As we proceed through our final year of editing the Review (something we approach with mixed feelings of relief and satisfaction), we will reflect from time to time on lessons learned, changes achieved (or perhaps only observed), and trends still underway.

In our most recent issue (November 2010), one thing stood out: The list of referees whom we thanked. Not only were their numbers great (some 1500), they were a veritable “who's who” of our profession, were more international and of more varied perspectives than ever before, and—we have to remind ourselves—none of them received a dime for their services. Almost all of them wrote thorough, careful, and helpful reviews and thus served the community of scholars selflessly. We are often drawn into longer correspondence with them, to explore further points they have raised or to discuss disagreement among referees, and we are all repeatedly impressed by their seriousness, dedication, and openness to contrary views. We also hear again and again from authors—yes, even ones whose articles we turn down—how greatly they have been helped by the referees' comments. We all owe these reviewers a large debt of gratitude; their work is at the core of our scholarly and scientific community.

Vigorous scholarly controversy, we think, characterizes a healthy and growing discipline, and certainly we are seeing more of it at the APSR. We have noted an uptick in “forum” submissions, more requests to publish dissents alongside forthcoming articles, and more disagreement on points both of method and substance. More frequently than in the past, referees' reports say, in essence, “This is a great paper, which you should definitely publish, but I think it's wrong and expect that several scholars will want to say so in print.” And, perhaps even more than previous editors, we have published pieces simply with a view to advancing an important scholarly conversation.

We mentioned in the previous issue the approaching end of our term as editors, and the American Political Science Association (APSA) Council—acting on recommendations of a search committee (chair: Joan Tronto) and President Carole Pateman—has now chosen our successors: another editorial team, based at the University of North Texas, and consisting of Professors Val Martinez-Ebers, John Ishiyama, Marijke Breuning, and Steve Forde. We look forward to passing the baton to this next group and will work, as Professor Lee Sigelman did with our group, to make the transition as seamless as possible. We expect them, following past practice, to offer a statement of editorial policy in the May 2012 issue of this journal.

The 1969 Vietnam draft lottery assigned numbers to birth dates in order to determine which young men would be called to fight in Vietnam. We exploit this natural experiment to examine how draft vulnerability influenced political attitudes. Data are from the Political Socialization Panel Study, which surveyed high school seniors from the class of 1965 before and after the national draft lottery was instituted. Males holding low lottery numbers became more antiwar, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft. They were also more likely than those with safe numbers to abandon the party identification that they had held as teenagers. Trace effects are found in reinterviews from the 1990s. Draft number effects exceed those for preadult party identification and are not mediated by military service. The results show how profoundly political attitudes can be transformed when public policies directly affect citizens' lives.

A large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy. Extant cross-country regressions, however, assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions. Because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable, this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships. Numerous sources of bias may be driving the results, the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country-specific and time-invariant heterogeneity. To address these problems, we develop unique historical datasets, employ time-series centric techniques, and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals. We test to see if there is a long-run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time, both on a country-by-country basis and across several different panels. We find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism. In fact, in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing.

A large literature in political science takes for granted that democratic leaders would pay substantial domestic political costs for failing to carry out the public threats they make in international crises, and consequently that making threats substantially enhances their leverage in crisis bargaining. And yet proponents of this audience costs theory have presented very little evidence that this causal mechanism actually operates in real—as opposed to simulated—crises. We look for such evidence in post-1945 crises and find hardly any. Audience cost mechanisms are rare because (1) leaders see unambiguously committing threats as imprudent, (2) domestic audiences care more about policy substance than about consistency between the leader's words and deeds, (3) domestic audiences care about their country's reputation for resolve and national honor independent of whether the leader has issued an explicit threat, and (4) authoritarian targets of democratic threats do not perceive audience costs dynamics in the same way that audience costs theorists do. We found domestic audience costs as secondary mechanisms in a few cases where the public already had hawkish preferences before any threats were made.

