In political science as in life, timing is everything. Actors act. Events unfold. Institutions evolve. Regimes transition. Journals change hands. Articles accepted under one editor are readied for publication by another. And all the while things happen politically. In the broadest sense political science at its best is a never-ending, recursive conversation about this ongoing flow of events, in which the object of our inquiry—society—is a constantly shifting target that is at once reflected in, tracked by, and influenced by our intellectual labors, and in which our inquiry itself incessantly shifts, grows, and simply moves onwards, however one judges this forward movement.

We explore the possibility that the US political system can usefully be characterized as oligarchic. Using a material-based definition drawn from Aristotle, we argue that oligarchy is not inconsistent with democracy; that oligarchs need not occupy formal office or conspire together or even engage extensively in politics in order to prevail; that great wealth can provide both the resources and the motivation to exert potent political influence. Data on the US distributions of income and wealth are used to construct several Material Power Indices, which suggest that the wealthiest Americans may exert vastly greater political influence than average citizens and that a very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufficient power to dominate policy in certain key areas. A brief review of the literature suggests possible mechanisms by which such influence could occur, through lobbying, the electoral process, opinion shaping, and the US Constitution itself.

We restate and clarify the idea of the “cartel party,” a concept that has found considerable traction in studies of parties throughout the democratic world, including those far from the original research site and data on which the cartel model was based. The cartel party thesis holds that political parties increasingly function like cartels, employing the resources of the state to limit political competition and ensure their own electoral success. The thesis has been subject to varied empirical testing and to substantial theoretical evaluation and criticism. Against this background, we look again at the cartel party thesis in order to clarify ambiguities in and misinterpretations of the original argument. We also suggest further refinements, specifications and extensions of the argument. Following a background review of the original thesis, we break it down into its core components, and then clarify the terms in which it makes sense to speak of cartelization and collusion. We then go on to explore some of the implications of the thesis for our understanding of contemporary democracies and patterns of party organization and party competition and we identify a possible agenda for future research in party scholarship.

Parties can be a crucial to democratic function but not all parties or party systems are democratic. Some parties are fully competitive within a pluralist system while others, notably hegemonic parties, are antithetical to democracy. Between competitive, pluralist party systems and hegemonic party systems lie predominant party systems. These are compatible with democracy where democracy is fully consolidated but inhibit democratic consolidation in settings with an authoritarian history or where the rule of law is incomplete. The effect of predominant parties in unconsolidated democracies has not been fully studied in comparative context. I scrutinize this problem in Argentina, which has followed an electoral calendar for two decades, but lacks a fully pluralist system of power-sharing among two nationally-competitive parties. The authoritarian background of Peronism, of Argentina itself and the limited competitive potential of the Radical Party have curtailed democratic development. The article underscores the seriousness of Argentina's dilemma by contrasting its situation with Democratic Party predominance in the United States Deep South in the 1940s. The comparison of democratic development in an older democracy with that of a newer democracy illustrates that some of the processes of consolidation are similar and that the experience of older democracies may indicate possible solutions for newer democracies.

Extensive political science research reveals that the decisions of the US Supreme Court are deeply political. And both advocates and critics of judicial elections concede that partisan elections are a democratic method of judicial selection. Does the value of democratic representation mean that US Supreme Court Justices should be selected through partisan elections? I argue not. Partisan judicial elections are actually far poorer institutional mechanisms for capturing the judgment of the people on legal matters than has been recognized. The role of parties in structuring a campaign distorts the deliberative environment surrounding judicial elections, creating significant barriers to voters expressing a judgment on matters of legal meaning. The kind of distortion is best understood through reference to a processual criterion of deliberative democracy, which provides a fitting normative template to ground theoretical inquiry into the reason-giving possibilities of existing democratic institutions and practices. Hence, answering why the US Supreme Court should not be elected on democratic grounds also reveals new insights about the role of parties in sustaining (or subverting) deliberative democratic ideals.

This article shows that judicial review has a democratic justification, although it is not necessary for democratic government and its virtues are controversial and often speculative. Against critics like Waldron and Bellamy, it shows that judges, no less than legislators, can embody democratic forms of representation, accountability and participation. Hence, judicial review is not undemocratic simply because it enables unelected judges to over-rule elected legislators when people disagree about rights. Against recent defenders of judicial review, such as Eisgruber and Brettschneider, it shows that democratic arguments for judicial review do not require judges to be better at protecting rights than legislators. Hence a democratic justification for judicial review does not depend on complex and inevitably controversial interpretations and evaluations of judicial as opposed to legislative judgments. Democratic government does not demand special virtue, competence or wisdom in its citizens or their leaders. From a democratic perspective, therefore, the case for judicial review is that it enables individuals to vindicate their rights against government in ways that parallel those they commonly use against each other. This makes judicial review normatively attractive whether or not it leads to better decisions than would be made by other means.

