Whether emerging powers embrace or instead challenge the current international order will be an important determinant of international stability in the years ahead. The material primacy of the traditional Western democracies will wane as emerging powers like China, India, and Brazil continue their ascent; that much we know. What remains unclear is how this change in the distribution of global power will affect the rules and institutions that are the infrastructure of international order.

Among the many scholarly attempts to reckon with the causes and consequences of Donald Trump’s rise, few have attracted popular attention on the scale of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die. Seldom do books by political scientists make it onto the New York Times best sellers list, but this one has, a testament to its broad influence. Levitsky and Ziblatt situate Trumpism within a broader comparative and historical context in order to assess its similarities to and differences from democratic breakdowns elsewhere, particularly in Europe and Latin America. Their broad argument is that modern slides into authoritarianism are not the result of revolutions or military coups, but rather the consequence of a steady erosion of political norms and the assault on such fundamental democratic institutions as an independent judiciary and a free press. In short, contemporary democracies die not as a result of men with guns attacking from outside the system, but rather because elected leaders from inside that system slowly undermine them. Judged from this standpoint, the authors argue that American democracy is now in real danger, and they offer a range of suggestions for saving it. How convincing is Levitsky and Ziblatt’s analysis of democratic breakdown, and how well does it apply to the American case? How useful are the solutions that they offer for rescuing American democracy? We have asked a range of prominent scholars from across the discipline to consider these questions in the present symposium.

In Left Turn: How Liberal Bias Distorts The American Mind, Tim Groseclose argues that media effects play a crucial role in American politics. His case rests on three arguments: (1) that journalists tend overwhelmingly to be liberal rather than conservative; (2) that their innate political bias slants their views in empirically measurable ways; and (3) that this bias fundamentally shapes American politics, by bringing US citizens further to the left than they would naturally be. According to Groseclose, in a world where media bias did not exist, American citizens would on average hold views close to those of Ben Stein or Bill O'Reilly. In such a world, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama by a popular vote margin of 56%—42% in the 2008 presidential election.

In making these claims, Groseclose draws on his own research, and on recent media scholarship by both political scientists and economists, making the broader claim that peer-reviewed social science—which seeks to deal with problems such as endogeneity and selection bias—should be the starting point for public arguments about the role of the media. His book, then, is clearly an effort to bring social scientific arguments into mainstream debates. Groseclose makes no secret of his conservative political leanings—but recent books from left-leaning political scientists such as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are equally unapologetic. It is at least plausible that political scientists' typical unwillingness to engage directly in political arguments has weakened the discipline's capacity for public engagement.

In this symposium a diverse group of contributors have been invited to engage with Groseclose's arguments in ways that bring together specific empirical and/or theoretical points and arguments aimed at the broader “political science public sphere” that Perspectives on Politics seeks to nurture. Contributors were asked to consider these five questions: (1): How do we best measure media effects? (2): If media bias exists, what are its plausible sources? (3): Can one use work on media effects to determine what people's views would be in the absence of such bias? (4): Do you agree that American politics is insufficiently representative, and if so what do you consider the primary sources of this problem? (5): What kinds of political and/or media institutions or practices might enhance democratic discourse?—Henry Farrell, Associate Editor

The policies of Republican Governor Scott Walker have come to symbolize a resurgent assault on the public sector, and on public employee unions in particular, by the Republican Party. The fact that this is happening in Wisconsin, the state that in the last century was considered the “laboratory of Progressivism,” makes the politics surrounding these policies all the more compelling. In The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, Katherine J. Cramer analyzes the “politics of resentment” surrounding these developments. Employing an ethnographic “method of listening,” Cramer furnishes thick description of the political language employed by rural Wisconsinites, and proceeds to develop an interpretive theory of “political resentment” that illuminates the reasons why lower-class citizens so strongly oppose public policies seeking to offset social and economic inequality. The book is important methodologically and politically. We have thus invited a range of social and political scientists to comment on the book as a work of political science and as a diagnosis of the current political moment.

Unfair Housing: How National Policy Shapes Community Action. By Mara S. Sidney. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. 200p. $35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.

In this well-written book, Mara Sidney skillfully utilizes the “policy design” approach developed by Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram (Policy Design for Democracy, 1997) to elucidate the relationship between national policy decisions and local political struggles surrounding the implementation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. The 1968 Act made housing discrimination against individuals because of race, creed, color, and national origin illegal. The 1977 Act was aimed at preventing credit discrimination (redlining) against geographical areas within cities. Sidney argues that the type of local groups that emerge to influence enforcement, and the strategies they utilize, are shaped by the resources built into the legislation's policy design, as well as by local political conditions. Case studies of two cities—Minneapolis and Denver—illustrate the impact of policy design in different local circumstances.

In his book, Corey Brettschneider defends a “substantive” conception of democracy—a “value theory of democracy”—against purely procedural accounts of democracy. Whereas “proceduralists” seek to define democracy strictly through reference to the (majoritarian) means by which decisions are rendered, Brettschneider fears that this leaves democracy rootless, at risk of producing undemocratic outcomes. His effort at solving the problem of “democratic autophagy”—the argument that democracy will consume itself through its own procedures, as I term it in Democracy and Legal Change—is twofold. First, he specifies the values that democratic rights should reflect and preserve. Second, he argues that even nonmajoritarian institutions, such as judicial review, act in a democratic fashion insofar as they help us to ensure that our laws actually do cohere with these values. The former effort is remarkably successful. In my view, however, the latter claim is less persuasive, partially because of the difficulty inherent in translating abstract substantive commitments into law.

From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. By Charles W. Mills. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 312p. $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

The author of the influential The Racial Contract (1997) has gathered together a provocative collection of his essays. These disparate papers do not form an argument for an overarching thesis. Nor do they converge on a single theme, for example, the need to shift away from a focus on class toward race, as the title might suggest. Rather, the essays reveal the recent changes in Charles Mills's philosophical interests, away from core problems in orthodox Marxism toward the project of developing a critical race theory. One constant throughout is Mills's attempt to demonstrate that the methods of analytic philosophy are not inherently “bourgeois,” as many radicals have supposed, but can be usefully applied to problems that concern leftists. Yet unlike much of analytic philosophy, these essays are never boring but instead are generously laced with the author's characteristic biting sarcasm and bold humor.

Making War and Building Peace. By Michael W. Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 400p. $24.95.

Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars. Edited by Philip G. Roeder and Donald Rothchild. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 392p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The two books discussed in this review address the same substantive question: How does one establish sustainable peace after civil war? However, their approaches are quite different. The Roeder and Rothchild edited volume focuses on one aspect of establishing postwar peace—the post–civil war political institutions of the country. Doyle and Sambanis focus on the role of the United Nations in helping to establish sustainable postwar peace. I will first address the edited volume and then turn to the Doyle and Sambanis book before offering a few concluding remarks.

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