Conventional wisdom associates support for military spending with conservative parties and support for social welfare programs with liberal parties. In “Both Guns and Butter, or Neither: Class Interests in the Political Economy of Rearmament,” Kevin Narizny stands the conventional wisdom on its head by proposing the unconventional hypothesis that, when confronted with international threat, liberal governments should be more likely than their conservative counterparts to support rearmament policies, while conservative governments should be more likely to pursue strategies of alliance-formation or appeasement. Narizny tests this hypothesis, which builds on the class bases of liberal and conservative parties, against the historical experiences of France, Britain, and the U.S. His findings are bound to evoke widespread comment and debate, as they bear directly on issues about which feelings run high and careful analysis is frequently lacking.
A key question for political science—some would even say the key question—is how institutional arrangements, or rules, affect decisions or outcomes. In “Bargaining in Legislatures: An Experimental Investigation of Open versus Closed Amendment Rules,” Guillaume R. Fréchette, John H. Kagel, and Steven F. Lehrer bring experimental methods to bear on a specific institutional arrangement that shapes legislative decision-making in many nations: the “closed” or “open” process by which legislation is amended. How are legislators' decisions affected by the operation of a “closed” amendment rule, in which proposals must be voted on without being subject to change, as opposed to an “open” rule, in which amendments can be offered that alter the substance of legislation? The answer that Fréchette, Kagel, and Lehrer provide will, of course, be of interest to legislative scholars. However, those interested more broadly in the impact of institutional arrangements should regard this as a pertinent case in point and may also discover in it a new and useful way to approach their subject matter.
The focus on institutional arrangements carries over, albeit in an altogether different light, in Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks's “Unraveling the Central State, but How? Types of Multi-level Governance.” The reallocation of authority away from central states has raised as yet unresolved questions about how multi-level governance should be organized. Hooghe and Marks distinguish between two types of multi-level governance: in one, jurisdictions are general-purpose, non-intersecting, and durable; in the other, they are task-specific, intersecting, and flexible. This framework sets out the basic institutional options for organizing multi-level governance and provides an analytical basis for assessing these options.
The next two articles in this issue shift the focus from politics inside the “black box” to the input side of the political process. In “Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States,” Gary Miller and Norman Schofield offer an explanation of partisan realignments that is tied to the balance among competing values, e.g., the free use of private property versus the pursuit of equality, or protection of individual freedom versus advancement of a good society. In Miller and Schofield's account, politicians reach out to activists who are not currently part of their party's electoral coalition. These attempts, when successful, alter the pattern of electoral support that parties receive; a new electoral coalition then gains control of government; and policy directions change as a consequence. By shifting the extent to which different values are realized in policy outcomes, such changes produce a new set of disaffected citizens, and the activists among them become inviting targets for politicians seeking to produce a new electoral coalition. Employing this activist-based approach, Miller and Schofield produce an account of electoral support for U.S. political parties over the last century that is capable of explaining why the Democratic and Republican parties switched sides on overarching economic and social issues.
Of course, the formation of electoral coalitions presupposes that people take the trouble to vote in the first place. In “A Behavioral Model of Turnout,” Jonathan Bendor, Daniel Diermeier, and Michael Ting confront what has been called the “paradox that ate rational choice”: Why do people vote even though the probability that they will be pivotal in deciding the outcome is too small to make this costly act rational? Several different answers have been proposed in the past—most notably, perhaps, by grafting onto the rather cold-blooded cost-benefit calculus the idea that people derive psychic benefits from voting. By contrast, Bendor, Diermeier and Ting strike out in a provocative new direction, attempting to marry rational choice and behavioral approaches to individual decision-making by portraying citizens as rational adapters rather than optimizers. The resulting account holds great promise as a resolution of the paradox of voting and, more broadly understood, as a step toward synthesizing analytical approaches that are often viewed as contradictory.
“In what sense, if any, do rights exist?” So begins “The Construction of Rights,” by Keith Dowding and Martin van Hees. If one has a right to do x but cannot exercise it, does one really “have” that right? That question may sound suspiciously like the age-old poser about whether, if a tree falls in an uninhabited forest, it makes a sound, but it is actually one of the bases of Dowding and Van Hees's framework for understanding the extent to which individuals have and can exercise rights—a framework in which rights are viewed as being built on a foundation of more fundamental moral values.
Political philosophers devote much of their attention to timeless questions like the one that Dowding and Van Hees ask, but in “Identity and Liberal Nationalism,” Evan Charney weighs in on some especially timely issues: the relative values of cultural identity and individual liberties. How, Charney asks, can a nation or nation-state pursue the benefits of forging and maintaining a collective identity without sacrificing the benefits of pluralism and commitment to individual rights? Charney contends that recent liberal attempts to justify the elevation of collective identity as a means of nurturing the self-worth of individuals founder due to their inconsistency and to their promotion of an undesirable view of what it means to be an autonomous individual. This assessment takes on a special resonance as we weigh the costs and benefits of post-September 11 policies and practices.
All political science researchers, including (or especially) political philosophers, engage in textual analysis of one sort or another. Recently, though, with the vastly increased availability of massive textual data bases and the advent of high-speed computers, systematic techniques for analyzing texts have proliferated rapidly. In some of these, human “coders” conduct word or phrase counts “by hand,” while in others, computers perform this drudgery. Similarly, some of these techniques score texts according to pre-defined categories or dimensions, while others operate more inductively in an attempt to coax the underlying meaning out a set of texts. In “Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts: Using Words as Data,” Michael Laver, Kenneth Benoit, and John Garry present a new computer-based, inductively-oriented technique of content analysis and demonstrate it by extracting policy positions from party manifestos and legislative speeches. The most striking characteristic of this novel technique is that it is “language-blind.” That is, it does not even require knowledge of the language of the texts that are being analyzed. Although that characteristic makes the technique an unusual (some might even say “bizarre”) way to try to capture the meanings of texts, the logic of the technique is straightforward and its applicability is potentially broad.
Finally, in the March, 2002, issue of the Review, Mark Peceny, Caroline Beer, and Shannon Sanchez-Terry considered what they called the “dictatorial peace,” arguing that some of the same factors that help produce peaceful relations between democratic nations also produce peace among authoritarian regimes. In a follow-up analysis in our “Forum” section (“Identifying the Culprit: Democracy, Dictatorship, and Dispute Initiation”), Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam dispute the claim that democracies are likely to be the aggressors in interstate conflicts with personalistic dictatorships, and report results that support the opposite conclusion. The exchange between Reiter and Stam, on the one hand, and Peceny and Beer (“Peaceful Parties and Puzzling Personalists”), on the other, raises several important issues. Is the willingness of personalistic dictatorships to initiate conflict a consequence of their perception that other types of regimes are institutionally constrained and unwilling to go to war, or does it stem from a lack of institutional constraints that enables personalistic dictators to go to war without carefully considering the consequences? Should we be asking instead “What causes personalistic dictatorships to initiate conflicts they are likely to lose?”
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