The articles in this symposium explore the relationships between terrorism and government respect for human rights. These relationships have wide-ranging implications for the study of politics. Terrorism is seen as a major threat to political stability in many countries. Respect for internationally recognized human rights is a fundamental responsibility of national governments. Can governments prevent terrorism while also respecting human rights, or must authorities trade off some human rights to reduce terrorism? If the latter is the case, which human rights can or should be sacrificed for the goal of stopping terrorism?

Can states afford to protect human rights when facing a terrorist threat? Contemporary academic literature suggests that the answer to this question is no, concluding that states that afford their citizens basic political rights and civil liberties leave themselves more exposed to terrorist attacks (Piazza 2008; Wade and Reiter 2007; Pape 2003; Eubank and Weinberg 1994). American policymakers seem to agree. Both the Bush and Obama administrations regard the curtailment of physical integrity rights as a necessary element of effective counterterrorism policy. The Bush administration responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with policies permitting indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, use of physically abusive interrogation practices, and increased and largely unchecked surveillance and wiretapping of suspected terrorists. Although it banned abusive interrogation and announced plans to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration has maintained the practice of wiretapping, reserved the option of rendition, and dramatically increased unmanned drone attacks against suspected terrorists in Pakistan, which often results in civilian casualties. Both presidents have claimed that these policies are necessary to keep Americans safe from terrorism (Hosenball 2009; “Bush Defends Policy on Terror Detainees” 2005).

Two big assumptions fuel current mobilization against and policy discussions about the U.S. war on terror and its implications for human rights and international cooperation. First, terrorism creates strong pressures on governments—especially democracies—to restrict human rights. Second, these restrictions are not only immoral and illegal, but also counterproductive to curbing terrorism. If these two assumptions are correct, then democracies face a vicious circle: terrorist attacks provoke a reaction that makes it harder to defeat terrorist organizations.

States represent a solution to an important set of economic, political, and social problems. Whether one turns to philosophers such as Hobbes or Locke or more recent work by rational institutionalists such as Douglass North, it is something of a received wisdom that powerful states play a central and vital role in fostering economic, political, and social cooperation. The other edge of that sword, of course, is that powerful states that claim a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of coercion are ideally situated to predate, using methods that include incarceration without trial and torture. The very power that makes states effective at engaging in cooperation can weaken other organizations that might deter the state from predation. While democratic theory is not necessarily focused on the question of how we might constrain a powerful state's predation, democracy is—and, more specifically, liberal democratic institutions are—widely held to be one of the most important tools at our disposal to deter predation (e.g., Staton and Reenock 2010). Democracy, of course, refers to rule by the people, and in this article, I focus on universal suffrage as the means by which those who wield state power produce rule by the people. I refer to liberal democratic institutions, by contrast, as those institutions that perform a distinct—and, one can argue, antidemocratic—function: their purpose is to distribute power among multiple state actors in an effort to address the second edge of the sword described above and limit the tyranny of majorities. This article shows how this distinction usefully assists our assessment of the Bush administration's incarceration and interrogation policies in its war on terror.

Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of “Change We Can Believe In.” One of the biggest changes many anticipated with his election was a dramatic break with the previous administration's counterterror policy. There were good reasons for thinking that this would be the case. George W. Bush was a Republican who took his cues from the most conservative elements of his party, including neoconservatives, the religious right, and other proponents of an assertive stance of U.S. global primacy and a forward-leaning posture in the war on terror. Conversely, Barack Obama is a liberal Democrat who opposed the Iraq War and seeks to “reset” America's relations with other countries around the world by recommitting the United States to a more moderate approach to waging the war against al-Qaeda, including measures such as adopting a more multilateral foreign policy, closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, ending the practices of extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation, and showing a greater respect for civil liberties domestically.

