What unites most articles in this issue of Perspectives is the search for power. The authors seek power for different reasons—to enable political leaders to be more effective, to eliminate its insidious effects on citizens and the polity, to end group-based strife, or to produce better social science theories. That the search for power would unify otherwise disparate articles is hardly surprising; if our discipline has any center toward which its many peripheries gravitate, it is the study of power in all of its many manifestations.

Rational choice theory tends to view political institutions as structures of voluntary cooperation that resolve collective action problems and benefit all concerned. Yet the political process often gives rise to institutions that are good for some people and bad for others, depending on who has the power to impose their will. Political institutions may be structures of cooperation, but they may also be structures of power—and the theory does not tell us much about this. As a result, it gives us a one-sided and overly benign view of what political institutions are and do. This problem is not well understood, and indeed is not typically seen as a problem at all. For there is a widespread sense in the rational choice literature that, because power is frequently discussed, it is an integral part of the theory and just as fundamental as cooperation. Confusion on this score has undermined efforts to right the imbalance. My purpose here is to clarify the analytic roles that power and cooperation actually play in this literature, and to argue that a more balanced theory—one that brings power from its periphery to its very core—is both necessary and entirely possible.Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (moe@hoover.stanford.edu). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Yale Conference on Crafting and Operating Institutions, April 11–13, 2003. The author would like to thank Sven Feldmann, Lloyd Gruber, James Fearon, Peter Hall, Jennifer Hochschild, Stephen Krasner, Chris Mantzavinos, Gary Miller, Paul Pierson, Theda Skocpol, Barry Weingast, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Ethnic divisions, according to empirical democratic theory, and commonsense understandings of politics, threaten the survival of democratic institutions. One of the principal mechanisms linking the politicization of ethnic divisions with the destabilization of democracy is the so-called outbidding effect. According to theories of ethnic outbidding, the politicization of ethnic divisions inevitably gives rise to one or more ethnic parties. The emergence of even a single ethnic party, in turn, “infects” the political system, leading to a spiral of extreme bids that destroys competitive politics altogether. In contrast, I make the (counterintuitive) claim that ethnic parties can sustain a democratic system if they are institutionally encouraged: outbidding can be reversed by replacing the unidimensional ethnic identities assumed by the outbidding models with multidimensional ones. My argument is based on the anomalous case of ethnic party behavior in India. It implies that the threat to democratic stability, where it exists, comes not from the intrinsic nature of ethnic divisions, but from the institutional context within which ethnic politics takes place. Institutions that artificially restrict ethnic politics to a single dimension destabilize democracy, whereas institutions that foster multiple dimensions of ethnic identity can sustain it.Kanchan Chandra is associate professor of political science at MIT (kchandra@mit.edu) and author of Why Ethnic Parties Succeed (2004). For useful discussions and written comments, the author thanks the anonymous reviewers and the editorial board of Perspectives on Politics, Steve Ansolabehere, Paul Brass, Eric Dickson, Cynthia Enloe, James Fearon, Rachel Gisselquist, J. P. Gownder, Henry Hale, Jennifer Hochschild, Mala Htun, Samuel Huntington, Stathis Kalyvas, Nelson Kasfir, Herbert Kitschelt, David Laitin, Gerard Padro-i-Miquel, Lloyd Rudolph, Susanne Rudolph, Jody Shapiro, Kenneth Shepsle, James Snyder, Ashutosh Varshney, Santhanagopalan Vasudev, Barry Weingast, Myron Weiner, Chris Wendt, Steven Wilkinson, Adam Ziegfeld, and participants of the fall 2003 meeting of the Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LICEP) at UCLA.

