Liberalism ordinarily requires authorities to provide a full public account of their actions so that citizens can critically evaluate those actions for themselves, but in times of life-threatening emergency, liberalism sometimes evinces a willingness to place unquestioning faith in executives who promise to deliver it from such evil. In doing so, liberalism violates its moral and epistemological commitment to “make public use of one's reason in all matters.” This article uses the framework provided by Carl Schmitt's concept of political theology to analyze the reluctance of liberals to ask questions of the executive in times of danger and uncertainty. That framework helps explain how both the content and the structure of liberal thought can shift in a theological (and specifically theistic) direction when faced with an emergency. This article demonstrates that the quasi-religious rhetoric sometimes used to justify expansions of executive power in practice has precedents in the theories of John Locke, William Blackstone, and Alexander Hamilton. Analysis of their writings suggests that the use of quasi-theistic language in discussions of emergency powers can have the effect of insulating “godlike” executives from the kind of scrutiny and criticism that liberalism usually promotes.

The greatest threat of democratic breakdown stems from the federal structure of the US Constitution and from false claims of election fraud with the potential for state- or congressional- level reversals of popular vote outcomes. The potential for such a breakdown was revealed by the events of January 6, 2021, with tens of millions of voters still believing in the big lie and the repetition of that lie by legislators and government officials. It is exacerbated by hyperpolarization, minoritarian control caused by partisan gerrymandering for state legislative districts and in the US House, malapportionment in the US Senate, and the highest likelihood of Electoral College reversals of popular vote outcomes in more than a century. Democratic breakdown is also made more likely by recent legislation that makes it easier for legislators in some gerrymandered states to reverse the outcomes of the popular vote in their states.

Lynch mobs regularly called on the language of popular sovereignty in their efforts to authorize lynchings, arguing that, as representatives of the people, they retained the right to wield public violence against persons they deemed beyond the protections of due process. Despite political theorists’ renewed interest in popular sovereignty, scholars have not accounted for this sordid history in their genealogies of modern democracy and popular constituent power. I remedy this omission, arguing that spectacle lynchings—ones that occurred in front of large crowds, sometimes numbering in the thousands—operated as public rituals of racialized people-making. In the wake of Reconstruction, when the boundaries of the polity were deeply contested, spectacle lynchings played a constitutive role in affirming and circulating the notion that the sovereign people were white, and that African Americans were their social subordinates.

We describe an emerging research practice that we call Large-N Qualitative Analysis (LNQA), outline its core components and codify best practice. LNQA starts with hypothesized regularities and causal mechanisms. Regularities take two basic forms: Y generalizations (if Y then X) or X generalizations (if X then Y), albeit with more complex variants. To establish a causal generalization requires defining its scope. The strength of the regularity is simply the percentage of cases conforming with the causal claim. The causal force of LNQA, however, comes from within-case causal inference, which demonstrates the presence and operation of the postulated mechanisms in all cases in the scope. The method thus partly obviates problems arising from case selection in qualitative and multimethod work. We also identify a multimethod variant (M-LNQA), which combines LNQA with experimental, quasi-experimental, or observational statistical analysis. An appendix introduces over fifty examples of the method.

Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider institutional innovations that could promote political equality. Finally, we describe the diverse ways that political scientists produce an impact on the world by sharing and applying their knowledge of the consequences of electoral rules and global trends in reform.

After 25 years, there is a broad though sometimes superficial awareness of state responses to HIV/AIDS in the global South, where the spread of disease is said to be fueled by inept or failed states, those so poor or whose officials are so indifferent that they lack public health services or even a minimal health care infrastructure. But this narrative ignores the failed responses among states struck in the first wave of the pandemic in the early 1980s. In the long run, generally between 1986 and 1990, the industrialized democracies where a new illness was first identified did implement comprehensive disease prevention, blood safety, and treatment and care regimes specifically targeting AIDS; in the short run, these same countries struggled over—and more often then not failed to implement—appropriate measures to stem the spread of the epidemic. And in the long run, tens of thousands contracted HIV and died.Michael J. Bosia, Assistant Professor at Saint Michael's College in Vermont, has been an activist and policymaker ([email protected]). He thanks the Fulbright fellowship program, a Blaine J. Yarrington Fellowship from Northwestern University, and Saint Michael's College for financial support.

