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).
The first article in this issue of Perspectives is by someone
who almost makes thinking, never mind writing, look easy. Robert Dahl has
been a preeminent analyst of democratic politics for half a century, and
in “James Madison, Republican or Democrat?” he revisits some
of his early seminal work. Madison is best known for his mistrust of
democratic majorities while designing a democratic polity. But Dahl shows
how Madison shifted from fearing majority tyranny while writing the
Constitution to fearing minority tyranny while implementing it. Dahl
clearly admires Madison's ability to change his strategies in order
to maintain his deepest convictions, but he castigates him, as one
democratic theorist to another, for ignoring or relegating to permanent
subjugation two-thirds of the members of the new polity. Madison has had
few peers; Robert Dahl is one of them.
Lane Kenworthy and Jonas Pontusson, in “Rising Inequality and
the Politics of Redistribution in Affluent Countries” address an
issue that Madison, and Dahl, pondered over much of their careers. Why
don't the many poor divest the few wealthy of their riches in
majoritarian democracies—or, more to the point at present, why are
the many poor becoming even poorer in affluent Western nations? Kenworthy
and Pontusson demonstrate that family market inequality has indeed been
rising in OECD nations for several decades and then analyze why that is
the case. They argue that the key to rising income inequality is sluggish
performance of labor markets; poor families gained more in nations where
they could attain low-wage jobs than in nations where they could not.
Redistribution persisted at high rates throughout this period, but the
evidence seems to support those who endorse strong market economies more
than those who endorse strong social democratic policies as a way to
redistribute wealth.
In “Wars and American Politics,” David Mayhew asks why
scholars of American political development attend so little to the causes
and consequences of war, especially given that the United States has been
on a war footing for a large fraction of its history. Perhaps scholars are
not inclined to study what they don't like or don't understand,
or perhaps wars have seemed too episodic, exogenous, or inchoate to be
understood with the tools of systematic social science. Mayhew argues
that, nevertheless, wars have had significant consequences for the
political development of the United States, and those consequences should
be classified, compared, and analyzed. Wars generate major policy changes,
new issue regimes, electoral realignments, and ideological shifts in
political parties. As he has done many times before, Mayhew opens up a new
arena for research; he also challenges us to incorporate contingent events
into modes of analysis that more easily engage with rules, institutions,
aggregated data, or structured events such as elections.
William Callahan, in “Social Capital and Corruption,”
takes on the apparently strong claims of a widely accepted paradigm and
concludes that “it depends.” The paradigm is social capital
theory, and the issue is whether more and deeper networks are always to be
preferred to shallower networks or fewer of them. Callahan shows how
bonding and bridging social capital mutually constitute one another and
how too much of the former can overwhelm or corrupt the latter. His case
for making this argument is the problem of vote-buying in Thailand. He
analyzes three distinct narratives of reform—fix the constitutional
structure, fix the leaders, or fix the peasantry—and shows how they
contradict one another in diagnosis of the problem and prescription for
solving it. Furthermore, each gets tangled up, albeit in different ways,
in the dispute between “good” and “bad” forms of
social capital. The upshot is a multisided portrayal of a complex
political conundrum, as well as the salutary reminder that even the best
political developments come with attendant costs.
William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks return the focus to military
conflict, but they shift the context away from American domestic politics.
In “International Relations Theory and the Case against
Unilateralism,” they take up the always urgent question of when and
how the United States should seek allies for international engagements.
Wohlforth and Brooks refute various claims, roughly associated with the
three dominant theories of international relations, purporting to show
that multilateral action is, ceteris paribus, always preferable to the
United States' striking out on its own. In their view, for some
issues or in some contexts unilateral policies might be preferable. That
apparently innocuous conclusion—also, “it
depends”—has powerful implications, the chief of which is that
scholars of international relations need to give up their increasingly
outmoded paradigms and develop new arguments for the newly unipolar
world.
Amy Gershoff and Shana Kushner probe a crucial political puzzle, also
connected with war, in “Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11-Iraq
Connection in the Bush Administration's Rhetoric.” They analyze
President George W. Bush's speeches to show how tightly he sought to
connect the war in Iraq to the earlier terrorist attack of September 11,
2001. They also show that the news media did not challenge this tight
link, so the public had no alternative frameworks from the mainstream
press with which to comprehend the facts differently. Thus the set of
considerations that, according to John Zaller, often lie behind expressed
opinions on a policy issue barely existed. The successful connection of
terrorism with the United States' intervention in Iraq would prove to
be highly consequential in the presidential election of November 2004, and
Gershoff and Kushner lay out plainly for us just how it began.
