We live in a time when fanaticism seems to have permeated politics across the globe. It seems especially crucial, therefore, that we understand fanaticism and its vicissitudes in specific contexts. It also seems imperative that we begin “at home,” as it were, by exploring how fanaticism has operated on American terrain and how it has informed our own politics. Joel Olson initiates this analysis in our lead article by attending to the words and actions of prominent Abolitionists in nineteenth-century America and the zeal with which they sought the demise of slavery. Olson offers a provocative argument regarding the role of fanaticism in democratic politics and, in so doing, prompts us to re-assess our own understandings of zealotry.

Zealotry or fanaticism is increasingly regarded as one of the principal threats to liberal democracy in the twenty-first century. Yet even as it is universally disparaged, zealotry is a severely understudied concept. This article seeks to formulate a critical theory of zealotry and investigate its relationship to democracy through a close reading of the speeches of the radical abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips. The American abolitionists were passionate democrats. Yet many of them, such as Phillips, were also self-defined fanatics who believed in using extremist language and tactics on behalf of the slave. Phillips's speeches suggest a specifically political definition of zealotry as a strategy that seeks to mobilize populations in defense of a particular position by dividing the public sphere into friends (those who support the position) and enemies (those who oppose it) and pressuring the moderates in between. Through his defense of fanaticism and his argument for disunion, Phillips articulates a democratic form of fanaticism that challenges common pejorative associations of zealotry with irrationality, intolerance, fundamentalism, or terrorism.Joel Olson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northern Arizona University (joel.olson@nau.edu) and the author of The Abolition of White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press). Thanks to Randall Amster, Lisa Disch, Mike Kramer, Michael Lienesch, Jill Locke, Ryan Narce, David Schlosberg, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticisms of earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to Baohua Yan, Steve VanDalen, Katrina Taylor, and Adria Mooney for valuable research assistance.

Scholars in international relations have failed to note a paradox about the balance of power: the concept of checks and balances and equilibria underlie classical Liberal constitutional and economic theory. Interest balancing interest lies at the core of the Liberal solution to the problem of anarchy, power, and human nature, whether in politics, economics, or the international sphere. Liberal scholars have adopted instead a rationalist utilitarian or a normative democratic approach. At the same time, Realists in international relations predict a balance, which realist scholars in domestic politics, like Schattschneider, have effectively questioned. This intellectual confusion denies Liberal theory a robust view of international politics, not least because the balancing principle is erroneously rejected as conservative. The confusion also undermines the coherence of Realist theory, which has hitherto tried to accommodate opposing predictions (balance of power and power concentrations) under one paradigm. I offer an explanation of how this conflation of theories arose. Conflating Liberalism with idealism leaves Realism as the only prudent alternative in international politics. The relation between the two theories is not zero-sum: both capture important aspects of international dynamics, and each can ignore the other only at serious cost.Deborah Boucoyannis is Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University (boucoyan@fas.harvard.edu). For comments and suggestions over the time the article has been in gestation, the author thanks Bear Braumoeller, Tim Crawford, Daniel Drezner, Nisha Fazal, David Grewal, Arman Grigorian, Mark Haas, Russ Hamilton, Michael Heaney, Jacques Hymans, Seth Jones, Andreas Kalyvas, Jacob Levy, Jack Levy, John Mearsheimer, Jennifer Mitzen, Kevin Narizny, Jacob Schiff, Jack Snyder, Kenneth Waltz, Alex Wendt, Bill Wohlforth, and the participants at the Political Theory and PISP workshops at the University of Chicago. Special thanks are due to Monica Toft, John Ikenberry, and Jennifer Hochschild for their support of the article; it was mostly written with the generous support of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.

