This is my final introduction as editor of Perspectives on Politics, and I'll conclude with a few thanks and hopes. But my main task here is to introduce the articles in this issue. They cluster around two themes—leadership and dilemmas of action (those themes are, of course, intimately related).

Running through most, though not all, of the articles in this issue of Perspectives on Politics is the theme of competing interpretations of the same event or activity—a subject all too familiar to those of us with partners, children, or political convictions. Some articles directly address alternative readings; in other cases, competing interpretations appear across articles or between author and commentator(s). There are also surprising substantive resonances among articles in this issue, especially about Louis Hartz's thesis of the liberal tradition in America.

What unites most articles in this issue of Perspectives is the search for power. The authors seek power for different reasons—to enable political leaders to be more effective, to eliminate its insidious effects on citizens and the polity, to end group-based strife, or to produce better social science theories. That the search for power would unify otherwise disparate articles is hardly surprising; if our discipline has any center toward which its many peripheries gravitate, it is the study of power in all of its many manifestations.

No clear theme runs through all of the articles in this issue, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to introduce another theme that encompasses these articles as well as, we hope, everything published in Perspectives on Politics. That is the issue of good writing. Perspectives aims to present articles that are accessible to all social scientists and political actors, regardless of their training or background. More ambitiously, Perspectives aspires to stylistic excellence—all articles should be written clearly, concisely, and with logical development and elegant, even passionate, phrasing. The managing editor is a professional editor (not a professional manager), and the editor and associate editors spend probably more time than we should in working with each manuscript to ensure that it is not only excellent substantively, but also well written. Our immodest goal is to set an example for all other academic journals so that there are no excuses for dull, turgid, or unclear publications. Good writing is not easy. As Roger Angell (one of the best current writers) wrote of the efforts of E. B. White (one of the best writers of the past), “writing almost killed you, and the hard part was making it look easy” (New Yorker, February 14 and February 21, 2005).

Rational choice theory tends to view political institutions as structures of voluntary cooperation that resolve collective action problems and benefit all concerned. Yet the political process often gives rise to institutions that are good for some people and bad for others, depending on who has the power to impose their will. Political institutions may be structures of cooperation, but they may also be structures of power—and the theory does not tell us much about this. As a result, it gives us a one-sided and overly benign view of what political institutions are and do. This problem is not well understood, and indeed is not typically seen as a problem at all. For there is a widespread sense in the rational choice literature that, because power is frequently discussed, it is an integral part of the theory and just as fundamental as cooperation. Confusion on this score has undermined efforts to right the imbalance. My purpose here is to clarify the analytic roles that power and cooperation actually play in this literature, and to argue that a more balanced theory—one that brings power from its periphery to its very core—is both necessary and entirely possible.Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution ([email protected]). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Yale Conference on Crafting and Operating Institutions, April 11–13, 2003. The author would like to thank Sven Feldmann, Lloyd Gruber, James Fearon, Peter Hall, Jennifer Hochschild, Stephen Krasner, Chris Mantzavinos, Gary Miller, Paul Pierson, Theda Skocpol, Barry Weingast, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

In February 1957 Lloyd Rudolph and I set forth into the “heat and dust” villages of Thanjavur district, South India, with 10 Indian graduate students from Madras Christian College. Our objective was to conduct a survey on political consciousness. Six hundred urban and rural Tamils scattered across three districts constituted the random sample we had selected from the first electoral rolls of recently freed India. V. O. Key, that witty and groundbreaking doyen of electoral behavior analysis, had enticed us into survey research. Upon our return, the Michigan Survey Research Center provided a methodologically intense summer.Susanne Rudolph is the William Benton Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Chicago and past president of the American Political Science Association ([email protected]). She studies comparative politics with special interest in the political economy and political sociology of South Asia, state formation, Max Weber, and the politics of category and culture. An earlier version of this address was presented at the annual meeting of the association on September 2, 2004.

Political theorists seldom have direct experience of power. Bringing together two decades of experience in educational leadership and my vocation as a political theorist, I offer advice to prospective leaders. This essay takes Machiavelli's Prince as a model in terms of format, and occasionally draws on his prose, either in agreement or to offer a different opinion. I emphasize the importance of context and organizational type in thinking about leadership, and of paying attention to what leaders actually do. I describe some of the qualities that often prove helpful to leaders, and discuss the distinctive attractions and pitfalls of power-holding.Nannerl O. Keohane is Laurance Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School and the Center for Human Values, Princeton University ([email protected]). From 1981 until 2004, she served as President of Wellesley College and then of Duke University. She is the author of Philosophy and the State in France and essays on political philosophy, education and feminism. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as the Godkin Lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, in February 2005. I acknowledge with gratitude comments on earlier drafts from colleagues at Harvard, Stanford, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, especially from Charles Griswold, Robert O. Keohane, James G. March, Norman Naimark, Joseph S. Nye Jr., Josiah Ober, and Samuel Popkin. I am also grateful to the assistant to the editor at Perspectives on Politics who suggested that I recast the lecture in the spirit of Machiavelli's The Prince. The reader who is familiar with this work will note multiple occasions where I have used his tone and even occasionally his prose, with minimal emendations, to make my own points, sometimes in agreement and sometimes in dissent, but without direct citation. After the essay was submitted for review, Harvey Mansfield made a number of helpful suggestions and drew my attention to Carnes Lord's The Modern Prince, which also uses Machiavelli's treatise as a “literary model of sorts.”

To be considered for publication in the Counterpoint section of the journal, letters must be relatively short (fewer than 1,000 words). Submit letters directly to [email protected]. The editors will choose which letters to publish. All letters may be lightly edited for style and length.

The scale, scope, and significance of humanitarian action have expanded significantly since the late 1980s. This article reflects on two ways in which humanitarianism has been transformed. First, its purpose has been politicized. Whereas once humanitarian actors attempted to insulate themselves from the world of politics, they now work closely with states and attempt to eliminate the root causes of conflict that place individuals at risk. Second, a field of humanitarianism has become institutionalized; during the 1990s the field and its agencies became more professionalized and rationalized. Drawing on various strands of organizational theory, I examine the forces that have contributed to these transformations. I then explore how these transformations have changed the nature of what humanitarian organizations are and what they do. In the conclusion I consider how the transformation of humanitarianism links to the relationship between international nongovernmental organizations and world order, including the purpose of humanitarian action and its distinctive function in global politics.Michael Barnett is Harold Stassen Chair of International Relations at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and professor of political science at the University of Minnesota ([email protected]). In 2004–5 he was a visiting associate at the Center on International Cooperation at the Center on International Cooperation. The author thanks Bud Duvall, Kevin Hartigan, Martha Finnemore, Abby Stoddard, Ron Kassimir, Craig Calhoun, Jack Snyder, Adele Harmer, the participants of the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium, and three anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics for their comments and corrections. Special thanks to the Social Sciences Research Council and the participants in its series on “The Transformation of Humanitarian Action.”

In 2001 and 2003, the Bush administration engineered two enormous tax cuts primarily benefiting very wealthy taxpayers. Most Americans supported these tax cuts. I argue that they did so not because they were indifferent to economic inequality, but because they largely failed to connect inequality and public policy. Three out of every four people polled said that the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people has increased in the past 20 years, and most of them added that that is a bad thing—but most of those people still supported the regressive 2001 Bush tax cut and the even more regressive repeal of the estate tax. Several manifestly relevant considerations had negligible or seemingly perverse effects on these policy views, including assessments of the wastefulness of government spending and desires for additional spending on a variety of government programs. Support for the Bush tax cuts was strongly shaped by people's attitudes about their own tax burdens, but virtually unaffected by their attitudes about the tax burden of the rich—even in the case of the estate tax, which only affects the wealthiest one or two percent of taxpayers. Public opinion in this instance was ill informed, insensitive to some of the most important implications of the tax cuts, and largely disconnected from (or misconnected to) a variety of relevant values and material interests.Larry M. Bartels is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University ([email protected]). He directs the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. This article is a revised and abridged version of a paper originally presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association and subsequently presented in seminars and conferences at the University of Michigan, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Brookings Institution, Harvard University, Demos, and Princeton University, and at the 2004 meeting of the Russell Sage Foundation's University Working Groups on the Social Dimensions of Inequality. The author is grateful to numerous seminar and conference participants, colleagues, students, and friends for their criticism and support. He is also grateful to the Russell Sage Foundation for generous financial support of his research through a grant to the Princeton Working Group on Inequality, and for additional support of the primary data collection on which the present report is based.

