Political scientists invoke the standard rationale to justify making and using formal models. It goes like this: (1) we rely on formal models to generate predictions, (2) we treat these predictions as empirical hypotheses, and (3) we seek to test these hypotheses against evidence derived from the “real world.” I show that this interpretation of formal models as directly empirical is inadequate just insofar as it fails to capture the way we actually use them. I then offer an alternative rationale for making and using formal models. Specifically, I argue that we use models, like we use fables, for conceptual purposes.

According to Samuel Huntington, Latin Americans are eroding our country's core Anglo-Protestant values. The values, says he, made America great, unified the country, and allowed immigrant upward mobility through assimilation and acculturation. Huntington expresses concern that immigrants from Latin America, now our main newcomers, along with their U.S.-born progeny, are creating another America, culturally and socially distinct. The reason for this, he claims, is that they settle in close proximity to one another; they retain use of their mother tongue, Spanish; and they remain, in the main, committed Catholics. These conditions purportedly are bad both for America and for the immigrants. They impede new immigrant ability to live the American Dream and, by implication, America's continued global economic preeminence.Susan Eckstein is Professor of Sociology at Boston University ([email protected]). Thanks to the Radcliffe Institute and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundations for financial support for the project on which this article draws, and to Richard Alba and Jorge Domínguez for comments on an earlier version of this essay. The author is also appreciative of the hundreds of Cuban Americans with whom she spoke who have deepened her understanding of Cuban American experiences. She has spoken with ordinary Cuban Americans who emigrated at different points in time, as well as with businessmen, politicians, clergy, leaders of diverse groups and organizations, scholars, and journalists.

The recent outpouring of work on executive power during emergencies, inspired by the post-9/11 era, has significantly enhanced our legal and theoretical understanding of this crucial subject. A key flaw in this literature, however, is that it is historically un-rooted, either dismissing or ignoring important analytical and empirical insights from presidential research and from APD and historical-institutionalist perspectives. In this article, I argue that we can better explain patterns and variations in the use of presidential emergency power by paying careful attention to shifting historical set points for executive choice and action during security crises. In particular, the findings here underscore the episodic growth of new precedents, resources, and expectations for the White House in perilous contexts. The development of presidential emergency power reflects the potential for early executive choices to be repeated and legitimated over time, laying dormant as a “loaded weapon” to be used by future executives in similarly urgent circumstances.

Surprise is an intrinsic fact of political life and its elimination, especially with regard to extraordinary moments of protest and revolution, is a vain endeavor. Prediction and explanation are fundamentally different enterprises. While scholars may be well-positioned to trace, retrospectively, the motivation, networks, leadership, and other contextual factors that fueled the events of 2011 and 1989, such analysis will never bestow the sort of predictive power that will eliminate the surprise of mass uprisings. Verstehen-esque studies of mobilization, while crucially enlightening, have limited capacity to augment our powers of foresight due to the fundamental gulf between agency and intention as well as the causal disconnect between precedent and prediction.

Thomas Hobbes observed that the human mind seeks causality in order to propagate good fortune or avoid disaster. However, events occur that cannot be linked to direct causes, leading human beings to invent beliefs and other mechanisms to produce a system of order and probability that can be applied to the seemingly random universe. Examining the relationship between Hobbes and the Book of Job reveals the failure of religion to provide for perfectly comprehensible causality since Job is forced to accept that God works in ways that he cannot understand in delivering rewards and punishments. Hobbes offers secular political order as an alternative that will conform to the structure of human reason. The attempt to order the universe is always incomplete, yet it is this lack of control that helps us to understand the inspiration to create and recreate political order, even when it fails to create a predictable, comprehensible environment. While the need for security is often seen as a malevolent or irrational element in political life, this article explains how the desire for order can also be understood as a dynamic interaction between the structure of human reason and the uncontrollable aspects of human life.Keally McBride is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco ([email protected]). Work on this essay began in a seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She would like to thank Kevin Bundy, Carl Cheeseman, Mary Dietz, Nancy Hirshmann, James Martel, Hanna Pitkin, and John Zarobell for their comments.