Conflict within and beyond the United States Senate has refocused scholarly and public attention on “advice and consent,” the constitutional provision that governs the Senate's role in confirming presidential appointments. Despite intense and salient partisan and ideological disputes about the rules of the game that govern the Senate confirmation process for judicial appointees, reformers have had little success in limiting the ability of a minority to block contentious nominees. In this paper, we explore the Senate's brush with the so-called “nuclear option” that would eliminate filibusters of judicial nominees, and evaluate competing accounts of why the Senate appears to be so impervious to significant institutional reform. The past and present politics of the nuclear option, we conclude, have broad implications for how we construct theories of institutional change.Sarah A. Binder is Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution (sbinder@brookings.edu). Anthony Madonna is a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University (ajmadonn@wustl.edu). Steven S. Smith is the Kate M. Gregg Professor of Social Sciences, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Weidenbaum Center, Washington University (smith@wustl.edu). The authors thank Stanley Bach, Richard Baker, Greg Koger, Forrest Maltzman, Elizabeth Rybicki, Eric Schickler, and Greg Wawro for helpful comments and advice.

Although the use of models has come to dominate much of the scientific study of politics, the discipline's understanding of the role or function that models play in the scientific enterprise has not kept pace. We argue that models should be assessed for their usefulness for a particular purpose, not solely for the accuracy of their predictions. We provide a typology of the uses to which models may be put, and show how these uses are obscured by the field's emphasis on model testing. Our approach highlights the centrality of models in scientific reasoning, avoids the logical inconsistencies of current practice, and offers political scientists a new way of thinking about the relationship between the natural world and the models with which we are so familiar.Kevin A. Clarke is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Rochester (kevin.clarke@rochester.edu) and David M. Primo is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Rochester (david.primo@ rochester.edu). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and at the 2005 Annual Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and the Canadian Political Science Association; we thank the participants for their comments. We thank Chris Achen, Jim Alt, Jake Bowers, Henry Brady, Bear Braumoeller, John Duggan, Mark Fey, Rob Franzese, John Freeman, Gary Goertz, Miriam Golden, Jim Granato, Gretchen Helmke, John Jackson, Keith Krehbiel, Skip Lupia, Scott de Marchi, Andrew Martin, Becky Morton, Bob Pahre, Kevin Quinn, Curt Signorino, Randy Stone, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion. We also thank Matt Jacobsmeier for research assistance. Support from the National Science Foundation (Clarke: Grant #SES-0213771, Primo: Grant #SES-0314786) is gratefully acknowledged.

When political scientists present empirical results, they are much more likely to use tables than graphs, despite the fact that graphs greatly increases the clarity of presentation and makes it easier for a reader to understand the data being used and to draw clear and correct inferences. Using a sample of leading journals, we document this tendency and suggest reasons why researchers prefer tables. We argue that the extra work required in producing graphs is rewarded by greatly enhanced presentation and communication of empirical results. We illustrate their benefits by turning several published tables into graphs, including tables that present descriptive data and regression results. We show that regression graphs emphasize point estimates and confidence intervals and that they can successfully present the results of regression models. A move away from tables towards graphs would improve the discipline's communicative output and make empirical findings more accessible to every type of audience.Jonathan P. Kastellec (jpk2004@columbia.edu) and Eduardo L. Leoni (eleoni@hmdc.harvard.edu) are Doctoral Candidates in Political Science at Columbia University. The authors' names appear in alphabetical order. They would like to thank Andrew Gelman, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Gary King, David Epstein, Jeff Gill, Piero Stanig, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Noah Kaplan, David Park, and Travis Ridout for generously making their data publicly available. Eduardo Leoni is grateful for support from the Harvard MIT Data Center, where he was a fellow while working on this project.We have created a web site, http://tables2graphs.com, that contains complete replication code for all the graphs that appear in this article, as well as additional graphs that we did not present due to space limitations.

In a recent issue of Perspectives on Politics, Larry Bartels examines the high levels of support for tax cuts signed into law by President Bush in 2001. In so doing, he characterizes the opinions of “ordinary people” as lacking “a moral basis” and as being based on “simple-minded and sometimes misguided considerations of self interest.” He concludes that “the strong plurality support for Bush's tax cut … is entirely attributable to simple ignorance.”