John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration introduces an early form of John Rawls's “original position” in order to shift the rhetorical ground in seventeenth-century England in favor of religious toleration. His method, which I call “Lockean switching,” seeks to induce readers to switch perspectives on the question of coercion of religious belief. This method yields three insights. First, although liberals typically assume that group identification stimulates passions beyond our ability to reason, Lockean switching reveals that the emotive qualities of group interest can actually help reinforce our commitment to and understanding of liberal principles. Locke thus insists that imagination and emotional response can encourage reason and increase impartiality. Locke's carefully crafted scenarios force readers to consider hard political questions, something underscored by comparing Locke's rhetorical strategies with those of two other important liberals, Montesquieu and Rawls. Second, Locke's invocation of remote “outsiders” such as Jews and pagans humanizes the hated minorities of his time and place. But it also risks reifying the majority group and inflaming prejudice. Finally, Lockean switching reminds us that liberals must be alert to the dangers of pushing readers to accept principles that are reasonable but impossible to implement. By exploring Locke's method of shifting perspectives, and connecting it to a broader liberal tradition of “switching,” I argue that contemporary liberals can use imagination and group identification to help reinforce the commitment of individuals and groups to liberal principles with which they might not otherwise identify. I conclude by illustrating this with regard to controversies surrounding the toleration of gays, lesbians and transgendered individuals in the US.

The combined effects of an aging population, domestic migration, and the geographically heterogeneous effects of foreign immigration are producing politically significant changes in the distribution of the American population. Using statistical projections of state populations in the 2010 and 2020 US Censuses combined with statewide estimates of the normal vote based on the last five presidential elections (1992–2008), I show that by 2024 Republican presidential candidates will receive a net benefit of at least eight electoral votes due to the declining population of the Northeast and upper Midwest relative to the rapidly-growing Sun Belt. Democratic presidential candidates will find it increasingly difficult to win elections without having some success in the South and Southwest as Barack Obama did in 2008 but many previous candidates failed to do. While migration will also benefit some solid Democratic states such as California, on balance Republican presidential candidates are poised to benefit from the status of Sun Belt states as magnets for both foreign immigration and domestic migration from a retirement cohort of unprecedented size.

The 2000 presidential election made various electoral institutions—from ballot format to voting mechanisms—suddenly prominent in public debate. One institution that garnered little attention, but nonetheless affected the outcome, was apportionment. A few commentators, looking ahead to 2004, noticed that Bush would have won more comfortably had the apportionment based on the 2000 census already been in place for the 2000 election. Little attention, however, was paid to the method by which 1990 census data were used to generate the 1992–2000 apportionment, even though there are many ways to perform that allocation, the United States has used different methods over its history, and the precise algorithm turned out, in this instance, to matter. More generally, previous discussions of apportionment methods have neglected the point that allocation to states of US House seats simultaneously determines Electoral College weights. Since the Electoral College has built-in biases favoring small states, an apportionment method that partially offsets this bias might be justifiable. We revisit some criteria by which one might prefer one apportionment rule to another, in light of this double duty.

We contribute to a greater understanding of political psychology by 1) collecting data in a more systematic way for the intellectual community, 2) sensitizing students to the extent to which any intellectual discipline is socially constructed and is a work in progress, 3) heightening awareness of the political aspects of intellectual life, 4) exposing readers to the wide variety of diverse approaches and methodologies utilized by political psychologists, and 5) suggesting the range of topics that political psychology can address successfully and the range of techniques it can utilize.

Cooperation between two agencies presents much the same problem whether these agencies are found in different countries or in the same country. This similarity is generally overlooked because the issues over which agencies negotiate often differ—defense and trade policy at the international level, transportation or land use at the domestic level. Demonstrating the analytical similarity of international cooperation to domestic interagency cooperation requires holding issue area constant while allowing interstate and intrastate units to vary. To do this, I focus on cooperation over wildlife and habitat preservation at the domestic and international levels in the US and Canada. I explain this variation in cooperation in a simple theory in which agency goals and certain features of species interact. Variation between successful and unsuccessful cooperation in this issue area is governed solely by characteristics of the species and agency goals in each management unit, and does not depend on whether a problem is “international” or “domestic.” For scholars who think in terms of nation-states interacting in an anarchic international system, this points to a very different unit of analysis. For those who emphasize the domestic politics of international cooperation, this moves us away from executives constrained by legislatures to look at sub-units within each executive.

