Robert Lieberman's critique of our work on the Israel lobby is at odds with an abundance of evidence and prior scholarship describing the powerful influence that pro-Israel groups exert on U.S. Middle East policy. In addition to mischaracterizing our arguments, Lieberman claims that our methodology and research design are flawed and that our work contradicts the scholarly literature on American politics. Neither claim is true. Contrary to what he says, we did consider alternative hypotheses, and our analysis contains significant variation on both the independent and dependent variables. Given the methodological challenges involved in assessing the causal influence of any interest group, we also relied heavily on “process-tracing.” Lieberman recognizes this is an appropriate method for assessing causal impact and he concedes that this evidence supports our central argument. Moreover, we went to some lengths to avoid selection bias. Similarly, our arguments are consistent with the existing literature on interest groups, and with much of the scholarly literature on congressional decision-making, campaign financing, electoral politics, and the role of think tanks and the media. Surprisingly, after leveling a variety of false charges, Lieberman offers an “alternative” explanation for the Israel lobby's influence that is virtually identical to our own.

Democracy is premised on the ability of individuals, often working with others, to influence policies affecting them. However, existing theory cannot always explain why some organized efforts are more influential than others. We introduce the concept of civic feedbacks, arguing that the ways organizations engage individuals in collective action have feedback effects that shape the strategic position of organizations, the options available to leaders, and the likelihood of policy influence. The mechanisms through which civic feedbacks operate include the depth of accountability to the constituency, the network of elite relationships to which leaders subsequently have access, and their ongoing ability to recruit a committed and flexible constituency willing to engage new issues. Analyzing how these feedbacks redound to organizations over time enhances our ability to explain civic organizations’ differential rates of political influence. The concept of civic feedbacks returns organizations and organizational strategy to the center of the study of political influence.

Together, the final reports of the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy and its three working groups constitute a remarkable resource for students of contemporary American politics. Most striking in these materials is the depiction of a reinforcing cycle of political and economic inequality. The task force report argues that inequalities in political voice reverberate in patterns of governance, which in turn give rise to public policies that reinforce political inequalities.Margaret Weir has written widely on social policy and politics in the United States and is the author of several books, including Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States. The author would like to thank Jennifer Hochschild for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Photography, understood as a technology for amplifying imagination, affords a useful tool for coming to terms with the massive forced migration caused by the Katrina catastrophe. Specifically, photographic projects by Robert Polidori and Richard Misrach reveal the exigencies of communicating in the wake of the disaster.

We examine the democratic legitimacy of popular referendums asking whether they should be understood as bypassing or complementing representative institutions. To answer this question, we focus on the distinction between legislative referendums and consultative ones, noting that even though referendums of the latter kind are by far more prevalent from an empirical point of view, their specific role in democratic decision-making remains under-theorized in the existing literature. We therefore focus on consultative referendums as a possible way of reconciling the referendum procedure with representative democracy. First, we clarify the specific conception of representative democracy that underscores our study; second, we develop the idea that consultative referendums are to be understood to specify the political mandate of elected representatives; finally, we apply the results of this conceptual work to the case of the Greek bailout and the Brexit referendums, aiming to dispel some lingering misconceptions concerning the normative implications of their results and thereby clarifying the normative significance of our theory.

In his 2000 best seller Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Civic Community, Robert Putnam analyzed the links between social capital and civic engagement. Lamenting the decline of “civic America,” he called for a Tocquevillean renewal of voluntary association in the United States. In American Grace, Putnam and coauthor David Campbell—who also helped with the preparation of Bowling Alone—return to the analysis of American civil society, focusing their attention on America's changing religious landscape and its implications for democracy. Their basic argument is that while the United States is religiously diverse and pluralistic to a profound degree, and while in recent years it has witnessed growing religious polarization, it has also succeeded in muting religious tensions and hostilities. As they conclude: “How has America solved the puzzle of religious pluralism—the coexistence of religious diversity and devotion? And how has it done so in the wake of growing religious polarization? By creating a web of interlocking personal relationships among people of many different faiths. This is America's grace” (p. 550).

Given the importance of religion in American life and the influence of Putnam's broad agenda on much current social science research on social capital and civic engagement, we have decided to organize a symposium around the book, centered on three questions: 1) How is American Grace related to Putnam's earlier work, particularly Bowling Alone, and what are the implications of the continuities and/or discontinuities between these works? 2) What kind of a work of political science is American Grace, and how does it compare to other important recent work dealing with religion and politics in the United States? 3) What are the strengths and weaknesses of Putnam and Campbell's account of “how religion divides and unites us,” and what is the best way of thinking about the contemporary significance of religion and politics in the United States and about the ways that the religious landscape challenges U.S. politics and U.S. political science?