Historically, U.S. asylum policy has reflected both an effort to provide safe haven for deserving asylum seekers and the intent to promote national security and domestic policy priorities. A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that asylum outcomes, at least in the aggregate, have been weighted more heavily by foreign policy considerations than humanitarian concerns. Since the mid 1990s, the United States government has reformed the asylum system in response to concerns of abuse by economic migrants, burgeoning caseloads, and national security threats. Although, as Davergne (2008) points out, “the most reviled of asylum seekers of the global era is the ‘economic refugee,’ under suspicion of fleeing poverty and poor prospects in search of a better life” rather than fleeing because of the fear of persecution (65), in the wake of terrorist attacks on the United States in 1993 and 2001, the fears of economic opportunists abusing the system have combined with the broader fear of potential terrorists gaining legal entry into the country through an overburdened asylum system. Since 1995, Congress has passed two major acts to reform the asylum process in reaction to these fears. Both the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the 2005 Real ID Act were passed to prevent economic migrants and individuals who may pose security risks from entering the country on false claims of asylum. Following September 11, the U.S. government has pursued prosecution for documents fraud among asylum applicants and aggressively enforced safe third country requirements. And, like our European counterparts, the United States has increasingly taken more deterrent and preventative actions to discourage asylum applicants from choosing it as a target for asylum and prevent potential applicants from reaching its ports of entry. Critics fear that the draconian measures adopted in response to these fears are overly broad and worry that worthy applicants have been turned away at the border or denied asylum with increasing frequency, thus leading them to face the real possibility of torture and other forms of persecution. In this article, we examine changes in U.S. asylum policy and whether the heightened security concerns after September 11 have significantly influenced the U.S. asylum process and outcomes in U.S. immigration courts.

Many journalists and politicians believe that during the Bush administration, a majority of Americans supported torture if they were assured that it would prevent a terrorist attack. As Mark Danner wrote in the April 2009 New York Review of Books, “Polls tend to show that a majority of Americans are willing to support torture only when they are assured that it will ‘thwart a terrorist attack.’” This view was repeated frequently in both left- and right-leaning articles and blogs, as well as in European papers (Sharrock 2008; Judd 2008; Koppelman 2009; Liberation 2008). There was a consensus, in other words, that throughout the years of the Bush administration, public opinion surveys tended to show a pro-torture American majority.

In recent years, the relationship between foreign military occupation and the increased likelihood of violent insurgency and terrorism has been asserted (Pape 2005) but is far from proven. The actual micro-level dynamics that make the correlation between the two sufficient to warrant extended discussion is even less understood and has led a variety of researchers to examine the micro-level foundations of how the presence of foreign military personnel might exacerbate conflict or provide motivation for the local population to mobilize against the foreign troops in their midst (e.g., Downes 2008; Edelstein 2008)

The six essays of this symposium address different aspects of the meaning and legacy of the Magna Carta—“the Great Charter” in Latin. Although social scientists and legal scholars routinely describe the Magna Carta as foundational for concepts of justice and liberty, the charter itself is rarely assigned in political science classes or scrutinized by political theorists. The aim of the symposium is twofold: first, to affirm the document's historical rootedness and intellectual richness, and, second, to explore the ways in which the Magna Carta's text and reputation have informed the development of common law and modern politics. The Magna Carta was the product of times very different from our own, yet it continues to be cited by jurists and human rights activists around the globe. This symposium makes the case for why political scientists should take an interest in the Magna Carta, not just as a cultural icon, but as a durable political text.

Scholars generally agree that the Magna Carta of 1215 was a watershed in Western (and, more specifically, English) legal and political history and thought. Beyond this simple statement, however, there is little consensus concerning the nature and significance of the Magna Carta's achievement. One central unresolved issue centers on whether the charter represents a principled defense of human liberty or instead reflects a pragmatic statement of baronial liberties. The dispute over this question is nontrivial and reflects much more than a matter of language. If one subscribes to the former belief, which received its classic articulation in the seventeenth century (Turner 2003, 145–82) and retains powerful resonance today (Linebaugh 2008), then the Magna Carta deserves to be accorded a foundational role in the intellectual and political history of the liberal-democratic constitutional tradition, in which the rule of law is deemed the basis for the protection of individual freedom. If, however, one adopts the viewpoint of “the modern historian” that the charter “is a statement of [specific] liberties rather than an assertion of [general] liberty,” then the document should be read narrowly as an interesting artifact stipulating elite “privileges” that were “devised mainly in the interests of the aristocracy” (Holt 1965, 4). In other words, either the Magna Carta reflects deeper philosophical doctrines and commitments that enjoy purchase beyond their specific time and place, or it represents an expression of the immediate demands and grievances of a specific class displeased with the conduct of King John's government.