In “Social Science and Liberal Values in a Time of War,” Jeffrey Isaac urges us to discuss “the responsibilities of social scientists during wartime.” He focuses specifically on the ethics of responsibility appropriate to the university-based scholar when political authority attacks the values, both moral and non-moral, that we implicitly presuppose when we function as academics in general, and political scientists in particular. Isaac invokes the authority of Max Weber to elucidate the precise boundaries of these obligations as well as to find a notion of responsibility on which all political scientists, whatever their partisan commitments, can agree.Peter Breiner is the author of Max Weber and Democratic Politics and articles on Weber and other German theorists. He is working on a book on the role of examples in political theory. The author thanks Jeff Isaac for a most useful interchange that helped him focus this response.

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

In a careful paper, John R. Hibbing makes a strong case that political scientists—who have learned lessons from many other disciplines—need to make room for biology. While his paper is reassuring on many counts, two matters cause concern. First, Hibbing argues that the open acknowledgment of the biological basis of group differences would lead to greater tolerance. It is easy to adduce examples to suggest that it is unrealistic to expect that people, especially people with political concerns and objectives, will begin to focus on the diversity within groups rather than the differences between groups. Second, it is not clear the extent to which investigations into the biological basis of politics would illumine the great questions of political analysis.

Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. By Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 368p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

It is more than 15 years since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was passed in 1996, famously described by then-President Bill Clinton as “the end of welfare as we know it.” In Disciplining the Poor, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram analyze recent changes in US welfare policy as reflections of broader transformations of the “governance” of poverty, arguing that these transformations represent a new form of “neoliberal paternalism” in which race continues to be an important element. In this symposium, a diverse group of political scientists working on welfare issues have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on the importance of the “governance of poverty” to the future of American politics.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Why, more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after repeated elections at both the regional and national levels, has post-Soviet Russia slid back into authoritarianism? Given the increasingly tense relations between the Kremlin and the West, this is a question of growing geopolitical importance. Analyzing it also turns out to be immensely fruitful for sharpening our theoretical understanding of the sources of democracy and autocracy more generally. While the decade and a half since the Soviet collapse has been a time of massive upheaval and hardship for the hundreds of millions of people living in the region, it has also been something of a golden era for the study of comparative politics—as anyone who reads the works reviewed here will readily attest.Stephen E. Hanson is Boeing International Professor at the University of Washington and the Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies. He is the author of Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions, winner of the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He is also a co-editor of Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule, a co-author of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, and the author of numerous journal articles examining post-communist politics in comparative perspective.

We inhabit a thoroughly globalized world. People are increasingly and visibly connected by a “World Wide Web,” by a world market, and by universalist discourses of human rights and democracy. At the same time, full citizenship in a political community—and the rights conferred by such citizenship—is an exclusive status that remains, remarkably, tied to accidents of birth and historical circumstance. And what one has a right to—gainful employment, education, health care, political voice, mere presence—is largely a function of whether one has the precious status of citizenship or is, alternatively, regarded as an alien. Ayelet Shachar's The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality is a compelling account of the moral arbitrariness of this state of affairs. A study in “normative political theory,” it is a work of political science that incorporates legal theory, moral philosophy, political economy, and public policy. The author tackles issues of increasing global political importance—global disparities of wealth; unequal access to clear air, water, and a secure place to live; and the increasingly contentious politics of immigration and immigrant rights.

So it seems fitting to invite a range of political science scholars who work on these topics to comment on the book. The basic editorial charge of this symposium is thus straightforward: How do you assess Shachar's arguments and the attention she focuses on the phenomenon of “birthright lottery”? How does this argument bear upon the topics and approaches that characterize your own scholarship? And how do these topics and approaches shed light on the book and its arguments? While the focus of the symposium is this provocative book, the discussion of it should also be regarded as an opportunity to address the question of whether or not the bases of citizenship need to be fundamentally reconceived, and in what ways political science can and should contribute to such a rethinking.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor