Professional journals provide one crucial tool for communicating our ideas. They largely determine the range of those to whom we speak and and the terms in which we speak to them. Among the daunting tasks of editing a journal, especially a relatively new one, is determining who the audience for the publication might be. To whom is the journal meant to speak? What sort of forum do we hope it will provide?

This essay starts with an observation, proceeds to an exhortation, and concludes with a set of suggestions.

Congress has been situated on the outside edge of the subfield of American Political Development (APD) despite the institution's centrality both to the political history of the United States and to political science as a discipline. Apart from an important but limited number of works—including a long-term research enterprise on the role of sectionalism conducted by Richard Bensel, a study of the antebellum Senate by Elaine Swift, an assessment of the alliance between farmers and workers in the half-century after 1877 by Elizabeth Sanders, a major work on institutional transformations in the House and Senate by Eric Schickler, and a small number of emergent inquiries—“scholars in the American Political Development tradition,” as Keith Whittington has noted, “have never fully integrated Congress, as they have other important institutions such as the bureaucracy, the presidency, political parties and the courts.”Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University (iik1@columbia.edu). John S. Lapinski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University (john.lapinski@yale.edu). This article reflects the work of the American Institutions Project located at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, the support of the National Science Foundation (SES 0318280 and SES 03188289), and the conducive environment for research and writing provided by the Russell Sage Foundation. We particularly wish to thank Rose Razaghian for her reading and suggestions, Eldon Porter for his assistance, and the three anonymous readers for this journal.

The positive literature on judicial behavior has not received nearly the attention it deserves. That literature has a great deal to offer, both to legal scholars and to those who are concerned about the role of legal institutions generally. For example, the literature has the potential to help shed light on the ability of courts to protect rights and foster economic development. This article argues that the positive literature has failed to see its due in large part because positive scholars often do not take law and legal institutions seriously enough.

The article identifies three specific sets of problems with the positive scholarship, offering detailed suggestions on how positive scholars can avoid them. The first is the problem of normative bite: Too often positive scholars of judicial behavior seem to be trapped in their own disciplinary debates, without pausing to examine why it is that they are studying what courts and legal institutions do. Second, positive scholars need to pay greater attention to the norms of the law, i.e., how law and legal institutions operate. A skeptical stance toward law is fine, but that skepticism should not get in the way of accurately understanding properly the mechanics of law and legal institutions. Finally, empiricists in particular must take great care regarding the data upon which they rely. It is difficult to obtain good data on the workings of legal systems. Data that are readily available often present a distorted picture of the system being studied.Barry Friedman is Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at New York University School of Law (barry.friedman@nyu.edu). The author thanks Chuck Cameron, Lee Epstein, Jennifer Hochschild, Jeff Lax, Stefanie Lindquist, Liam Murphy, Jeff Segal, Seana Shiffrin, Jim Spriggs, and three anonymous reviewers for invaluable comments on prior drafts. All errors are the author's own. Jane O'Brien and Kathleen O'Neill provided terrific research assistance.

On February 2, 2005, newly elected Florida Senator, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Mel Martinez, a Cuban-American immigrant, “shattered a 216-year tradition of the U.S. Senate … when he used the ceremonial occasion of his first floor speech to speak three sentences in Spanish.” This event represents the first time a language other than English was entered in the Congressional Record. He did so in support of Mexican-American Alberto Gonzales' nomination to the post of Attorney General. Martinez was rhetorically addressing his remarks to immigrants, whom he described as having come to America to seek a better life. He described Gonzales as “uno de nosotros,” or “one of us.”

The publication of Samuel Huntington's Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity provides an opportunity to consider several distinct underlying assumptions about American national identity, and to evaluate the claim that this identity is threatened by growth among native-born and immigrant populations of Latin American origin, particularly—but not exclusively—Mexicans.Luis R. Fraga is Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford University (fraga@stanford.edu). Fraga was a member of the APSA Standing Committee on Civic Engagement and Education that co-authored Democracy at Risk: And What to do About it (Brookings Institution Press 2005) and is co-author of Multiethnic Moments: The Politics of Urban Education Reform (Temple University Press, forthcoming 2006). Gary M. Segura is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Washington (gmsegura@u.washington.edu). Among his most recent publications are “Earth Quakes and After Shocks: Race, Direct Democracy, and Partisan Change,” in the American Journal of Political Science (2006), “The Mobilizing Effect of Majority-Minority Districts on Latino Turnout” in the American Political Science Review (2004), and the edited volume Diversity In Democracy: Minority Representation in the United States, published in 2005 by the University of Virginia Press. Fraga and Segura are both among the co-principal investigators of the Latino National Survey (LNS), an 8600 respondent state-stratified survey of Latinos in the U.S. scheduled for completion in the Spring of 2006.

