As is now traditional we begin this issue of Perspectives on Politics with the presidential address, this year by Robert Axelrod who offers sound advice about how political scientists might alter what is commonly seen as a lopsided balance of trade with other disciplines. It is difficult to imagine a message more in keeping with my own vision for this journal.

The title of this journal—Perspectives on Politics—presupposes, at least tacitly, that even if we view it from a variety of vantage points, we can identify and agree upon some thing called politics. We spend a lot of time and effort arguing about those vantage points, the theoretical and methodological “perspectives” from which we explore our object of inquiry. Rarely, however, do we direct our attention reflexively and systematically on the ways our own practices and institutions themselves are infiltrated by politics. The lead article in this issue, a study of how gender inequality operates, sometimes subtly, sometimes much less so, among faculty and administrators at one prominent American university. As the authors Kristen Monroe, Saba Ozyurt, Ted Wrigley, and Amy Alexander note at the outset, not everyone immediately sees how this topic fits within a conception of politics. Like the authors, I find it difficult to grasp that perspective. Monroe, Ozyurt, Wrigley, and Alexander not only chart in an innovative manner the ways that women faculty at a prominent research university encounter gender inequality but the strategies they have devised for responding to the predicaments that inequality creates for themselves and their colleagues. I am pleased to be publishing this provocative study and hope that it will generate much subsequent inquiry into this topic.

This past summer was marked by violent conflict between Georgia and Russia over what might, from a parochial American vantage point, seem obscure and insignificant territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. For political scientists this conflict raises a host of issues. Most strikingly, it raises the question of whether and how nations and states map onto one another geograpically. In our lead article, Shererill Stroschein examines the case of Kosovo as a vehicle for proposals about “creative designs” for governance that might be implemented in demographically complex regions. The hope of course would be that such designs might dampen conflict in ways that are both practical and normatively attractive.

This journal is an experiment, an attempt on the part of APSA to encourage political scientists to find ways to communicate with others beyond their narrow specialty or sub-specialty, using a form other than the familiar research article. This is in may ways a difficult undertaking precisely because there are few models of how to proceed in the space between the familiar journal article and a more journalistic essay. Many of the contributions to this issue of Perspectives on Politics afford some aid in direction

Is there gender discrimination in academia? Analysis of interviews with 80 female faculty at a large Research One university—the most comprehensive qualitative data set generated to date—suggests both individual and institutional discrimination persists. Overt discrimination has largely given way to less obvious but still deeply entrenched inequities. Despite apparent increases in women in positions of authority, discrimination continues to manifest itself through gender devaluation, a process whereby the status and power of an authoritative position is downplayed when that position is held by a woman, and through penalties for those agitating for political change. Female faculty find legal mechanisms and direct political action of limited utility, and increasingly turn to more subtle forms of incremental collective action, revealing an adaptive response to discrimination and a keen sense of the power dynamics within the university. Women attributed the persistence of gender inequality not to biology but to a professional environment in which university administrators care more about the appearance than the reality of gender equality and a professional culture based on a traditional, linear male model. Respondents described heart-wrenching choices between career and family responsibilities, with tensions especially intractable in the bench sciences. They advocated alternative models of professional life but also offered very specific interim suggestions for institutions genuinely interested in alleviating gender inequality and discrimination.

In this article, I make a case for a dispersed state control model as an alternative to the territorial and hierarchical principles of the Weberian state. Rather than allocating governance powers in terms of territory, dispersed state controls are based on a functional principle, in which governance is allocated to various subunits by issue area or function. This examination is informed by recent debates in international relations theory on contractual and imperial network models of control, as well as work on non-territorial autonomy in the fields of nationalism and ethnic conflict. I examine the practical application of a dispersed control model in the context of the governance structure proposed for Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. I conclude with an overview of the advantages of creative designs for states that move beyond territory and hierarchy, to deal with complex demographic and governing realities in regions such as the Balkans.

Because the space of policies is two-dimensional, parties in the United States are coalitions of opposed interests. The Republican Party contains both socially conservative and socially liberal groups, though both tend to be pro-business. The increasing dominance of the social conservatives has angered some prominent Republicans, even causing a number of them to change party allegiance. Over time, the decreasing significance of the economic axis may cause the Republican Party to adopt policies that are analogous to those proposed by William Jennings Bryan in 1896: populist and anti-business. In parallel, the Democratic Party will increasingly appeal to pro-business, social liberals, so the party takes on the mantel of Lincoln.

This is the Presidential Address delivered at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, August 30 to September 2, 2007. The theme is that the discipline of political science has benefited from imports from many other fields, but it also has a lot to offer in the way of exports to other fields. A personal example is the export of cooperation theory to cancer research. The main recommendation is to cultivate your curiosity by: reading up in a variety of fields so your mind will be well prepared, teaming up with others who can help you, loading up on research related to your problem, and lightening up when you need to escape from the problem for a while. Promising opportunities exist for political science to export to public health, cognitive and neuropsychology, and the design of web-based institutions.Robert Axelrod is the Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan ([email protected]). This text is a renamed, footnoted and slightly revised version of his presidential address at the 2007 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting. For help in preparing this address, he wishes to thank John Aldrich, David Axelrod, Vera Axelrod, Lily S. Axelrod, Michael Brintnall, Joshua Epstein, Rick Hall, Liz Gerber, Ross Hammond, Rob Hauck, Lisa Koch, Justin McCrary, Ken Pienta, Robert Putnam, Eric Rabkin, Amy Saldinger, Jasjeet Sekhon, and PhillipTetlock. For financial support he thanks the National Science Foundation.