The symposium in this issue of Perspectives is our most
recent attempt to enliven the discipline of political science and connect
it to the Real World. The introduction to the symposium explains its logic
in a bit more detail; suffice it to say here that we invited thirteen
intrepid scholars to predict the state of the world, from the vantage
point that they know best, a decade from now. Actually we invited fifteen,
but regretfully two could not make room in their impossibly busy
schedules; I report this by way of noting that this invitation had by far
the highest acceptance rate of all the solicitations I have made as editor
of Perspectives. I interpret that result to mean that political
scientists are eager to test their theories and are very good sports about
laying themselves open to be proved wrong (or right!) as the future
unfolds. I urge whoever is editor of this journal a decade from now to
invite these scholars back to reflect on how well their predictions held
up, or to invite others to comment on the predictions and venture their
own for the coming decade.
An innovation in this issue of Perspectives is a section of
letters to the editor, entitled “Counterpoint.” We have long
envisioned such a section, and earlier issues of Perspectives
encouraged readers to respond to published articles. We simply did not
receive enough responses to start the section until now. These letters are
not reviewed, of course, but they are lightly edited for clarity and
Perspectives retains the right not to publish letters that have
too high a ratio of invective (or praise) to substantive content. We very
much hope that this new section flourishes, both in order to get new ideas
into public discussion quickly, and to give readers even more of a sense
that this really is your journal.
I introduced “Counterpoint” at this juncture in order to
set the stage for our “Perspectives” essay. Jeremy Pressman
sent a detailed letter in response to an article by Jonathan Isacoff and
commentary by Sari Nusseibeh in the March 2005 issue of
Perspectives. Professor Pressman's response was too long for
the letters section, so we had it lightly reviewed and, after revision, it
now appears as an essay, entitled “Historical Schools and Political
Science: An Arab-Israeli History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.”
Pressman challenges four features of Isacoff's article—its
inattention to Arab sources, its risk of reifying schools of thought, its
lack of nuance in using realist theory to explain Israeli actions, and its
conflation of scholars and activists among writers of history. Pressman
carefully explicates each criticism, and in so doing continues the example
set by Isacoff and Nusseibeh of discussing this intensely difficult issue
with evidence, analytic coolness, and civility.
This issue of Perspectives contains two review essays. Karen
Beckwith develops a syllabi review essay around the intersection of three
major topics—gender studies, the study of social movements, and the
study of comparative politics. In “The Comparative Politics of
Women's Movements,” Beckwith shows how this intersection not
only illuminates each of the three topics, but also creates a subfield of
its own. Studying women's movements comparatively enables scholars
and students to consider the relationship between feminism and political
activity guided by or focused on the concerns of women; it encourages us
to develop various ways of studying an issue comparatively; and it links
the sociological study of movements to the political realm of state
activity. In the end, the comparative study of women's movements
expands our understanding of what democracy is, or at least could be if
all issues and all people were taken seriously in the political arena.
Finally, David Dessler and John Owen examine four books that move
constructivism far from its origins as a reaction against other theories
of international relations into a fully developed strategy for empirical
investigation in its own right. These four books, by Martha Finnemore,
Neta Crawford, Mlada Bukovansky, and Ted Hopf, all are
“constructivist,” although each means something slightly
different by the term and uses the concept to do different kinds of work.
Dessler and Owen focus particularly on the ways in which constructivism
does, and does not, permit causal or other kinds of explanation. They
conclude that rationalists start with structures and then explain how
agents act in the context of those structures, whereas constructivists
start with actors and their perceptions and then show how institutions and
structures are built up around those perceptions. The two modes of
analysis are in some senses opposite—the remaining question is
whether and how they can be made complementary.
As always, this issue of Perspectives has almost 100 pages of
book reviews. And as always, the collection of reviews bring us together
as a discipline while each individual review permits specialists to delve
deeply into writings of particular and idiosyncratic interest. We are
grateful to the authors for the books, the reviewers for their perspicuous
comments, and the book review editor for his dedication to the good of us
all. Here is a case, pace William Callahan, in which bridging and
bonding social capital not only constitute each other but also provide
many benefits with almost no discernable costs.
As of June 1, 2005, Perspectives on Politics has a new
editor, James Johnson of the University of Rochester. The new book review
editor is Jeffrey Isaac of Indiana University. They are gathering a new
team of associate editors, which will be in place when you read this note.
Professor Johnson is dealing with all new submissions and manuscripts in
the pipeline, and his team is developing new solicitations; in due course
he will shape Perspectives according to his own vision. I and the
associate editors and current managing editor will continue to have full
responsibility for the rest of volume 3 (that is, this issue and that of
December 2005), and much of the responsibility for the first issue of
volume 4 (March 2006). I have enjoyed my term as editor enormously and
will tell you some of what I have learned in my final introduction, for
the issue of December 2005. I look forward to continuing involvement with
the journal, even as I turn gratefully to the prospect of a few free days
in which to finally draft the book manuscript that has been floating in my
head for the past three and a half years. So keep those proposals, ideas,
and manuscripts coming—but no longer to me!