Samuel Huntington's analysis of the “Hispanic challenge”—his claim that Mexicans are on their way to forming a separate nation within the U.S.—rests on a series of misconceptions that are not his alone. At the heart of his difficulties is a widely shared form of reasoning about racial and ethnic populations that has become increasingly problematic in the contemporary era of mass immigration: it anticipates a single, predominant outcome for group members, such as assimilation or racialized exclusion; instead, it is the diversity within groups of patterns of incorporation into American society that needs recognition today. This is all the more true of Mexican Americans because of the long history across which their immigration stretches and their presence in the Southwest and California before the arrival of European Americans.Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at The University at Albany, SUNY (r.alba@albany.edu). This paper was written while the author was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He is grateful to Jennifer Hochschild for the invitation to write it for this symposium and to his colleagues at the Institute, especially Susan Eckstein and Luis Fraga, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

According to Samuel Huntington, Latin Americans are eroding our country's core Anglo-Protestant values. The values, says he, made America great, unified the country, and allowed immigrant upward mobility through assimilation and acculturation. Huntington expresses concern that immigrants from Latin America, now our main newcomers, along with their U.S.-born progeny, are creating another America, culturally and socially distinct. The reason for this, he claims, is that they settle in close proximity to one another; they retain use of their mother tongue, Spanish; and they remain, in the main, committed Catholics. These conditions purportedly are bad both for America and for the immigrants. They impede new immigrant ability to live the American Dream and, by implication, America's continued global economic preeminence.Susan Eckstein is Professor of Sociology at Boston University (seckstei@bu.edu). Thanks to the Radcliffe Institute and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundations for financial support for the project on which this article draws, and to Richard Alba and Jorge Domínguez for comments on an earlier version of this essay. The author is also appreciative of the hundreds of Cuban Americans with whom she spoke who have deepened her understanding of Cuban American experiences. She has spoken with ordinary Cuban Americans who emigrated at different points in time, as well as with businessmen, politicians, clergy, leaders of diverse groups and organizations, scholars, and journalists.

As the United States begins the twenty-first century, it remains the world's leading immigration country. In 2000 (the latest year for which migration data are available on a global basis) the United States was home to almost 35 million legal and unauthorized migrants, or 2.7 times as many as any other country. Although other nations have higher proportions of foreign-born residents (e.g., nearly 25 percent in Australia and 20 percent in Canada), the globally dominant position of the United States in regard to numbers of new immigrants reinforces its self-image as a “nation of immigrants,” as does the fact that immigration is generally seen as contributing to the country's economic and demographic strength. However, over the past three decades, more and more new arrivals with non-European origins have come to the country (more than four-fifths are Latino and Asian), many with very low levels of education and illegal status at entry. These changes have fueled public concerns and led to heated debates over whether U.S. admissions and settlement-related policies ought to be modified.Frank D. Bean is Professor of Sociology (fbean@uci.edu), Susan K. Brown is Assistant Professor of Sociology (skbrown@uci.edu),and Rubén G. Rumbaut is Professor of Sociology at University of California, Irvine (rrumbaut@uci.edu). Some of the research results reported in this paper come from a research project entitled “Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles” and supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.

Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. By Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 262 pages. $55.00 cloth

Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser's recent book, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe, exemplifies the recent incursion of economists into the domains of political science and sociology. In thinking about welfare states, economists have traditionally been interested in their effects on the distribution of income and, above all, their implications for efficiency and growth. Alesina and Glaeser instead set out to explain why “Americans are much less willing to redistribute from the rich to the poor than Europeans” (2) or, in other words, why the American welfare state is so small by comparison to European welfare states. This, then, is a book about American exceptionalism in the realm of social policy, but Alesina and Glaeser's discussion also addresses the general problem of accounting for cross-national variation in the public provision of social welfare. Their project is to provide an account of the exceptional nature of the American welfare state that is consistent with and sheds light on differences among other welfare states as well. This makes for an audacious book that deserves critical scrutiny.Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Politics at Princeton University (jpontuss@Princeton.edu). This essay was written while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. I am most grateful to the foundation for its support. For comments on previous drafts, I am grateful to Ira Katznelson, Mary O'Sullivan, and Kenneth Sokoloff.

All the News That's Fit to Sell. By James Hamilton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 264 pages. $37.95 cloth. $18.95 paper.

Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age. By Matthew Baum. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 291 pages. $39.95 cloth. $19.95 paper.