Although James Madison is best known for the views he expressed in the Federalist, as he gained greater experience in the new American political system he rejected some of these early views and increasingly emphasized four propositions: (1) the greatest threat in the American republic comes from a minority, not the majority; (2) to protect their rights from minority factions, members of the majority faction must organize their own political party; (3) the danger that majorities might threaten property rights could be overcome by enabling a majority of citizens to own property, a feasible solution in America; and (4) in a republic, majorities must be allowed to prevail. Even Madison's post-1787 constitutional views, however, were flawed in at least three serious ways: (1) as an empirical proposition, his conjecture that increased size reduces the danger of factionalism is contradicted by subsequent experience; (2) in his conception of basic rights, Madison excluded more than half the adult population: women, African Americans, and American Indians; and (3) he actively supported the provision in the Constitution that gave to slave states an increase in representatives amounting to three-fifths of the slave population.Robert A. Dahl is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University ([email protected]). A past president of the American Political Science Association, his numerous publications include A Preface to Democratic Theory; Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City; Democracy and Its Critics; and How Democratic is the American Constitution? The author expresses his appreciation to the Political Science Departments of the University of Indiana and Stanford University for providing opportunities to offer a lecture on the subject of this essay and to profit from the discussions that followed. Thanks also to Professors Jack Rakove, Richard Mathews, and Lyman T. Sargent for their helpful criticisms and suggestions on a draft of this paper.

Ethnic divisions, according to empirical democratic theory, and commonsense understandings of politics, threaten the survival of democratic institutions. One of the principal mechanisms linking the politicization of ethnic divisions with the destabilization of democracy is the so-called outbidding effect. According to theories of ethnic outbidding, the politicization of ethnic divisions inevitably gives rise to one or more ethnic parties. The emergence of even a single ethnic party, in turn, “infects” the political system, leading to a spiral of extreme bids that destroys competitive politics altogether. In contrast, I make the (counterintuitive) claim that ethnic parties can sustain a democratic system if they are institutionally encouraged: outbidding can be reversed by replacing the unidimensional ethnic identities assumed by the outbidding models with multidimensional ones. My argument is based on the anomalous case of ethnic party behavior in India. It implies that the threat to democratic stability, where it exists, comes not from the intrinsic nature of ethnic divisions, but from the institutional context within which ethnic politics takes place. Institutions that artificially restrict ethnic politics to a single dimension destabilize democracy, whereas institutions that foster multiple dimensions of ethnic identity can sustain it.Kanchan Chandra is associate professor of political science at MIT ([email protected]) and author of Why Ethnic Parties Succeed (2004). For useful discussions and written comments, the author thanks the anonymous reviewers and the editorial board of Perspectives on Politics, Steve Ansolabehere, Paul Brass, Eric Dickson, Cynthia Enloe, James Fearon, Rachel Gisselquist, J. P. Gownder, Henry Hale, Jennifer Hochschild, Mala Htun, Samuel Huntington, Stathis Kalyvas, Nelson Kasfir, Herbert Kitschelt, David Laitin, Gerard Padro-i-Miquel, Lloyd Rudolph, Susanne Rudolph, Jody Shapiro, Kenneth Shepsle, James Snyder, Ashutosh Varshney, Santhanagopalan Vasudev, Barry Weingast, Myron Weiner, Chris Wendt, Steven Wilkinson, Adam Ziegfeld, and participants of the fall 2003 meeting of the Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LICEP) at UCLA.

The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts represent dramatic legislative breakthroughs. Taken together, they have fundamentally reshaped the nation's fiscal landscape. In view of the voluminous and largely sanguine literature on American democratic responsiveness, one might assume that this policy turnaround was broadly consistent with voters' priorities. In this article, we show that—in contradiction to this prevailing view, as well as the claims of Larry Bartels in this issue—the substance of the tax cuts was in fact sharply at odds with public preferences. Tax policy was pulled radically off center, we argue, by the intersection of two forces: (1) the increasing incentives of political elites to cater to their partisan and ideological “base”; and (2) the increasing capacity of politicians who abandon the middle to escape political retribution. In accounting for these centrifugal forces, we stress, as others have, increasing partisanship and polarization, as well as the growing sophistication of political message-control. Yet we also emphasize a pivotal factor that is too often overlooked: the deliberate crafting of policy to distort public perceptions, set the future political agenda, and minimize the likelihood of voter backlash. By showing how politicians can engineer policy shifts that are at odds with majority public preferences, we hope to provoke a broader discussion of voters' capacity to protect their interests in America's representative democracy.Jacob S. Hacker is Peter Strauss Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University ([email protected]) and author of The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States and The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security. Paul Pierson is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley ([email protected]), where he holds the Avice Saint Chair in Public Policy. He is the author of Politics in Time: History, Institutions and Social Analysis and Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment. The authors are grateful for the comments and suggestions of Akhil Amar, Daniel Carpenter, Peter Hall, Michael Heany, Jennifer Hochschild, Richard Kogan, Theodore Marmor, Andrew Martin, David Mayhew, Nolan McCarty, Bruce Nesmith, Peter Orszag, Eric Schickler, Theda Skocpol, Richard Vallely, Robert van Houweling, Joseph White, and three anonymous reviewers, as well as participants in a workshop at Harvard University sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. Rachel Goodman, Pearline Kyi, Joanne Lim, and Alan Schoenfeld provided able research assistance. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

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]).