The Constraint of Race: The Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America. By Linda Faye Williams. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. 440p. $35.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Linda Faye Williams's book seeks to identify “how, when and why American social policy became fused with the politics of race” and what that has meant for the development and evolution of the welfare state in the United States. The author's central argument is that the welfare state was “grafted onto preexisting conditions of race relations,” and the long-term consequence of this grafting is that even today, the organization of social policy in the United States continues to reproduce advantages for whites and disadvantages for many people of color. Further, as social welfare policy institutionalizes white advantage, this in turn tends to block movement in the direction of more universalistic social policy (p. 14). Williams supports this contention by revisiting the political history of social welfare policy, from just after the Civil War up to the Clinton administration's efforts at welfare “reform” in 1996.

Over the last decade, the impact of emergencies on the American state has become the subject of renewed interest. While early literature in the post-9/11 era often overlooked the historical development of crisis governance in the United States, many scholars have begun to uncover the precedents that continue to shape modern emergency management. In an effort to clarify the main analytical assumptions of the existing scholarship, I construct three models of emergency statebuilding: permanent emergency state, national security state, and contract state. The models each share an underlying framework of historical institutionalism, which defines the state as a stabilized material institutional structure that is disrupted by emergency conditions—exogenous shocks that cannot be incorporated into the normal statebuilding processes or legal order. Yet this perspective is ill-equipped to explain institutional change. I propose discursive institutionalism as an approach that emphasizes how discourse and ideas construct emergencies as objects of government management—in different ways, at different times. I then illustrate the utility of this perspective by demonstrating the influence of national planning ideas on efforts to prepare the state for emergencies before they occur.

Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians in Democracy in America is often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. This narrative holds that westward expansion was easy, in part because American Indians did not offer much resistance. Historians of political thought and scholars of American Political Development tend to affirm this narrative when they read Tocqueville’s text as suggesting merely that Indians are “doomed” to an inevitable extinction. Our interpretation here proceeds along different lines, with a greater focus on the ways in which contending Jacksonian-era discourses of Indian nomadism are represented in Tocqueville’s text. We argue that Democracy reflects complex and often competing descriptions of inherent Indian nomadism, retreat, and removal, with varying attributions of causal responsibility for disappearing Indian populations. This reading of Tocqueville highlights contentions about Indian removal that are often ignored or neglected in current scholarship, and can therefore help us to better appreciate both his text and his time.

Morozov is absolutely right to point out that other countries—not in the set analyzed in Digital Origins—might reveal different paths toward or away from democratic government. But a quick look at some of the examples shows that they do not directly conflict with my argument that the proliferation of consumer electronics in countries with an active civil society and limited resource wealth seems to come with democratic consequences. China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are often offered as examples of how a tough regime can use digital media to oppress their citizens.

Though psychic trauma may be an essential part of the human condition, in recent decades its interpretation as PTSD has had important political consequences. I examine both the political roots of the PTSD diagnosis and the disorder’s subsequent impacts on American foreign policy discourse. I draw on a mixed-methods approach, including historical analysis of PTSD’s development and quantitative and qualitative analysis of presidential papers, presidential debates, and the Congressional Record from the last fifty years. My chief findings are twofold. First, even though PTSD was added to the DSM in 1980, American leaders only began commonly referencing the disorder around the 2008 presidential cycle, more than half a decade into the War on Terror. Second, critical discourse analysis reveals that increased attention to PTSD has contributed to a blurring of important spatiotemporal lines around the concept of war, extending its consequences into an unknown future and outside the war zone. This erosion has profound normative consequences, considering how it similarly blurs the pivotal ethical distinction between victim and perpetrator. These findings not only elucidate an evolution that has taken place in American foreign policy, but also speak to the more general conceptual challenges posed by war trauma.