Our analysis of the same data reveals different results. We show that for a large and politically relevant class of respondents, conservatives and Republicans, rising information levels increase support for the tax cuts. In fact, Republican respondents rated “most informed” supported the tax cuts at extraordinarily high levels (over 96 percent). For these citizens, Bartels' claim that “better-informed respondents were much more likely to express negative views about the 2001 tax cut” is untrue. Bartels' results depend on the strong assumption that if more information about the tax cut makes liberals less likely to support it, then conservatives must follow suit. Our analysis allows groups to process information in different ways and can better help political entrepreneurs better reconcile critical social needs with citizens' desires.Arthur Lupia is the Hal R. Varian Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (lupia@umich.edu). Adam Seth Levine is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan (adamseth@umich.edu). Jesse O. Menning received a Master's Degree in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2005. He is currently an information technology consultant (Jesse.Menning@gmail.com). Gisela Sin is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois (gsin@uiuc.edu). We thank Scott Althaus, John Bullock, Nancy E. Burns, James N. Druckman, Elisabeth R. Gerber, Orit Kedar, Kenneth W. Kollman, Arthur Lupia Sr., Jan Lupia, Diana C. Mutz, Samuel L. Popkin, Markus Prior, Paul M. Sniderman, and Kaare Ström for advice. We thank Larry Bartels for his generosity and assistance in our replication efforts. We thank David Howell and the NES Staff for assistance with the NES data set. This article uses data from the 2002 American National Election Studies, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (grant B7532), the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, the Russell Sage Foundation (grant 83-02-05), and the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President of Research, and Department of Political Science for funding the 2002 National Election Studies; Nancy E. Burns and Donald R. Kinder, Principal Investigators.

Lupia, Levine, Menning, and Sin show that well-informed Republicans and conservatives were highly supportive of the 2001 Bush tax cut. They mistakenly infer that this fact invalidates my claim in “Homer Gets a Tax Cut” that “the strong plurality support” for the tax cut was “entirely attributable to simple ignorance.” Their analysis, like mine, implies that a fully-informed public would have been lukewarm, at best, toward the tax cut. They have little to say about why this is the case, beyond insisting that “citizens have reasons for the opinions they have.” I suggest that citizens' “reasons” are sometimes misleading, misinformed, or substantively irrational, and that social science should not be limited to “attempts to better fit our analyses into their rationales.”Larry M. Bartels is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (bartels@princeton.edu).

The political science discipline is so very broad and diverse. The Program of the APSA meetings is one sign of this. The range of books reviewed in any given issue of Perspectives is another. In general we run reviews as we receive them. There is no long-range thematic plan beyond the review essays. And yet it is striking how certain patterns emerge in each issue. Perhaps the patterns I observe when I write these editorial introductions are subconsciously imposed in the editorial process. Perhaps they are simply artifacts of the way I retrospectively read the reviews. Obviously each reader can discern their own patterns, and we hope that they will. My own discernments are intended only as a guide and a prompt. They are motivated by the fact that, for perhaps good reasons including efficiency, most of us tend to read only the reviews in “our” subfields. One of my goals is to draw connections that can move people to look beyond the familiar (more on this below).

Why, more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after repeated elections at both the regional and national levels, has post-Soviet Russia slid back into authoritarianism? Given the increasingly tense relations between the Kremlin and the West, this is a question of growing geopolitical importance. Analyzing it also turns out to be immensely fruitful for sharpening our theoretical understanding of the sources of democracy and autocracy more generally. While the decade and a half since the Soviet collapse has been a time of massive upheaval and hardship for the hundreds of millions of people living in the region, it has also been something of a golden era for the study of comparative politics—as anyone who reads the works reviewed here will readily attest.Stephen E. Hanson is Boeing International Professor at the University of Washington and the Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies. He is the author of Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions, winner of the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He is also a co-editor of Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule, a co-author of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, and the author of numerous journal articles examining post-communist politics in comparative perspective.

British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory, 1500–1800. Edited by David Armitage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 338p. $90.00.

Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Edited by Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton-Bleakley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 308p. $90.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Scholars organizing conferences—and subsequently seeking to publish the ensuing conference volume—are notoriously presented with a task akin to the proverbial herding of cats: getting all their contributors to maintain some kind of focus on the conference theme(s). These two excellent collections avoid this problem in distinct ways. One way to ensure a unified focus is to build the conference around a single book; better yet, put the author's colleagues and former students on the roster and let the author himself have the last word. This amounts to an enlarged and friendly “author meets critics” panel or a narrowly drawn festschrift. While this certainly provides for a tightly focused and unified collection, it places a lot of weight on a single reed. But when the book is the two-volume Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), the author Quentin Skinner, and the list of contributors this distinguished, the results are interesting and insightful as well as tightly focused.

