverse American society. I argue furthermore that there is another strand of the American jeremiad and conclude by sketching a different way of drawing on the past, a progressive jeremiad epitomized by the thought of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Such a jeremiad is also deeply rooted in the American tradition and offers a far more promising contribution to a diverse and pluralistic American future.

The 2015 Paris Agreement established a new logic for international climate governance: the pledge-and-review system. In 2009, the same idea had been proposed in the Copenhagen Accord, but was then forcefully rejected by the negotiation community. Explaining this turnaround, I analyze the role of the United States in the international climate negotiations, using Putnam’s two-level game framework and Snidal’s k-group theory. U.S. domestic politics imposed significant constraints on the terms of the Paris Agreement, contributing to the emergence of the new treaty architecture. Until 2015, U.S. negotiators were either unable or unwilling to bring the demands of political actors at the domestic and international levels in alignment. President Obama achieved this alignment in 2015 by creating international support for a treaty without legally binding obligations that could circumvent a Congressional ratification barrier. The latter required a surprising move: the proactive engagement of China despite the structural context of hegemonic transition.

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.

In accounting for the endurance of dysfunctional institutions, scholars often highlight the importance of path dependence or incremental change. Yet this fails to capture the creativity that actors deploy to reproduce order, particularly in times of crisis. We propose the concept of dynamic order, rooted in pragmatist theory, as an alternative way to think about institutional durability. Powerful actors reproduce order through creative adjustments to rules and routines that channel action into predictable and controllable behavior. We illustrate this dynamic with examples from the European Union and the United States. In response to the crisis of the Eurozone, EU and state officials invented new procedures that strengthened European governance at the very moment many questioned whether the euro could survive. Likewise, in the United States, public officials responded to social movements and street protests against racism and police brutality by creatively channeling these grievances into judicial proceedings and procedures controlled by the state. By focusing on how elite actors regenerate order in times of crises, our analysis enhances the conceptual toolkit currently available to the scholars of institutions.

The “corporatization” of the academy is often cited as a cause of the “de-professionalization” of the professoriate, and that in turn is cited as a cause of the faculty’s current disempowerment. The specifically modern conception of professionalism presupposed by these arguments occludes the deep implication of the academy in the generation and legitimation of specific configurations of power. This essay begins, accordingly, by elaborating this early conception of professionalism and showing how it informs twentieth century arguments on behalf of tenure, academic freedom, and the participation of faculty in institutional governance. The explicitly political reading of professionalism I offer as an alternative better explains how the academic workforce in recent decades has been thoroughly reconfigured in accordance with neoliberal imperatives. The downside of this reading, however, is that it deprives us of the justification for tenure, academic freedom, and shared governance that rested on an apolitical representation of the professoriate. I close, therefore, by asking what we stand to lose if we relinquish this ideal, but I then ask what costs we are likely to incur if we cling to a notion that compromises our ability to grasp the faculty’s current situation.

What can the disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies tell us about the character of American liberalism? Felony disenfranchisement reveals a dark face of American liberal democracy that is distinct from two more familiar narratives: the Tocquevillean story of a triumphal and inclusionary liberalism and the “multiple traditions” account proposed by Rogers Smith that sees liberalism battling with racial and other exclusionary ideologies. The history of felony exclusion points to a third perspective: a hyphenate American liberalism (liberal-ascription; liberal-republicanism) in which an exclusionary politics is embedded within liberalism itself. We develop this argument with specific reference to the ways in which liberalism as an abstraction is reflected in concrete advocacy debates over reform, in court decisions, and in the legislative domain. We identify three strands of liberal argumentation—the conceptualization of discrimination that relies on intentionality; the paradigmatic liberal belief in the social contract; and the liberal-republican adherence to norms of individual responsibility. The three strands show how the purportedly universal and impartial liberal embrace of individuality, contract, and responsibility, that ostensibly transcends the ascriptive barriers of birth has nevertheless fostered laws and policies that buttress the boundaries of an exclusionary American citizenship.

In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of ethnicity in shaping political behavior, and the organizational weakness of political parties. Whereas these axioms have some empirical basis, the massive changes in political practices, the vast variation in political patterns, and the burgeoning literature on subnational dynamics in India mean that such generalizations are not tenable. In this article, we consider research on India that compels us to rethink the contention that India neatly fits the prevailing wisdom in the comparative politics literature. Our objective is to elucidate how the many nuanced insights about Indian politics can improve our understanding of electoral behavior both across and within other countries, allowing us to question core assumptions in theories of comparative politics.