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.

Is establishment internationalism in decline? Conventional wisdom is becoming that structural shifts in the international environment along with generational, demographic, and cultural changes within the United States are inexorably leading to the decline of the broad, post-war internationalist consensus that dominated American foreign policy after 1945. Despite the frequent assertion that this change has taken place, very few studies have analyzed the extent to which establishment internationalism is in fact in decline. To answer this question, we first track trends in congressional foreign policy votes from the American Conservative Union (1970–2004) and Americans for Democratic Action (1948–2004). Our second set of indicators tracks the state of birth, educational profile, and formative international experience of a cross section of the U.S. foreign policy elite. Our third and fourth sets of indicators track elite attitudes as represented by presidential State of the Union addresses and major party platforms. We find support for increasing partisan polarization in Congress on foreign policy as well as increasing regional concentration of the parties. However, there is only mixed evidence to suggest that internationalism has experienced a secular decline overall. Support for international engagement and multilateral institutions remain important parts of elite foreign policy rhetoric. Moreover, we find that social backgrounds of U.S. foreign policy elites—save for military service—have not substantially changed from the height of the internationalist era.

Liberal constitutionalism is founded in part on a desire to build a polity on the basis of reason and the public interest. At its most ambitious, the result can verge on a prepolitical or even apolitical view of constitution writing. To be sure, most liberal constitutionalists have backed away from the extreme view by increasingly recognizing that passion and bargaining will inevitably play a role in constitution writing. But few have moved beyond grudging acceptance of passion and bargaining to active incorporation. In addition, the terms themselves are used in increasingly slippery ways. Yet while greater terminological precision is desirable and possible, it cannot overcome a key feature of constitution drafting: reason and interest are easily confused in practice as are passion and rationality. Even if reason and deliberation over the public interest could be distinguished from passion and private bargaining, they are unlikely to be able to deliver what is demanded of them. Constitutional politics differs from normal politics less in the role for rationality and the public interest and more in the means used and the number of actors with veto power. In such an environment, partisan interest and passion are not merely inevitable contaminants but essential elements.

This article is an extended review essay that classifies the main literatures on American politics, somewhat unconventionally, in terms of four distinct narrative modes: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. The four modes are differentiated by their internal construction and external social message. The central assertion is that there are standardized trajectories inherent to many of the empirical analyses we advance, which can be used to understand ongoing debates in the field. Perceiving inherent harmony or discord, emphasizing the exalted or the mundane, projecting achievement or frustration, the various narratives of American politics present contrasting interpretations regarding regime tensions and prospects. The more that political scientists become conscious of the forms and limits of the models employed, the more sophisticated we can be at developing and debating them.

Despite their importance to one another, the current literatures on political parties and normative democratic theory continue to develop largely in mutual isolation. Empirical studies of contemporary political parties and party systems tend to have little to say about the meanings and possibilities of democracy, and therefore also about the varied potential roles of political parties within it. Meanwhile, contemporary democratic theorists quietly sidestep the issue of whether political parties perform a legitimate function in democracies. This lack of mutual engagement is regrettable, in particular given the pervasive erosion of popular support and legitimacy of political parties as representative institutions. In this article we explore the key reasons for democratic theorists and scholars of political parties so rarely taking on each others' core concerns, and we outline the key ways in which this mutual disengagement is mutually impoverishing. We will also suggest ways forward, by pinpointing and illustrating potentially productive areas of engagement which might serve to deepen our understanding of democracy's present and its possible futures.Ingrid van Biezen is Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK ([email protected]). Michael Saward is Professor of Politics at the Open University, UK ([email protected]). The authors are grateful to Richard S. Katz and Jeremy Jennings and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. In developing our arguments, we also benefited from conversations with Robert Dahl, Russell Dalton, Ian Shapiro, workshop participants at the ECPR Joint Sessions, and graduate students at Yale University. Part of this research was supported by the British Academy (research grant SG 38612).

The historically constructed nature of ethnicity has become a widely accepted paradigm in the social sciences. Scholars have especially have focused on the ways modern states have been able to create and change ethnic identities, with perhaps the strongest case studies coming from colonial Africa, where the gap between strong states and weak societies has been most apparent. I suggest, however, that in order to better understand how and when ethnic change occurs it is important to examine case studies where state-directed ethnic change has failed. To rectify this oversight I examine the case of the “lost counties” of Uganda, which were transferred from the Bunyoro kingdom to the Buganda kingdom at the onset of colonial rule. I show that British attempts to assimilate the Banyoro residents in two of the lost counties were an unmitigated failure, while attempts in the other five counties were successful. I claim that the reason for these differing outcomes lies in the status of the two lost counties as part of the historic Bunyoro homeland, whereas the other five counties were both geographically and symbolically peripheral to Bunyoro. The evidence here thus suggests that varying ethnic attachments to territory can lead to differing outcomes in situations of state-directed assimilation and ethnic change.