Policymaking is hard. Policymakers typically have imperfect information about which policies produce which outcomes, and they are left with little choice but to fumble their way through the policy space via a trial-and-error process. This raises a question at the heart of democracy: Do democratic systems identify good policies? To answer this question I introduce a novel model of policymaking in complex environments. I show that good policies are often but not always found and I identify the possibility of policymaking getting stuck at outcomes that are arbitrarily bad. Notably, policy stickiness occurs in the model even in the absence of institutional constraints. This raises the question of how institutions and the political environment impact experimentation and learning. I show how a simple political friction—uncertainty over voter preferences—interacts with political competition and policy uncertainty in a subtle way that, surprisingly, improves the quality of policymaking over time.

Optimal jurisdiction size is a cornerstone of government design. A strong tradition in political thought argues that democracy thrives in smaller jurisdictions, but existing studies of the effects of jurisdiction size, mostly cross-sectional in nature, yield ambiguous results due to sorting effects and problems of endogeneity. We focus on internal political efficacy, a psychological condition that many see as necessary for high-quality participatory democracy. We identify a quasiexperiment, a large-scale municipal reform in Denmark, which allows us to estimate a causal effect of jurisdiction size on internal political efficacy. The reform, affecting some municipalities, but not all, was implemented by the central government, and resulted in exogenous, and substantial, changes in municipal population size. Based on survey data collected before and after the reform, we find, using various difference-in-difference and matching estimators, that jurisdiction size has a causal and sizeable detrimental effect on citizens' internal political efficacy.

How do American Indian tribal governments relate to nearby local governments? Do insights gleaned from these cases illuminate the constraints and opportunities that marginalized groups face within any system of federalism? What circumstances of marginalized governments help or hinder their effectiveness? Although some Native American tribes have transformed their fortunes with highly profitable casinos, most continue to face stark disadvantages. Some tribal governments, despite limited opportunities prevail locally by cultivating policy and political expertise. This analysis demonstrates that such expertise can be developed, even when resources are scarce.

A leader's culpability for involving his state in a conflict affects both his war termination calculus and his domestic audience's willingness to punish him if he loses. I define a culpable leader as any leader who either presides over the beginning of a war, or comes to power midwar and shares a political connection with a culpable predecessor. Using a data set created specifically for this study, I find that culpable leaders are more likely than nonculpable ones to achieve favorable war outcomes. I also find that domestic audiences will be willing to punish culpable leaders who lose, yet spare nonculpable leaders who do the same. Taken together, my findings underscore the need to appreciate more fully the role individual leaders play in bringing their states to war.

A salient feature of China's Great Leap Famine is that political radicalism varied enormously across provinces. Using excessive grain procurement as a pertinent measure, we find that such variations were patterned systematically on the political career incentives of Communist Party officials rather than the conventionally assumed ideology or personal idiosyncrasies. Political rank alone can explain 16.83% of the excess death rate: the excess procurement ratio of provinces governed by alternate members of the Central Committee was about 3% higher than in provinces governed by full members, or there was an approximate 1.11‰ increase in the excess death rate. The stronger career incentives of alternate members can be explained by the distinctly greater privileges, status, and power conferred only on the rank of full members of the Central Committee and the “entry barriers” to the Politburo that full members faced.

Democracy is about including those who are potentially affected by collective decisions in making those decisions. For this reason, contemporary democratic theory primarily assumes membership combined with effective voice. An alternative to voice is exit: Dissatisfied members may choose to leave a group rather than voice their displeasure. Rights and capacities for exit can function as low-cost, effective empowerments, particularly for those without voice. But because contemporary democratic theory often dismisses exit as appropriate only for economic markets, the democratic potentials of exit have rarely been theorized. Exit-based empowerments should be as central to the design and integrity of democracy as distributions of votes and voice, long considered its key structural features. When they are integrated into other democratic devices, exit-based empowerments should generate and widely distribute usable powers for those who need them most, evoke responsiveness from elites, induce voice, discipline monopoly, and underwrite vibrant and pluralistic societies.

Contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed the role of political and economic grievances, focusing instead on opportunities for conflict. However, these strong claims rest on questionable theoretical and empirical grounds. Whereas scholars have examined primarily the relationship between individual inequality and conflict, we argue that horizontal inequalities between politically relevant ethnic groups and states at large can promote ethnonationalist conflict. Extending the empirical scope to the entire world, this article introduces a new spatial method that combines our newly geocoded data on ethnic groups’ settlement areas with spatial wealth estimates. Based on these methodological advances, we find that, in highly unequal societies, both rich and poor groups fight more often than those groups whose wealth lies closer to the country average. Our results remain robust to a number of alternative sample definitions and specifications.