The books under review reveal considerable agreement about suicide bombers. Yet there is a significant gap between the scholarly consensus they embody and widespread perceptions about the subject. We learn, for example, that suicide missions are as old as the hills. We learn that there is no particular link between the propensity to engage in suicide attacks or other forms of extreme terrorism and religious belief—let alone belief in Islamic fundamentalism. We learn that Sri Lanka's secular Marxist Tamil Tigers have been responsible for more suicide attacks than any other group in recent decades. We learn that even within Islamist groups like Hezbollah, the majority of suicide attackers have not been religious at all, and that some of the religious ones have been Christian rather than Islamist. And we learn that suicide attackers are of both sexes and of various ages, incomes, and education levels.Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University and Henry R. Luce Director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

There have been many retrospective analyses written about the marriage-equality movement since the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that made marriages between people of the same sex legal in all 50 states. Most attribute that triumph to a stunningly swift turnaround in public comfort with and approval of same-sex relationships. However, public opinion data indicates that this narrative is inaccurate. In 2015, 51% of General Social Survey respondents declared that they found sexual relationships between people of the same sex to be “wrong” at least “some of the time.” Nevertheless, at the same time, 56% of respondents affirmed that people of the same sex ought to have the legal right to marry. This dissonance suggests that the most common narrative about the success of the movement misses something crucial about how political persuasion happened in this case, as well as the way that political persuasion happens in general. In this article, I show that the massive shift in support for same-sex marriage was likely not the result of large majorities changing their underlying attitudes regarding gay sexual relationships, but was instead the result of activists inserting new criteria for evaluating same-sex marriage into popular political discourse by consistently using resonant arguments. These arguments reframed the political stakes, changed the public meaning of the marriage debate, and altered the decisional context in which people determine their policy preferences.

Douglas A. Ollivant on The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. By the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Forward by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos, and John A. Nagl. Introduction by Sarah Sewall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 472p. $15.00.

This article develops W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of democratic despotism to illustrate the entanglement of popular sovereignty and empire through an excessive form of western self-determination and theorizes how features of this formation remain today. Democratic despotism implies that, in western democracies at the turn of the twentieth century, popular sovereignty was an impulse to partake of the wealth and resources obtained by empire. Western democracies issued a claim to determine themselves (democratically) and others (despotically), in what I call “self-and-other-determination.” I frame the question of imperial democracy within the literature on empire and racial capitalism and the writings of Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and Saidiya Hartman to conceptualize how racial affective attachments allow citizens past and present to restrict democratic concern to a limited community, whose wealth relies on the imperial exploitation of racialized others. I discuss the absence of these questions in the literature on self-determination and reflect on the implications of my framework for the contemporary rise of right-wing populism.

We contribute to a greater understanding of political psychology by 1) collecting data in a more systematic way for the intellectual community, 2) sensitizing students to the extent to which any intellectual discipline is socially constructed and is a work in progress, 3) heightening awareness of the political aspects of intellectual life, 4) exposing readers to the wide variety of diverse approaches and methodologies utilized by political psychologists, and 5) suggesting the range of topics that political psychology can address successfully and the range of techniques it can utilize.

Michael Barnett has written a brilliant—and sobering—analysis of the dilemmas of humanitarian organizations in contemporary global politics. He argues convincingly that humanitarianism is becoming politicized and that humanitarian organizations are becoming institutionalized. These changes speak to core conceptualizations by humanitarians of themselves and to their capacity to fulfill their most essential functions. Barnett appropriately draws attention to the unexpected, counterintuitive, and at times undesirable consequences of politicization and institutionalization, particularly for ethics and identity. Humanitarian organizations, he concludes, are now far more vulnerable to external control, to the ability of states to constrain their practices and principles. By implication, Barnett concludes, politicization and institutionalization produce negative consequences for humanitarianism. Power is changing what humanitarian organizations do and what they are.Janice Stein is Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto ([email protected]).

Several months ago, the editors of Perspectives on Politics invited the 12 most recent presidents of the APSA, the current president, and the president-elect to answer the following questions:

What one or two things has the discipline of political science taught us of really lasting political import over roughly the past two decades? What do we now know that we didn't know before, say, 1980 that really matters, whether for scholarship, political action, or policy improvement? Alternatively, what one or two really important questions or issues has political science failed to address or failed to address well? What new knowledge from political science might make a material difference in how we understand the world or how we act in it?

Prior to the 1970s, political science for the most part happily ignored questions of production, exchange, consumption, and investment. The new prominence of Marxist and neo-Marxist scholarship in that decade as well as the transformation of many institutions, trends and premises of the post-World War II order (including the collapse of Bretton Woods, the rise of OPEC and Third World liberation movements, the advent of détente, and the first global recession since the Great Depression) ushered many innovative themes and methodologies into our discipline. Political economy was the most direct result of both these trends, taking its place as one of the first of a wave of “inter-” or “multidisciplinary” fields of study.Darel E. Paul is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Williams College, Williamstown, MA ([email protected]). He is the author of Rescaling International Political Economy: Subnational States and the Regulation of the Global Political Economy (Routledge, 2005) as well as of several articles on cities in the contemporary global political economy.

A decade ago, very few political scientists had either the opportunity or the incentive to engage with the political public in a direct, unmediated way. Today, there is a dense and eclectic ecosystem of political science and international relations-focused blogs and online publications, where good work can easily find an audience through social media. There are multiple initiatives dedicated to supporting academic interventions in the public sphere, and virtually every political or cultural magazine of note now offers a robust online section featuring commentary and analysis in which political scientists are well represented. This has transformed publication for a broader public from something exotic to something utterly routine. I discuss how these changes have affected individual scholars, the field of political science, and the political world with which we are engaged.