In the English constitutional tradition, subjecthood has been primarily derived from two circumstances: place of birth and time of birth. People not born in the right place and at the right time are not considered subjects. What political status they hold varies and depends largely on the political history of the territory in which they reside at the exact time of their birth. A genealogy of early modern British subjecthood reveals that law based on dates and temporal durations—what I will call collectively jus tempus—creates sovereign boundaries as powerful as territorial borders or bloodlines. This concept has myriad implications for how citizenship comes to be institutionalized in modern politics. In this article, I briefly outline one route through which jus tempus became a constitutive principle within the Anglo-American tradition of citizenship and how this concept works with other principles of membership to create subtle gradations of semi-citizenship beyond the binary of subject and alien. I illustrate two main points about jus tempus: first, how specific dates create sovereign boundaries among people and second, how durational time takes on an abstract value in politics that allows certain kinds of attributes, actions, and relationships to be translated into rights-bearing political statuses. I conclude with some remarks about how, once established, the principle of jus tempus is applied in a diverse array of political contexts.

A short time after 1206 and before 1215, a Londoner assembled a massive collection of older and near contemporary English laws, called the Leges Anglorum by historians, and inserted long interpolations and spurious codes that enunciated many of the principles that guided the baronial opposition to King John and later became part of the Magna Carta. To those familiar with the struggle leading up to the creation of the Magna Carta, these principles should cause no surprise. These ancient laws were made to proclaim that “in the kingdom right and justice ought to reign more than perverse will” (ECf4, 11.1.A.6; Liebermann 1903, 635). In another part of the collection, King Arthur, making his first appearance in English law, is credited with establishing as law the requirement that all nobles, knights, and freemen of the whole kingdom of Britain swear “to defend the kingdom against foreigners and enemies” (ECf4, 32.A.5–7; Liebermann 1903, 655). More surprising is the attribution of the regularly assembled Hustings court in London to the Trojans (who became the Britons). The seventh-century West Saxon king, Ine, suddenly looms large in the ranks of Britain's lawmakers; he not only reigns for the good of all, but is also given the lordly virtues of twelfth-century chivalric romance: he is “generous, wise, prudent, moderate, strong, just, spirited, and warlike” (as was appropriate for the time and place) (ECf4, 32.C.2, 32.C.8; Liebermann 1903, 658–59). A confection of bits of other law, attributed here to King Alfred, orders an end to vice, national education for freemen, and unity for all “as if sworn brothers for the utility of the kingdom” (Leges Angl, Pseudo-Alfred 1–6; Liebermann 1894, 19–20). Finally, in the grandest statement of English political ambition, Arthur appears again as the great conqueror, whose spirit was not satisfied by Britain alone: “Courageously and speedily he subjugated all Scandinavia, which is now called Norway, and all the islands beyond, namely Iceland and Greenland, which belong to Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Gotland, Denmark, Samland, Vinland, Curland, Runoe, Finland, Wirland, Estland, Karelien,Lapland, and all other lands and islands of the eastern Ocean as far as Russia” (ECf4, 32.E; Liebermann 1903, 659).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Charles McIlwain observed that the new histories of the Magna Carta were portraying the charter as a “document of reaction” that could only fulfill its purported greatness “when men [were] no longer able to understand its real meaning” (McIlwain 1914, 46). Characteristic of these early-twentieth-century writers was Edward Jenks, who, in his 1904 article “The Myth of Magna Carta,” came to the conclusion that the real beneficiaries of the document—the liber homo of Article 39—were not “the people” we traditionally imagine, but rather an “aristocratic class … who can no more be ranked amongst the people, than the country gentleman of to-day” (Jenks 1904, 269). Although Jenks's position is often criticized as extreme, it is nevertheless the case that virtually all of the Magna Carta's modern commentators recognize vast historical inaccuracies in the Whiggish accounts of the charter's development up until the late nineteenth century (Radin 1946; Reid 1993; Halliday 2010, 15–16). What these new revisionist histories suggested was that the Magna Carta's great provisions—due process and trial by jury—only became great when, forgetting or ignoring the charter's seemingly lackluster beginnings, generations subsequent to 1215 gave them new meaning.

If English and American constitutional thought rests on one shared foundation, it is the principle that executive power, in order to be legitimate, must be subject to law. In the thirteenth century, the English jurist Henry de Bracton declared that “the law makes the King”—rather than the King makes the law—and urged, “Let the King … bestow upon the law what the law bestows upon him, namely dominion and power, for there is no King where will rules and not law” (White 1908, 268). Bracton no doubt had in mind some of the recent provisions of the Magna Carta (1215), which provided a formal codification of this principle. The rebel barons who imposed the Magna Carta on King John were animated by a desire to limit arbitrary executive power, and, in Article 39, they secured a promise from the monarchy that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned, or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” (Turner 2003, 231). In the fourteenth century, Article 39 was redrafted by Parliament to apply not only to free men but also to any man “of whatever estate or condition he may be,” and this process of reinterpretation continued throughout the next several centuries as Parliament expanded “the Charter's special ‘liberties’ for the privileged classes to general guarantees of ‘liberty’ for all the king's subjects” (Turner 2003, 3).