The electoral connection incentivizes representatives to take positions that please most of their constituents. However, on votes for which we have data, lawmakers vote against majority opinion in their district on one out of every three high-profile roll calls in the U.S. House. This rate of “incongruent voting” is much higher for Republican lawmakers, but they do not appear to be punished for it at higher rates than Democrats on Election Day. Why? Research in political psychology shows that citizens hold both policy-specific and identity-based symbolic preferences, that these preferences are weakly correlated, and that incongruous symbolic identity and policy preferences are more common among Republican voters than Democrats. While previous work on representation has treated this fact as a nuisance, we argue that it reflects two real dimensions of political ideology that voters use to evaluate lawmakers. Using four years of CCES data, district-level measures of opinion, and the roll-call record, we find that both dimensions of ideology matter for how lawmakers cast roll calls, and that the operational-symbolic disconnect in public opinion leads to different kinds of representation for each party.

Are the preferences of women and men unequally represented in public policies? This simple yet fundamental question has remained largely unexplored in the fast-growing fields of women’s representation and inequality in the opinion-policy link. Our study analyzes gender biases in policy representation using an original dataset covering 43 countries and four decades, with citizens’ preferences regarding more than 4,000 country-year policies linked to information about actual policy change. Our analysis reveals clear and robust evidence that women’s policy preferences are underrepresented compared to those of men. While this skew is fairly modest in terms of congruence, women’s representation is driven mostly by the high correlation of preferences with men. When there is disagreement, policy is more likely to align with men’s preferences. Our analyses further suggest that women’s substantive underrepresentation is mitigated in contexts with high levels of female descriptive representation and labor market participation. In sum, our study shows that gender inequality extends to the important realm of policy representation, but there is also meaningful variation in unequal representation across contexts.

Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power. By Clement Fatovic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 368p. $55.00.

Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy. By Bonnie Honig. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 218p. $26.95.

States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies. By Nomi Claire Lazar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 190p. $80.00.

In the wake of 9/11, many political scientists and theorists in the United States of America turned their attention to the topic of emergencies. That required them to confront a fundamental question: Are emergencies to be studied as important in their own right, as altogether exceptional events that threaten the very existence of a society in unforeseeable ways? Or are they important, not because they are radically distinct from the normal situation of politics, but because they bring to the surface otherwise implicit aspects of normal politics?

The potential of political science to contribute to debates over public issues has long been hindered by tensions in the discipline's goals of achieving scientific rigor while also serving America's democracy. Those tensions have been exacerbated by recent trends in American higher education working to separate research and teaching activities and to rely more on external donors to finance both. Collectively these trends suggest that political science faces growing pressures to steer away from unpopular topics in both research and teaching, and to abandon the traditional teacher/scholar model of academic careers. It is advisable for the discipline both to seek more actively to promote engagement between different forms of political science scholarship in order to achieve cumulative knowledge that is pertinent to important political issues, and to preserve and strengthen its commitments to effective teaching about politics.

War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. By Joshua S. Goldstein. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 523 pages. $40.00 cloth.

Vast disparities between and within American states’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have evoked renewed attention to whether greater centralization might enhance investments in subnational capacity and remedy subnational inequalities or instead erode subnational organizational capacity. Developments in American public education (1997–2015) offer perspective on this puzzle, which we examine by applying interrupted time series analysis to a novel dataset to assess the implications of centralization on subnational investments in administrative and technical capacity, two dimensions of organizational capacity. We find simultaneous subnational erosion in administrative capacity and growth in technical capacity following centralization, both of which appear concentrated in low-poverty areas despite centralization’s explicit antipoverty purposes. Public education reforms highlight both the challenge of dismantling subnational inequality through centralization and the need for future research on policy designs that enable centralization to yield subnational capacity that is able to remedy inequality.