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine household market inequality, redistribution, and the relationship between market inequality and redistribution in affluent OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. We observe sizeable increases in market household inequality in most countries. This development appears to have been driven largely, though not exclusively, by changes in employment: in countries with better employment performance, low-earning households benefited relative to high-earning ones; in nations with poor employment performance, low-earning households fared worse. In contrast to widespread rhetoric about the decline of the welfare state, redistribution increased in most countries during this period, as existing social-welfare programs compensated for the rise in market inequality. They did so in proportion to the degree of increase in inequality, producing a very strong positive association between changes in market inequality and changes in redistribution. We discuss the relevance of median-voter theory and power resources theory for understanding differences across countries and changes over time in the extent of compensatory redistribution.Lane Kenworthy is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Arizona ([email protected]). Jonas Pontusson is a professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University ([email protected]). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Conference of Europeanists (March 2002), a workshop on the Comparative Political Economy of Inequality at Cornell University (April 2002), the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (June 2002), and a seminar at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University (December 2003). For criticisms and suggestions the authors thank Richard Freeman, Janet Gornick, Alex Hicks, Torben Iversen, Larry Kahn, Tomas Larsson, Jim Mosher, Nirmala Ravishankar, David Rueda, Tim Smeeding, John Stephens, Michael Wallerstein, Christopher Way, Erik Wright, and the Perspectives on Politics reviewers.

As a result of the 1996 reforms, the number of welfare recipients has declined precipitously, and the reform effort has been heralded a “success.” However, a growing body of research indicates racial disparities in client treatment and outcomes under welfare reform. These findings have inaugurated a debate about interpreting racial disparities under welfare reform and determining what corrective action, if any, is necessary. Some analysts contend that welfare reform, as a post–civil rights era, racially neutral public policy, can legitimately have differential outcomes for different racial groups. I argue that this claim must be countered with a new poverty research that goes beyond the limits of mainstream work by placing welfare reform in its historical and social context, thereby providing a more robust explanation of how and to what effect welfare reform is race-biased. I show how welfare reform contributes to what Loic Wacquant calls “racemaking” by being part of a racial policy regime that has developed from past policy but reinforces current racial inequalities.Sanford F. Schram teaches social theory and policy in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College ([email protected]). He is the author of Praxis for the Poor, After Welfare, and Words of Welfare, which won APSA's Michael Harrington Award in 1996. His Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance, and Globalization is forthcoming. The author thanks Bruce Baum, Wesley Bryant, Tia Burroughs, Anne Dalke, Linda Dennard, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Richard Fording, Burnee Forsythe, Jocelyn Frye, Margaret Henderson, Jennifer Hochschild, Tallese Johnson, Vicki Lens, Amy McLaughlin, Anne Norton, Frances Fox Piven, Melania Popa, Dorit Roer, Corey Shdaimah, Roland Stahl, Roni Strier, Carl Swidorski, Tom Vartanian, Dvora Yanow, Iris Marion Young, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Joe Soss's invaluable suggestions were critical to the completion of this article.