The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. By Linda Bosniak. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 248p. $27.95.

This book makes a distinctive contribution to an important topic in legal and political theory: what Linda Bosniak calls the “citizenship of aliens.” What rights, she asks, do and should aliens who reside within the territory of liberal democracies like the United States enjoy, even though they are not full political citizens of that territory?

Terms of Inquiry: On the Theory and Practice of Political Science. By James W. Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 296p. $45.00 cloth, 19.95 paper.

Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. By William H. Sewell, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 376p. $70.00 cloth, $29.00 paper.

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others. Edited by George Steinmetz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 632p. $94.95 cloth, $25.95 paper.

Heated controversies about the theory and practice of social inquiry seem to come in waves. In political science, one such wave arrived with the advent and aftermath of the so-called behavioral revolution. Roughly a quarter century later, in October 2000, the self-named Perestroika rebellion inspired another wave of intense interest in the proper conduct of political inquiry. Unlike the earlier wave, the Perestroika movement failed initially to generate much compelling discussion of methodological issues. To be sure, it elicited numerous expressions of discontent with the hegemonic influence of rational choice theory and quantitative methods, as well as vocal demands for greater methodological pluralism, problem-driven research, and political “relevance.” In addition, the proponents of Perestroika raised serious questions about the institutional structures and intellectual orthodoxies that have organized academic political inquiry in the United States over the past few decades. Yet these expressions of discontent and demands for reform were rarely accompanied by creative thought about the nature of political inquiry or compelling visions of alternatives to the present hegemony. Consequently, those scholars who hoped that the Perestroika revolt might rejuvenate the increasingly moribund literature on methodologies of political inquiry were sorely disappointed. Instead of providing powerfully articulated defenses of or alternatives to the methodological axioms of our age, the Perestroika controversy all too often issued in amorphous proposals and empty platitudes.

Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge. Edited by Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 270p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

African American Environmental Thought: Foundations. By Kimberly K. Smith. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. 264p. $29.95.

Irrespective of what some students of political theory might claim, transformations within the discipline—especially in terms of concept formation and substantive foci—are oftentimes closely related to developments within real-world political discourses and practices. One notable example, of course, is the way in which the feminist movement in the 1960s brought about not only important transformations in our understanding of the history of political thought (e.g., in terms of the troubling position of many canonical theorists on the “private” status of women), but also new ways to reconceptualize politics today. With the “ecological challenge” confronting the world today, it is no wonder that there is now a new subfield within the discipline of political theory (in the United States, at least, it goes under the name of “environmental political theory”), one that is involved in a major rethinking of the history of political thought, not to mention the deconstruction and reconstruction of important political traditions and concepts to meet these challenges.

Securing Constitutional Democracy: The Case of Autonomy. By James E. Fleming. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. 272p. $45.00.

James Fleming's excellent book offers a compelling interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as protecting not only the political liberties required for democratic citizenship but also the substantive liberties of the person, commonly referred to as privacy or autonomy rights. Fleming advances his theory both through engagement with the views of other legal scholars and through detailed analysis of the opinions filed in various U.S. Supreme Court cases, most notably several recent ones concerning the rights of homosexuals, with considerable attention also paid to cases concerning abortion or discrimination on grounds of race or sex. Fans of Justice Antonin Scalia will find much in this book with which to disagree.

Bounded Divinities: Sacred Discourses in Pluralist Democracies. By Fred M. Frohock. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 272p. $69.95.

While authors such as Michael Perry challenge liberal thinkers such as Bruce Ackerman and John Rawls to move beyond their neutral rendering of political discourse in order to foster an ecumenical politics between secular and spiritual perspectives, Fred Frohock contends that the public discourse of liberal theory cannot grasp the supernatural basis of sacred discourses. Instead, Frohock contends that “thin” realism (p. 159), found in international relations theory, can better negotiate the tensions between secular and religious discourses in pluralist democracies: “[R]elationships between secular and the sacred, religion and politics, church and state, are settled by the great political languages of stability, efficiency, equity, and power (among other collective level terms), not the metaphors of walls and spheres” (p. 197).