The way we think about news should be changed by two recent books: James Hamilton's All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News and Matthew Baum's Soft News Goes to War. Both present surprising findings that challenge conventional wisdom. And, read together, they presage a new line of research into how entrepreneurial politicians, all over the world, are changing politics through their responses to changing media.Samuel L Popkin is Professor of Political Science at University of California, San Diego (spopkin@ucsd.edu). This essay was inspired by Elizabeth Eisenstein's pioneering research on the effects of the printing press and Ithiel Pool's analyses of the discrepancies between the expected and actual effect of new communications technologies from the printing press through the digital revolution. It was written during a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am indebted to Gerald Gamm, Delynn Kaufman, Gary Jacobson, Arthur Lupia, Samuel Kernell, Michael Schudson and Bob Kaiser for their comments.

What has the discipline that calls itself “political science” to do with literary studies, anthropology, the philosophy of language, structural linguistics, or hermeneutics? With postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cultural studies, and other such pursuits? Anne Norton's 95 Theses raises these questions at the nexus of “Politics, Culture, and Method.” Asked to consider this work both generally and with an eye to its potential impact on the discipline of political science, the subfield of political theory and disciplinary or subfield divisions, I find myself caught between the terms of the invitation and the implosion of those terms for which the Theses offer no small spark. Curiously though, its most incendiary aspects appear not in Norton's own measured prose, but rather on its dust jacket. The back cover, for example, dubs it “an attack on the social science establishment,” while an inner flap applauds Norton as a “political scientist” who has launched “a polemic against the orthodoxy of her own field.” There, too, strident phrasing names the polemical target: “the antiquated and stultifying models in the textbooks on method, in courses on methodology, championed by the self-appointed gatekeepers of a narrow and parochial political science.” Norton, we're told, “opens the gates to more new practices, new principles, new questions, more methods, and more demanding ethical and scientific criteria.”Kirstie M. McClure is Associate Professor of Political Science and English at University of California, Los Angeles (kmmac@ucla.edu).

In 95 Theses Anne Norton picks a fight with conventional political science. She asks conventional political science to use different measures (indeed, conceptualize what we do as something other than “measuring”), use different methods, and ask different questions. Some may read this as a threat to an entire way of life. I read it as an intriguing and exciting challenge.Katherine Cramer Walsh is Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison (kwalsh@polisci.wisc.edu). She is the author of Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life (University of Chicago, 2004) and A Practical Politics of Difference: Race, Community and Dialogue in Civic Life (University of Chicago, forthcoming). Special thanks to Joe Soss for extensive feedback and conversations on this essay.

Rethinking Freedom: Why Freedom Has Lost Its Meaning and What Can Be Done to Save It. By C. Fred Alford. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 192p. $75.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society. By Isaac D. Balbus. New York: Other Press, 2005. 264p. $25.00.

Psychoanalysis has suffered rough treatment in American mass media in recent decades. Dubious sweeping neurological claims have displaced what are regarded as dubious “talking cure” claims. This cultural trend is reflected in the reflex-like skepticism with which especially under-50 scholars behold the works of Sigmund Freud and his schismatic followers. Political scientists rarely bother with psychoanalysis or tend at best to exhibit a “Freud for Beginners' grasp of the enterprise, which is, after all, an exploration, and canny effort at explanation, of our “inner world” and of the rule of unconscious elements over our intentions and best-laid plans. Inasmuch as the study of the unwieldy “inner self” militates against rational modeling, it is little wonder that psychoanalysis has fallen out of favor since Harold Lasswell's heyday. Indeed, psychoanalysts offer some intriguing comments about underlying motives that drive those of us who pursue rationalist models as adequate depictions of reality, but we need not tarry there.

Democratic Faith. By Patrick J. Deneen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 440p. $45.00.

Contemporary democratic theory has been flourishing. Recent liberal, communitarian, republican, deliberative, agonistic, pluralist, postmodern, cosmopolitan, cyberspace, and realist models and theories abound. Patrick Deneen's book is a significant contribution to this genre and original in its critical focus on those democratic theories that “insist upon the possibility of democratic transformation” and advance “a conception of human beings as both infinitely malleable and ameliorable” (p. 4).

Protestantism and the American Founding. Edited by Thomas S. Engeman and Michael P. Zuckert. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. 296p. $65.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Thomas Engeman and Michael Zuckert's unique collection of essays and commentaries, most written specifically for this volume, offer competing interpretations of the relationship between the “spirit of liberty” and the “spirit of religion,” as Tocqueville would put it, in the American Founding. The collection begins with a long essay by Zuckert that sets the terms of discussion of the book to which many of the contributors respond, and it concludes with a response by Zuckert to each of his critics.

The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. By Micheline R. Ishay. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 459p. $24.95.