The legacy of the Magna Carta is apparent in the Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding detainees' rights. Asked to evaluate strong claims of executive power, the Court has had occasion to consider the origin and scope of habeas corpus, which many scholars see as a product of the Magna Carta. The majority opinion in Boumediene v. Bush (2008) traced the history of the writ of habeas corpus back to the Magna Carta and relied on that lineage to rule that Guantanamo detainees were entitled to petition for habeas corpus, even though Congress had explicitly denied them that right in the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA) and the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act (DTA).

Presidential candidates frequently tout their political experience on the campaign trail, telling voters that it has prepared them to deal with complex problems, make weighty decisions, and show leadership. The value of that argument was put to the test in the 2008 presidential campaign by Hillary Clinton against her opponent, Barack Obama. This paper uses a multilevel model to analyze the value of national and state political experience on overall presidential greatness, as judged by seven surveys of academic experts. Overall, there is no evidence that political experience improves the likelihood of strong presidential performance, and even some weak evidence that political experience in certain political positions, most notably mayor and member of Congress, leads to poorer performance. In the end, great presidents are not great simply because they have spent their lives in politics and learned important lessons. Other personal and historical factors are likely to be more important.

This article focuses on South Korean attitudes toward the South Korean-U.S. alliance by comparing three political groups. Using a nationwide survey of South Koreans conducted in 2007, it performs two quantitative analyses: cluster analysis to identify distinct political groups and regression analysis to test hypotheses drawn from literature about what influences public attitudes toward the alliance. This study draws four major conclusions about attitudes toward the alliance: (1) There is strong support for the alliance among South Koreans, including anti-American progressives. (2) For conservatives and centrists, the traditional rationale for the alliance—deterrence of North Korean aggression—remains a basic foundation for the alliance. (3) Among the three groups, there is a developing consensus on a new rationale for the alliance of promoting inter-Korean reconciliation. (4) The younger generation, which constitutes a large majority of the voting public, exhibits moderation and pragmatism in its ideological orientation, contradicting the commonly held view that it heavily slants progressive. These findings can offer important guidance for the future of the alliance.

Women's political action committees (PACs)—those committees founded by women to raise money for women candidates—have been and will likely continue to be an important part of American electoral politics. In this article, we investigate the impact of EMILY's List, because it is the standard bearer of women's PACs and is commonly cited as crucial to women's electoral success. Empirical studies of EMILY's List impact to date have largely assumed causal inference by using traditional linear models. We use a propensity score–matching model to leverage on causality and find that an EMILY endorsement helps some candidates and hurts others. Our findings set the stage for further and more nuanced investigations of when, where, and how EMILY's List can enhance the likelihood of electoral success for women.

Political scientists hail from large, research-intensive universities like the Ohio State University, regional comprehensive schools like Western Kentucky University, and small teaching-intensive institutions like Mars Hill College. Despite this diversity, most studies of the political science discipline overlook the contributions of individuals from non-Ph.D. departments. To address this oversight, we compare the publishing rates of scholars with four types of affiliations: non-Ph.D. departments, Ph.D. departments, non-U.S. departments, and nonacademic institutions. We focus particularly on whether faculty from non-Ph.D. departments publish in different types of journals than faculty from other departments, and whether the institutional affiliations of editorial board members corresponds to the institutional affiliations of published authors. We find that people from non-Ph.D. departments represent 16% of the authors in our sample of political science journals, and their contributions are particularly noteworthy in certain types of journals. We also demonstrate that the institutions represented on editorial boards generally do not reflect the institutional affiliations of the authors who publish in these journals.

In this article, we investigate the graduate curricula of political science programs and 122 Ph.D.-granting political science programs in the United States and how they seek to prepare political science teachers. We first investigate whether the department offers a dedicated political science course at the graduate level on college teaching, and whether the presence of this class correlates with the size of the department, the size of the university, the ranking of the department, and so on. We find that whether a program offers a graduate course on teaching is inversely related to the research productivity of a department, and that departments at public institutions are more likely to offer such courses than are departments at private institutions. Second, we conduct content analysis of a sample of syllabi from departments that offer such courses to ascertain the kinds of topics that are covered. Finally, we briefly describe some model programs that seek to prepare graduate students for teaching careers that integrate graduate student teacher training throughout the Ph.D. program.