As a result of the 1996 reforms, the number of welfare recipients has declined precipitously, and the reform effort has been heralded a “success.” However, a growing body of research indicates racial disparities in client treatment and outcomes under welfare reform. These findings have inaugurated a debate about interpreting racial disparities under welfare reform and determining what corrective action, if any, is necessary. Some analysts contend that welfare reform, as a post–civil rights era, racially neutral public policy, can legitimately have differential outcomes for different racial groups. I argue that this claim must be countered with a new poverty research that goes beyond the limits of mainstream work by placing welfare reform in its historical and social context, thereby providing a more robust explanation of how and to what effect welfare reform is race-biased. I show how welfare reform contributes to what Loic Wacquant calls “racemaking” by being part of a racial policy regime that has developed from past policy but reinforces current racial inequalities.Sanford F. Schram teaches social theory and policy in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College (sschram@brynmawr.edu). He is the author of Praxis for the Poor, After Welfare, and Words of Welfare, which won APSA's Michael Harrington Award in 1996. His Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance, and Globalization is forthcoming. The author thanks Bruce Baum, Wesley Bryant, Tia Burroughs, Anne Dalke, Linda Dennard, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Richard Fording, Burnee Forsythe, Jocelyn Frye, Margaret Henderson, Jennifer Hochschild, Tallese Johnson, Vicki Lens, Amy McLaughlin, Anne Norton, Frances Fox Piven, Melania Popa, Dorit Roer, Corey Shdaimah, Roland Stahl, Roni Strier, Carl Swidorski, Tom Vartanian, Dvora Yanow, Iris Marion Young, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Joe Soss's invaluable suggestions were critical to the completion of this article.

The debate over same-sex marriage in the United States is fundamentally a disagreement about the nature of democratic citizenship and the meaning of full inclusion of adult citizens in the polity. The facts that marriage has both private and public dimensions, and is described by policy makers as natural and unchanging even as they write laws to define it create confusion among those who publicly contest same-sex marriage. The feminist critique of marriage provides insight on the issue; its critique, along with the questions raised by same-sex marriage, indicates a need to rethink many aspects of the legal regulation of families and intimate life as they affect democratic citizenship.Jyl Josephson is an associate professor of political science and director of women's studies at Rutgers University, Newark (jylj@andromeda.rutgers.edu). She is coeditor, with Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, of the second edition of Gender and American Politics; coeditor, with Cynthia Burack, of Fundamental Differences: Feminists Talk Back to Social Conservatives, and author of Gender, Families, and State: Child Support Policy in the United States. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild for her editorial guidance. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers, and to Cynthia Burack, David Foster, and Stacy VanDeveer, whose questions helped me to clarify my arguments.

School choice has attracted much attention from academic policy analysts. Their data analyses, however, have become entangled in the politics surrounding debates over market-driven reform rather than serving as foundations for utilitarian policy making. High-profile research programs generate an increasing number of empirical studies, which are often valued for how well they fit ideological preferences rather than how useful they may be in offering practical guidance on workable and politically feasible strategies. In this paper I assess what supportable policy message(s) can be extracted from the large research literature on choice and vouchers.Kevin Smith is an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (ksmith1@unl.edu). His most recent book is The Ideology of Education: The Market, the Commonwealth, and America's Schools.

To many, mayors are the most familiar elected officials. Unlike federal representatives, mayors often directly coordinate community services like trash removal, policing, and in some cases oversight of public schools. Despite the seeming transparency of mayoral duties, bottom-line judgments about mayors' performance are political, and, unlike profit margins in business, essentially aesthetic. The public does not evaluate mayoral performance in accordance with “objective” or “rational” criteria; rather, its judgment has more do with values than “facts.” In addition, mayors' performances, including their credibility and ability to implement agendas, has as much (if not more) to do with local politics as with their political orientation. I will address these two points in turn.J. Phillip Thompson is associate professor in the Department of Urban Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (jt71@mit.edu). He is author of a forthcoming book on black mayors (Oxford University Press). He was director of Mayor's Office of Housing Coordination and deputy general manager of the New York Housing Authority in the administration of Mayor David Dinkins (1990–93).

Several months ago, the editors of Perspectives on Politics invited the 12 most recent presidents of the APSA, the current president, and the president-elect to answer the following questions:

What one or two things has the discipline of political science taught us of really lasting political import over roughly the past two decades? What do we now know that we didn't know before, say, 1980 that really matters, whether for scholarship, political action, or policy improvement? Alternatively, what one or two really important questions or issues has political science failed to address or failed to address well? What new knowledge from political science might make a material difference in how we understand the world or how we act in it?