The Amish are often cited as a paradigm illiberal group, mistrustful of and separated from the modern world. But the Amish practice of rumspringa complicates this common image. At age 16, Amish children are released from church strictures and given a year or more to “run around” in violation of Amish norms. Only after the opportunity to taste life with cars, electricity, alcohol, and rock and roll do Amish-raised teens decide whether to be baptized and enter the church. Consent must be express, never tacit: to paraphrase Locke, an Amish youth is born a member of no church. But is rumspringa a meaningful exit option? Are there plausible ways to make it more meaningful? What does this practice suggest about the debate between “toleration” and “autonomy” liberals, who divide over whether illiberal minority cultures ought to be accepted or somehow reformed? This paper brings a potent case study to the cultural rights debate and argues that both sides fundamentally err. While tolerance liberals tend to vastly underestimate what is required of a meaningful right of exit, autonomy liberals fail to appreciate how much intervention would be necessary to provide such a right. The Amish case suggests that the exit option is deeply flawed as the litmus test for whether and how minorities should be accommodated in a liberal polity.Steven V. Mazie is assistant professor of politics at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan and has taught previously at Bard College, New York University, and the University of Michigan ([email protected]). His articles have appeared recently in Polity, Field Methods, and The Brandywine Review of Faith and International Affairs. His first book, Israel's Higher Law: Religion and Liberal Democracy in the Jewish State, is forthcoming in early 2006. Earlier versions of this article were delivered at annual meetings of the Western Political Science Association (2003) and the Midwestern Political Science Association (2004) and in a Bard High School Early College Faculty Seminar (2005). The author would like to thank anonymous reviewers, the editors of Perspectives on Politics, and particularly Jennifer Hochschild for their valuable suggestions and criticisms. In addition, he is grateful to Herman Bontrager, Harry Chotiner, Andrey Falko, John Hagan, JoAnne Jensen, Donald Kraybill, Chandran Kukathas, Emile Lester, Carol Levy, Renanit Levy, Marc Olshan, Marek Steedman, Conrad Stern-Ascher, Jennifer Sutton, Lucy Walker, David Wiacek, Ed Wingenbach, Joe Wittmer, and Lee Zook.

Why do some ethnofederal states survive while others collapse? The puzzle is particularly stark in the case of the former Soviet Union: the multiethnic Russian Federation has managed to survive intact the transition from totalitarian rule, whereas the multiethnic USSR disintegrated. The critical distinction between the USSR and Russia lies in the design of ethnofederal institutions. The USSR contained a core ethnic region, the “Russian Republic,” a single region with a far greater population than any other in the union. This core ethnic region facilitated dual sovereignty, exacerbated the security fears of minority-group regions, and promoted the “imagining” of a Russia independent of the larger Soviet state. In place of a single core ethnic region, the Russian Federation contains 57 separate provinces. This feature of institutional design has given Russia's central government important capacities to thwart the kind of centrifugal forces that brought down the USSR. This holds important lessons for policy makers crafting federal institutions in other multiethnic countries.Henry E. Hale is an assistant professor of political science at Indiana University ([email protected]). His book on the development of a national party system in the Russian Federation will be published by Cambridge University Press. The author is indebted to many who provided helpful advice and support, including Andrew Buck, Mikhail Filippov, Edward Gibson, Yoshiko Herrera, Juliet Johnson, Pauline Jones Luong, Daniel Posner, Olga Shvetsova, Jack Snyder, Ashutosh Varshney, the anonymous reviewers of earlier drafts, and participants in the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security workshop and a seminar at the Russian and East European Center, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

The debate over same-sex marriage in the United States is fundamentally a disagreement about the nature of democratic citizenship and the meaning of full inclusion of adult citizens in the polity. The facts that marriage has both private and public dimensions, and is described by policy makers as natural and unchanging even as they write laws to define it create confusion among those who publicly contest same-sex marriage. The feminist critique of marriage provides insight on the issue; its critique, along with the questions raised by same-sex marriage, indicates a need to rethink many aspects of the legal regulation of families and intimate life as they affect democratic citizenship.Jyl Josephson is an associate professor of political science and director of women's studies at Rutgers University, Newark ([email protected]). She is coeditor, with Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, of the second edition of Gender and American Politics; coeditor, with Cynthia Burack, of Fundamental Differences: Feminists Talk Back to Social Conservatives, and author of Gender, Families, and State: Child Support Policy in the United States. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild for her editorial guidance. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers, and to Cynthia Burack, David Foster, and Stacy VanDeveer, whose questions helped me to clarify my arguments.

Wars have been underexamined as causal factors in American political history. The nation's freestanding hot wars seem to have generated at least four kinds of major effects: policy changes of lasting consequence, new issue regimes, durable changes in electoral alignments, and durable changes in party ideologies. Considered here are the War of 1812, the War with Mexico, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.David R. Mayhew is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University ([email protected]). His publications include Party Loyalty among Congressmen; Congress: The Electoral Connection; “Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals”; Placing Parties in American Politics; Divided We Govern; America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through Newt Gingrich; and Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre. The author thanks Alan Gerber, Matthew Green, Jacob Hacker, Sonam Henderson, Rogan Kersh, Philip Klinkner, Heinz Kohler, Joseph LaPalombara, Bruce Russett, Abbey Steele, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.