Judging from Gallup Polls in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, opinion often changes during an election campaign. Come election day itself, however, opinion often reverts back nearer to where it was before the campaign began. That that happens even in Australia, where voting is compulsory and turnout is near-universal, suggests that differential turnout among those who have and have not been influenced by the campaign is not the whole story. Inspection of individual-level panel data from 1987 and 2005 British General Elections confirms that between 3 and 5 percent of voters switch voting intentions during the campaign, only to switch back toward their original intentions on election day. One explanation, we suggest, is that people become more responsible when stepping into the poll booth: when voting they reflect back on the government's whole time in office, rather than just responding (as when talking to pollsters) to the noise of the past few days' campaigning. Inspection of Gallup Polls for UK snap elections suggests that this effect is even stronger in elections that were in that sense unanticipated.

Reports from abroad on the American condition have a special place in the canon of social commentary. There is Lord Bryce's American Commonwealth (1888), Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906) and, of course—the standard setter—Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in 1835. What makes these works touchstones is not just the quality of the analysis or the fame of their authors but the privileged status they have come to enjoy as works of external reflection and criticism. For a people prone to ignore the rest of the world or see abroad only a mirror image of themselves, Americans have always had a surprisingly soft spot for the foreign observer willing to discourse on what makes their nation unique.

In Charles Dickens's novel about capitalism run amok, a teacher asks: “Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn't this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty, isn't this a prosperous nation, and an't you in a thriving state?” “Girl number twenty” (the teacher doesn't dignify the pupils with names) later confides to a friend how she got it all wrong: “I said I didn't know. I thought I couldn't know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all” (Hard Times [1854] 1997, 64).

The economist Amartya Sen has said that world development ought to focus on the capabilities that people achieve, and not simply on aggregate economic indicators. In that spirit, the United Nations since 1990 has published several Human Development (HD) reports that assess nations in terms of health and education conditions, as well as income or wealth. Many countries have assessed their own HD. In The Measure of America, Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, and Eduardo Borges Martins apply this approach to the United States. They describe variation in health, education, and income conditions across American states, congressional districts, and social groups.

Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is not the best indicator of a nation's well-being. A nation can be relatively wealthy, but many of its people may be living under circumstances of misery and deprivation. Some people may be unable to transform their own wealth into things that really matter to them (think of those with severe disabilities or ill health); background social arrangements may have significant causal effects on individual well-being (think of physical security); and some of the most important components of a person's well-being may be nonmonetary (think of the importance of family and friends). A nation's GDP tells us nothing about how its wealth is distributed for different public purposes. (Recall the criticism by Martin Luther King, Jr., of America's priorities in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”) Nor does GDP reveal how wealth is distributed among a nation's people. It may, therefore, tell us little about how the nation's very poorest members are faring.

Sixteen avuncular men stare at the camera in the book's epilogue. One clutches a Bible, two smile, 11 are black or Hispanic, and all are among the 127 men and women released from death row after reformers uncovered evidence of their innocence. Frank Baumgartner, Suzanna De Boef, and Amber Boydstun will be speaking for many readers when they start their book by writing simply, “It has been shocking” (p. xiii). The phenomenon is also a stunning public policy mystery.

This is one of the most interesting books I have read on the mass media, public opinion, and policymaking. Capital punishment is an important and compelling issue in its own right, which makes the first part of the book a great read, devoid of technical detail and filled with stunning descriptions of specific cases. Moreover, the rise and staying power of the idea of innocence—that innocent people sit on death row and may be executed—is clear. There continues to be a stream of news stories and commentaries about convicted murderers making plausible appeals for DNA tests that may set them free. While the overturning of murder convictions based in new evidence or faulty defenses preceded the use of DNA testing, this testing became important since it could confirm guilt or prove innocence.

The death penalty is declining in the United States. The number of people executed each year has fallen by about half since the late 1990s. Opinion polls show support for capital punishment is waning. It now stands at about two-thirds, down from a high point of 86% in 1995, according to Gallup polls (p. 173).

What seemed unimaginable a decade ago, namely, the abolition of the death penalty in the United States, today seems well within the horizon of possibility. Indeed, supporters of capital punishment now seem to be very much on the defensive. To take but one example, in April 2005, then Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney filed a long-awaited bill to reinstate the death penalty in his state. The bill, which Romney called “a model for the nation” and the “gold standard” for capital punishment legislation, was remarkable for its hesitations and qualifications. Thus, it limited death eligibility to a narrow set of crimes, including deadly acts of terrorism, killing sprees, murders involving torture, and the killing of law enforcement authorities. It excluded entire categories of crimes that many believe also warrant the death penalty, including the murders of children and the rape-murders of women. It also laid out a set of hurdles for meting out capital punishment sentences, in an effort to neutralize the kind of problems that have led to dozens of death row exonerations across the nation in recent years. The measure called for verifiable scientific evidence, such as DNA, to be required before a defendant can be sentenced to death, and a tougher standard of “no doubt” of guilt (rather than the typical “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” standard) for juries to sentence defendants to death. The limited nature of Romney's bill, which nonetheless ultimately was defeated in the Massachusetts legislature, provides one vivid sign that the tide has turned in the national conversation about capital punishment.