Deliberative democratic theorists argue that important moral questions turn on whether regimes are sufficiently deliberative. To attribute “deliberativeness” to a regime, we need an account of “deliberative integration” that connects such a holistic assessment to the acts or qualities of individuals and smaller groups. I turn to Aristotle's Politics for instruction in developing such accounts, arguing that he judges regimes according to how reliably they act pursuant to excellent common deliberation—a manner of excellent rule that I call the “rule of reason.” I then interpret Aristotle's metaphorical argument for the “wisdom of the multitude” to establish the claim that democracies may best integrate citizens’ deliberations. This interpretation illuminates Aristotle's complex evaluation of regimes, including his ambivalent views on the rule of the many. It also suggests a structure for contemporary accounts of deliberative integration helpful even for those who differ from Aristotle in their basic moral concerns.

When faced with a regulatory constraint, firms can either comply, bribe the regulator to get around the rule, or lobby the government to relax it. We analyze this choice, and its consequences, in a simple dynamic model. In equilibrium, when the level of development is low, firms are more inclined to bend the rule through bribery but they tend to switch to lobbying when the level of development is sufficiently high. Bribery, however, is associated with holdup problems, which discourage firms from investing. If the holdup problems are severe, firms will never invest enough to make lobbying worthwhile. The country may then be stuck in a poverty trap with bribery forever. The model can account for the common perception that bribery is relatively more common in poor countries, whereas lobbying is relatively more common in rich ones.

How can people who lack access to effective government institutions establish property rights and facilitate exchange? The illegal narcotics trade in Los Angeles has flourished despite its inability to rely on state-based formal institutions of governance. An alternative system of governance has emerged from an unexpected source—behind bars. The Mexican Mafia prison gang can extort drug dealers on the street because they wield substantial control over inmates in the county jail system and because drug dealers anticipate future incarceration. The gang's ability to extract resources creates incentives for them to provide governance institutions that mitigate market failures among Hispanic drug-dealing street gangs, including enforcing deals, protecting property rights, and adjudicating disputes. Evidence collected from federal indictments and other legal documents related to the Mexican Mafia prison gang and numerous street gangs supports this claim.

An enduring concern about democracies is that citizens conform too readily to the policy views of elites in their own parties, even to the point of ignoring other information about the policies in question. This article presents two experiments that undermine this concern, at least under one important condition. People rarely possess even a modicum of information about policies; but when they do, their attitudes seem to be affected at least as much by that information as by cues from party elites. The experiments also measure the extent to which people think about policy. Contrary to many accounts, they suggest that party cues do not inhibit such thinking. This is not cause for unbridled optimism about citizens' ability to make good decisions, but it is reason to be more sanguine about their ability to use information about policy when they have it.

Why do states make concessions to some self-determination movements but not others? This article explores the role of the internal characteristics of these movements, demonstrating that their internal structures play a major role in determining which groups get concessions. Using new data on the structure of self-determination movements and the concessions they receive, I evaluate whether states respond to internally divided movements by trying to “divide and conquer” or “divide and concede.” Consistent with the latter approach, I find that internally divided movements receive concessions at a much higher rate than unitary ones and that the more divided the movement is the more likely it is to receive concessions. Yet, concessions to unitary movements appear to work better to settle these disputes. This suggests that states use concessions not only as a tool to resolve disputes, but also as part of the bargaining process.

I develop a game-theoretic model of an interaction between an antiterrorist agency and a terrorist organization to analyze how the probability of a terrorist attack varies when the level of privacy protections changes. I derive two implications. First, privacy and security from terrorism need not be in conflict: when accounting for strategic interactions, reducing privacy protections does not necessarily increase security from terrorism. Second, and more important, the antiterrorist agency will always want less privacy. The very agency whose expertise affords it disproportionate influence on policy making will prefer a reduction in privacy protections even when that reduction harms security from terrorism. The analysis has implications for understanding the relationship between government powers and civil liberties in the context of terrorism prevention and times of emergencies more generally.