Spatial diagrams of politics could and should be iconic for political science in much the same way as supply-and-demand curves are in economics. Many fundamental problems of political science can be connected with them, and many different concepts—such as ideological constraint, cross-pressures, framing, agenda-setting, political competition, voting systems, and party systems, to name just a few—can be illuminated through spatial diagrams. Spatial diagrams raise questions and provide insights. They suggest political maneuvers, possible realignments, and political problems. They provide us with revealing images that aid memory and facilitate analysis. They are a powerful way to think about politics, and we could not do better than to feature them in our textbooks, to use them in our research, and to exhibit them as our brand—as our distinctive way of thinking about how the world works

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted a “right-to-work” (RTW) legal regime for the entire government workforce (Janus v. AFSCME). While many predict lower union membership, few have considered how Janus will challenge the overall cost-sharing strategy that unions use to ensure their affiliates’ organizational maintenance and survival. Using the National Education Association (NEA) as our empirical example, we develop and test a theory we call “financial solidarity,” which posits that union organizational maintenance hinges on the transfer of resources from affiliates in strong labor states to those in weaker labor states. We demonstrate that this system is in effect by showing that most NEA revenue originates from dues and fees paid by teachers in strong labor states and then by examining the causal effect of labor law retrenchment on affiliates’ reliance on their national union between 2005–2018. We find that the NEA transfers an additional $6–10 per member and is significantly more likely to make a political contribution in an affiliate’s state in the aftermath of retrenchment. These findings highlight that unions are maintained on an organizational model that relies on a balance of strong and weak state labor laws. By upending that equilibrium, Janus threatens to undermine the power of labor in American politics.

The conventional approach to criminal victimization views it as a traumatic but one-time act. This overlooks a layer of contentious and dynamic politics between victims and criminal actors that we have yet to analyze. I develop a new theoretical framework to analyze the strategic behaviors that victims and criminal actors use to pursue and resist power as part of the political process of criminal victimization. The framework enables us to better observe, conceptualize, and theorize how victims exercise agency vis-à-vis their criminal perpetrators, as well as behaviors and practices that criminal actors undertake to carry out and sustain victimization, but which are overlooked by the traditional focus on their use and threat of coercive force. I illustrate the framework’s analytic utility with an empirical analysis of the victimization of informal street vendors in a major Latin American city under a criminal protection racket. The argument and empirical findings suggest ways to expand and deepen the research agenda on the politics of criminal victimization.

The ISIS videos staging the executions of James Foley and Steven Sotloff are usually understood as devices to deter, recruit, and “sow terror.” Left unanswered are questions about how these videos work; to whom they are addressed; and what about them can so continuously bring new audiences into existence. The evident durability of ISIS despite the imminent defeat of its state, coupled with the political impact of these particular videos, make these questions unusually urgent. Complete answers require analysis of the most understudied aspect of the videos that also happens to be vastly understudied in US political science: the visual mode of the violence. Approaching these videos as visual texts in need of close reading shows that they are, among other things, enactments of “retaliatory humiliation” (defined by Islamists) that perform and produce an inversion of power in two registers. It symbolically converts the public abjection of Foley and Sotloff by the Islamist executioner into an enactment of ISIS’ invincibility and a demonstration of American impotence. It also aims to transpose the roles between the US, symbolically refigured as mass terrorist, failed sovereign, and rogue state, and ISIS, now repositioned as legitimate, invincible sovereign. Such rhetorical practices seek to actually constitute their audiences through the very visual and visceral power of their address. The affective power of this address is then extended and intensified by the temporality that conditions it—what I call digital time. Digital time has rendered increasingly rare ordinary moments of pause between rapid and repetitive cycles of reception and reaction—moments necessary for even a small measure of distance. The result is a sensibility, long in gestation but especially of this time, habituated to thinking less and feeling more, to quick response over deliberative action.

President Trump is often at odds with the conservative establishment over a range of issues, not least of which is foreign policy. Yet it remains unclear whether supporting “Trumpism” is commensurate with coherent foreign policy views that are distinct from conventionally conservative positions. We evaluate whether the foreign policy views of Trump’s supporters, both in the voting public and among activists, differ from those of other Republicans. We use the 2016 ANES to examine Republican primary voters and the new 2016 State Convention Delegate Study to assess Republican activists. In doing so, we reveal systematic differences in foreign policy preferences between Trump supporters and more establishment conservatives. We demonstrate that the status-threat model need not be confined to domestic politics. Indeed, it may be extended to explain foreign policy preferences on the political right, that of Trump’s supporters in the present case. In doing so, we also find evidence that status threat may well be the source of fracture in the Republican Party.

I informally examine how the idea of public sociology has been affected by the rise of social media. New social media platforms disintermediate communication, make people more visible, and encourage public life to be measured. They tend to move the discipline from a situation where some people self-consciously do “public sociology” to one where more sociologists unselfconsciously do sociology in public. I discuss the character of such “latently public” work, the opportunities and difficulties it creates for individuals, and its tendency to be associated with academic fields that believe in what they are doing.