The institutionalization of race-conscious inclusion policies in employment, education, and contracting has largely endured in post-civil rights America despite predictions of their demise. However, scholarship has continued to mislabel many of the specific policies in these organizations and governments as “affirmative action” policies, even though many such policies lack the civil rights roots necessary to warrant this label. In this article, I explain how many organizations have recast, supplemented, or replaced their rights-based affirmative action policies with utilitarian diversity policies. While the conventional, civil rights framework for analyzing affirmative action obscures the rise of such organizational diversity policies, an alternative body of scholarship that employs a diversity framework has shed light on the causes, content, and consequences of this policy and political realignment. The Supreme Court's 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision and the political activism surrounding Michigan's Proposal 2 in 2006 both exemplify the trademark signs of this shift from rights-based affirmative action to organizational diversity policies. The article concludes by assessing the promise and dangers of this trend of rooting racial inclusion policies in a utilitarian diversity logic rather than a civil rights logic.

Many scholars have viewed the rise and political influence of religious conservatives in the U.S. with some alarm, arguing that their commitments are so illiberal and undemocratic as to be a substantial threat to the creation and maintenance of a just and stable democratic polity. In particular, many worry that religious conservatives lack the requisite civic virtues necessary to making pluralist democracies work. After attending to what sorts of virtues a good citizen ought to possess, we present evidence drawn from interviews with state-level religious conservative activists suggesting that political mobilization and integration into institutions of deliberation and electoral contestation actually works to make them better citizens, at least with respect to one important virtue, political autonomy. If such engagement can temporize the dangers politicized religion can sometimes pose, those concerned about religion's public influence might have their fears eased. Religious conservative activists can make for good citizens, fellow participants in the project of constructing a common political order that is durable, decent, and democratic.

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.

Conceptualizing a political world “beyond black and white” is a familiar scholarly refrain, but theoretical relics of bipolarity remain. The deracialization concept, a much-discussed phenomenon in American elections, is one example. Asian American campaigns provide an interesting case for testing the utility of deracialization in multicultural urban milieus, given the overwhelming tendency for such candidates to be elected from predominantly non-Asian constituencies. Looking in depth at two successful campaigns by Vietnamese Americans in Northern and Southern California, I argue for a broadened approach that can better account for changes in the American political mosaic—namely, increases in immigration occurring in some of the country's fastest growing regions and the availability of alternative media. I call this approach toggling. In this article, I outline the toggling strategy. I conclude by considering the impact of toggling on equality in the American democratic process and suggest some directions for future research.

The recent explosion of popular protest in China, often framed as a demand for the fulfillment of “rights,” has captured widespread attention. Some observers interpret the protests as signs of a “moral vacuum.” Others see the unrest as signaling a powerful new “rights consciousness.” In either case, the protests are often regarded as a major challenge to the stability of the political system. In this article, an examination of Chinese conceptions of “rights,” as reflected in the ethical discourses of philosophers, political leaders, and protesters (and as contrasted with American understandings of rights), provides the basis for questioning prevailing assumptions about the fragility of the Chinese political order. For over two millennia, Chinese political thought, policy, and protest have assigned central priority to the attainment of socioeconomic security. As a result, the meaning of “rights” in Chinese political discourse differs significantly from the Anglo-American tradition. Viewed in historical context, China's contemporary “rights” protests seem less politically threatening. The Chinese polity appears neither as vacuous nor as vulnerable as it is sometimes assumed to be.Elizabeth J. Perry is Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and is the current President of the Association for Asian Studies ([email protected]). A preliminary draft of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the conference on Socioeconomic Rights and Justice in China held at Dickinson College in April 2004. The author is grateful to the conference organizer, Neil Diamant, for the invitation to consider these issues and to the other conference participants (especially David Strand and Jerome Cohen) for their challenging comments and questions. A substantially revised version was presented at the conference in memory of Benjamin Schwartz, held in Shanghai at East China Normal University in December 2006. Thanks are due to the conference organizers and participants (particularly Zhu Zhenghui, Xu Jilin, Zhang Jishun, Tong Shijun, and Roderick MacFarquhar) for their stimulating suggestions. Appreciation is also extended to Stephen Angle, Nara Dillon, Mary Gallagher, and Kevin O'Brien for their critical reading of an earlier draft.

While there is a vast and highly contentious literature devoted to understanding the economic, social, and political consequences of the welfare state, little attention has been paid to the fundamental question of whether social security programs actually improve the overall quality of human life. We attempt such an appraisal, using the extent to which individuals find their lives to be satisfying as an evaluative metric. Considering national rates of satisfaction in the industrial democracies from the 1970s to the present, we find that citizens find life more rewarding as the generosity of the welfare state increases, net of economic or cultural conditions. The implications for social policy are discussed.