Gandhi's Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony. By Anthony J. Parel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 240p. $75.00.

Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home. By Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 272p. $45.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.

It is perhaps fitting that a political leader who chose to title his autobiography “The Story of My Experiments with Truth,” should himself be regarded today as an open text, one worthy of continuous reinterpretation as times change. Mohandas Gandhi was an unusual political leader in too many ways: in his emphasis on nonviolence and truth-force (Satyagraha) as instruments of political change during the decades dominated by world wars, genocide, and imperialism; in a relentless refusal to separate ethics from politics but possessed of an uncanny sense for the political jugular of his much stronger opponents; in the crafty use of emerging media to outflank the colonial regime alongside his ready sense of humor and quick repartee; in his ascetic lifestyle and sartorial tastes; and in the eclectic and truly universal range of philosophical and intellectual sources of his thought. He was an early critic of modern industrial civilization during the era of its hegemonic sway, and saw little point in independence if all it meant was Indians gaining sovereignty to do unto themselves what alien rule had been doing to them in the name of modernization.

J. S. Mill's Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment. Edited by Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 400p. $85.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

John Stuart Mill is as famous for his celebrated contradictions as for the originality of his thinking. What else should we expect from a disciple of the likes of Bentham and Coleridge, Saint-Simon and Tocqueville, Wilhelm Von Humboldt and Auguste Comte? Much of the two centuries since Mill's birth has been spent trying to figure out how all of these diverse influences can be made to fit together into one tidy package, and this may explain why there are almost as many renditions of J. S. Mill as there are Mill interpreters. Simultaneously heralded as the poster child of libertarianism and of social control, defender of women's rights and whipping boy of contemporary feminists, aristocratic critic of democratic culture and defender of Athenian-style participatory democracy, a liberal reformer who condoned empire—the list of Mill's paradoxes goes on and on. What makes this volume such a breath of fresh air is the way these essays build upon, without duplicating, traditional interpretations. Original, illuminating, and suggestive of altogether new directions in Mill scholarship, this collection should carry us well into the third full century of engagement with his life and political thought.

Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force. By James Boyd White. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 256p. $29.95.

James Boyd White's recent work is as impressive as his earlier work in terms of the clarity of argument, the originality of thought, and the commitment to social analysis that incorporates language analysis, legal theory, and ethics. While drawing from current theories of language, White does not quite belong in the postmodern tradition because he searches for authentic representations of thoughts and emotions. This brings him closer to phenomenology. His title phrase, “living speech,” taken from Simone Weil, sets forth his primary argument. He makes a distinction between living speech, which represents genuine, creative thought, and “dead speech,” which reiterates slogans, clichés, and speech patterns from a culture's ideologies, including advertising and propaganda. Dead speech endeavors to get the listener to act in a prescribed way, while living speech tries to persuade the listener to see the virtues of an argument. White's goal is to encourage living speech in order to move societies closer to love and justice. Like the postmoderns, he believes that speech is the foundational human activity because it conveys the imagination, but unlike postmoderns, he wants to talk about the ways in which speech articulates aspects of a human mind by making meaning.

The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy. By Bruce Ackerman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 266p. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

As the title of this book indicates, Bruce Ackerman does not believe that the Founding Fathers produced a finished, or flawless, frame of government in 1787. In particular, their method for selecting the president of the United States was ill-conceived and left critical questions of procedure unanswered and open to contestation. These failures aggravated the controversy surrounding the presidential election of 1800, when neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson won a majority in the Electoral College and Federalists in the outgoing House of Representatives nearly threw the election to Aaron Burr. As the House deliberated, the governors of Massachusetts and Virginia readied their militias to prevent each other's favorite son from stealing the election. Ackerman suggests that a civil war was avoided only by the statesmanship of Adams and Jefferson and the unraveling of a plot to install John Marshall as acting president.