Are human rights universal or culturally bounded? From what religious or philosophical premises are they derived? Do they conflict? Do they empower or instead disempower the weak and oppressed? What is their fate in an era of globalization? The key to answering these questions may lie more in historical than conceptual investigation. This is the hunch that inspires Micheline Ishay's remarkably learned and wide-ranging book. It delivers forceful conclusions, which need no belaboring by the author, since she allows them to emerge from the historical record. Among the lessons we learn are that human rights should indeed be viewed as universal; that they draw nourishment from diverse ideological sources; that their meaning has always been contested, though not primarily along cultural lines; that civil and political rights on the one hand and socioeconomic rights on the other have historically been dependent on each other; that the claim to national self-determination as a human right has often been a cover for human rights violations; and that the idea of human rights has regularly been reborn, often strengthened, after periods of tyranny and oppression.

Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law. By Ken I. Kersch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 400p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

This is a fascinating book about constitutional development in the United States that questions traditional explanations for the genesis of constitutional rights. In this erudite study, Ken Kersch offers an account of the changing interpretations of constitutional rights by analyzing landmark cases in their historical context in order to show the interplay of ideological, political, and social forces that influenced them. The book provides a careful reconsideration of the jurisprudence concerning civil rights and civil liberties that effectively challenges the conventional wisdom about individual cases. Kersch's compelling analysis demonstrates that explanations for the expansion of particular rights are often more complicated than traditional constitutional works have assumed. He argues that the expansion of constitutional rights did not occur in a unilinear and unidimensional fashion (cf, e.g., pp. 132, 360). This is a brilliant interdisciplinary study that should interest scholars in many fields, including cultural studies, history, international law, law and society, and political science. This comprehensive book is rich in historical detail and full of surprises.

Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community. By Keally D. McBride. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. 192p. $45.00.

The concept of community weighs heavily in the history of social and political theory but even more so in the collective imagination. The idea and varying visions of community traverse concepts of identity, public sphere, and state in theoretical discourses. Community also insinuates itself into discussions and decision making at the most practical level. Keally D. McBride's book offers a creative and probing exploration of how community has been imagined by theorists and how imagined communities inform practice. It does not claim to be a comprehensive synthesis of competing views, but rather succeeds as a provocative set of thematically linked, exploratory essays. While McBride acknowledges at the outset the importance of the analytic task of delineating the various conceptualizations of community, her project makes its contribution by explicating how visions of the political imagination of different eras inform the imagination of community. She shows how the resulting set of ideals and images creates and constrains real-world political possibilities. Throughout, she offers subtle judgments and useful provocations and, in the end, this book emerges as an important resource for everyone who values the possibilities of community, but wishes to remain critical of the concept's many traps and seductions.

Freedom Reclaimed: Rediscovering the American Vision. By John E. Schwarz. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 264p. $30.00.

In his book, John Schwarz develops a conception of freedom different from, and more expansive than, the one most common today. His crucial distinction echoes that of Isaiah Berlin's (1969) Four Essays on Liberty: Negative freedom (which Schwarz calls “free-market freedom”) involves the absence of formal restrictions on personal conduct, particularly those coming from government, whereas positive freedom (“genuine freedom,” in Schwarz's words) requires that society be organized such that people can and do attain a decent standard of living through their own efforts. Schwarz differs from Berlin, however, in seeing positive freedom not as a concept easily twisted for totalitarian ends but rather as the highest form of freedom. Emphasizing only negative freedom means ignoring the bonds that connect citizens to one another, leading to an individualistic, morally bankrupt notion that says we are all in this—alone.

On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory. By Brian Z. Tamanaha. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 188p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Brian Z. Tamanaha reminds us that the rule of law is a near-universal yet little-understood ideal. His book presents a brief and clear introductory history and analysis that defends the coherence and value of the rule of law and that gives a sense of its global reach, limitations, and prospects. Tamanaha wisely argues that what is called the rule of law is actually a family of doctrines. Crucial to it, on his view, are three “themes” (p. 114): government limited by law, formal legality (which “entails public, prospective rules with the qualities of generality, equality of application, and certainty” [p. 119]), and a distinction between the rule of law and the “rule of man” (p. 122). The theoretical core of the book deftly explicates Friedrich Hayek's defenses and Roberto Unger's criticisms of legal liberalism as a prelude to discussing the challenges of indeterminacy and surveying a range of thinner to thicker formal and substantive conceptions of the rule of law. Tamanaha analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each of these conceptions. These analyses are intelligent and fair-minded; his own position is veiled, but suggests support for a relatively thin substantive and relatively thick formal conception (involving basic individual rights within a formally democratic legal order), friendly to Hayek and not too bothered by the acknowledged indeterminacy of legal rules.