American Political Development (APD) is among the fastest-growing areas in political science. Barely two decades ago, the “field” consisted of a handful of works by a few scholars. Since then political scientists have been joined under the APD banner by researchers from other disciplines in issuing dozens of books and hundreds of articles, organizing a biennial APD conference, and teaching numerous graduate and undergraduate courses. The flagship APD journal, Studies in American Political Development, in print since 1986, is ranked among the top political science journals; also well regarded is the Journal of Policy History, begun three years later. The Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association, likewise founded recently, has the eighth largest membership of the discipline's 35 subgroupings. Newly minted PhDs list APD as a specific research and teaching interest, and political science departments are matching that surging interest with job postings. And overviews of recent scholarship on the American polity separately highlight APD approaches. Perhaps inevitably, however, the rapid emergence of APD as a full-fledged disciplinary concentration has been accompanied by developmental problems.Rogan Kersh is associate professor of political science and public administration at Syracuse University's Maxwell School (rtkersh@maxwell.syr.edu). He is the author of Dreams of a More Perfect Union, as well as articles on APD in numerous journals. For helpful advice and commentary, the author thanks Brian Balogh, Dan Galvin, Jennifer Hochschild, Shelley Hurt, David Mayhew, Suzanne Mettler, Sid Milkis, Jim Morone, three anonymous Perspectives reviewers, and audience members at the APD workshop at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents. By Anne L. Alstott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 272p. $27.50 cloth.

By any account, the United States lags far behind other industrialized nations in providing positive support for child rearing. Politicians utter maudlin paeans to the sanctity of the American family while shredding income-support programs for poor mothers and children, while on the popular front, advocates of “childfree” living bemoan the “culture of parental privilege” (Elinor Burkett, The Baby Boon, 2000). Anne Alstott makes the case for state support of families by examining the well-being of caretakers rather than dependents. She argues that society imposes a “No Exit” obligation on caretakers, and it is the increased vulnerability of caretakers flowing from that obligation that provides the foundation for the analysis.

Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: The Uncanniness of Late Modernity. By Kathleen R. Arnold. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 212p. $40.00.

This study focuses on the problem of homelessness, though it is not an empirical study designed to propose particular policies to tackle the plight of the homeless and the dislocation of immigrants. The issue of homelessness is used to illustrate some deep-seated difficulties in the modern concept of citizenship and the political identity offered by the contemporary nation-state. The core argument of the book is that modern citizenship rests on a two-fold criterion of work and national identity. Citizens are those who contribute productively through their work and thus can claim to be economically independent. Citizenship is also dependent on membership of a national community. The ideal citizen thus has a home, in both a literal and a metaphorical sense: Such citizens are economically independent through their work, and have a home in a more abstract sense of being part of a territorially based nation-state.

The Deconstitutionalization of America: The Forgotten Frailties of Democratic Rule. By Roger M. Barrus, John H. Eastby, Joseph H. Lane, Jr., David E. Marion, and James F. Pontuso. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. 174p. $70.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.

In this short but provocative book, the authors argue that Americans' interest over the last century in expanding democratic responsiveness to the popular will has resulted in a diminution of representative institutions. Only the latter can refine and enlarge public opinion and provide the safeguards that are the essence of constitutionalism. The triumph of democracy is not inevitable. We are in danger of forgetting, the authors suggest, “its intrinsic and characteristic deficiencies, which must be counteracted if it is to function properly” (p. 7). In the first four chapters, Roger Barrus and his coauthors concentrate on American statesmen whose writings and actions played crucial roles in shaping the current context.

The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Argument and Magical Rhetoric in Plato's Laws. By Randall Baldwin Clark. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 192p. $55.00.

A Journey into Platonic Politics: Plato's Laws. By Albert Keith Whitaker. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. 254p. $39.00.

Plato's Laws, his longest and most comprehensive work on politics, is a conversation about the purposes and limits of legislation among three old men: an Athenian Stranger, Megillus, a Spartan, and Kleinias, a Cretan. The three speak while ascending to the cave-shrine of Zeus where Kleinias hopes to receive the blessing of the god for his appointed task of drawing up a law code to govern a new colony. Until recently, the Laws was very little read, and there is still relatively little useful secondary literature on it, especially when compared to the ocean of scholarly treatments available on the far better known Republic.

Deliberative Democracy and the Plural Polity. By Michael Rabinder James. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. 240p. $35.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Michael Rabinder James addresses one of the most pressing problems facing liberal democracies: how to deal fairly and justly with group conflict and identity-based political claims. Although a normative theorist at heart, James understands the problem as both a question of stability and of justice. Prudence can tell us that reducing antipathy and mistrust between groups is a good thing, but in reducing tensions between groups, we also need to be sensitive to the legitimate claims and calls for justice on behalf of groups. His normative approach is refreshingly pragmatic and empirically well informed. But as mentioned, he is at heart a normative theorist, and at the heart of this book is a normative concept of deliberation that focuses on the way dialogue and conversation between groups can promote mutual understanding, reduce tension, enhance stability, and address deep-seated justice claims.

Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society. By Sung Ho Kim. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 224p. $60.00.

The idea that a healthy and vibrant civil society provides an essential basis for democratic polities has become a mainstay of contemporary political theory. The so-called civil society argument has been put forward as transcending a rather blunt dichotomy between liberal individualism and Marxian collectivism. Current interest in this area engages the intersection between what Ernest Gellner referred to as the “modal” self of the modern age, and the neo-Tocquevillian concern with the institutional and character-forming elements of associational life. Fitting Max Weber—typically viewed as either founding father of sociology, nationalist apologist, or aristocratic liberal—within these positions is an engaging project that requires a keener awareness of the overall subtlety of his thinking than normally presented, as Sung Ho Kim recognizes (p. 17). Reconciling Weber's concern for the ethical presuppositions of action with his understanding of the difficulties of maintaining a sense of individuality in an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratic world suggests a very particular vision of civil society. It is a sphere that ties together a concern with “statecraft,” on the one hand, and “soulcraft,” on the other, both in terms of the particular concerns of legitimate political rule, but also in terms of the requirements of personality more generally.

Modern Peoplehood. By John Lie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 394p. $49.95.

This book is a valuable addition to the literature on social identity and modern politics. In the manner of historical sociologists, John Lie synthesizes a vast body of scholarly literature—the book has a 100-page bibliography—in order “to illuminate and sublate the categories of modern peoplehood” (p. ix).

Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns. By Domenico Losurdo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 400p. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This is a sustained defense of G. W. F. Hegel against his critics, in particular the liberal and conservative critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This defense focuses on issues in social and political thought, especially on the role of the political state in securing the rights of citizens, including interventions in the economic sphere to ameliorate the conditions of the disadvantaged and the poor. The controversy about Hegel, whether he was a liberal or a conservative, a radical or a reactionary, is long-standing, and Domenico Losurdo attempts to contribute to the debate by situating it historically and concretely in the social and political conditions of Hegel's time, in Europe and in England. Moreover, he argues that these political categories must be understood in terms of how thinkers identified themselves in relation to others, which often was motivated by specific political commitments in particular political environments, particularly in France, Germany, and England.

The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice During the Holocaust. By Kristin Renwick Monroe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 392p. $29.95.

Kristin Monroe interviews several non-Jewish rescuers during the Holocaust to get at their moral psychology and motives in rescuing Jews imperiled by the Nazis. Her extensive notes and transcripts provide an intimate and powerful glance into how rescuers viewed their own actions and how they discerned their own motives. For most “it just seemed the right thing to do.” Monroe's Rousseauian argument is intriguing both in the presentation of the narratives and in her careful, systematic analysis of the moral psychology behind the rescuers' action. She moves in a very different direction than, say, Frantz Fanon's analysis in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) where he sees the emotions of rage and revenge as central to the resistance of the colonized. These two powerful emotions I found to be the primary dynamic behind rescue in the narratives of Jewish resistors and rescuers (Glass, Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust: Moral Uses of Violence and Will, 2004). The gentile rescuers Monroe interviewed rarely spoke of their anger or rage toward the Germans. Rather, the action of rescue arose through an empathic connection with the victims, for example, Margot: “You have either compassion with these people or you think ‘I couldn't care less when they drop dead’” (p. 20).

The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought. By Eric Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 320p. $65.00.

In the United States today, the top 20% of families receive approximately 50% of the nation's aggregate income; the bottom 40% of families receive less than 14%. Nearly 36 million Americans—12.5% of the population—live in poverty. These facts are well known. But what do they mean for politics? Do inequalities of wealth distort the political process? Do they contribute to—or constitute—injustice? Is the pursuit of wealth itself corrupting? Does greed distort the soul and damage the polity? Eric Nelson explores affirmative answers to these questions in this impressive first book.

Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations. Edited by Beate Rössler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 231p. $55.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

This fine collection of essays on privacy crosses disciplinary and national boundaries, bringing together 13 scholars from law, philosophy, political theory, and film studies to consider “various aspects of the problematic of the private.” As the editor, Beate Rössler, explains this “problematic,” current debates about the value and limits of privacy—such as the reach of information technology or the private lives of public figures—pose afresh more fundamental philosophical questions about privacy: What is the normative grounding for a right to privacy? How does such a right relate to identity and integrity? What is the demarcation in persons' lives between the private and the public? And why should privacy be valued?