Although International Organizations (IOs) have the ability to promote economic and political development throughout the world, political imperatives ensure that they will fail to meet their potential. This essay is a response to the editor's kind request to speculate as to the role of IOs over the next decade. Although my arguments apply broadly, here I consider development, and so I focus on organizations such as the World Bank and IMF. Over the coming decades these organizations will fail in their attempts to alleviate poverty. On a more positive note, political science is rapidly advancing our understanding of the pathologies of IOs. Unfortunately, the failure of IOs to alleviate poverty is, I believe, a politically stable circumstance: intellectual advances will not translate into better-performing IOs. I focus on a specific set of theoretical arguments as to why IOs fail to promote development, concluding that we should anticipate more of the same rather than the radical reforms that are necessary if IOs are to achieve their stated goals.Alastair Smith is professor of politics at New York University (alastair.smith@nyu.edu).

Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider institutional innovations that could promote political equality. Finally, we describe the diverse ways that political scientists produce an impact on the world by sharing and applying their knowledge of the consequences of electoral rules and global trends in reform.

The counter-majoritarian difficulty has for many years framed constitutional scholarship for both law professors and political scientists studying judicial review. Unfortunately, shared attention has not led to shared insights, as these scholars have remained isolated in their respective academies. Recently scholars have begun targeting this disciplinary barrier, and questioning whether developing norms of judicial supremacy have importantly raised the stakes of determining the legitimacy of courts setting policy in a democracy. This article proposes a new approach to the study of judicial review aimed at understanding systemic change rather than institutional legitimacy, using recent concerns over the drift from judicial review to judicial supremacy as a point of departure for study. I recommend, to both normative and positive scholars, a new and integrated focus on the relationship between judicial policymaking and wider transformations of the constitutional order that have previously been obscured by orienting constitutional scholarship around the counter-majoritarian difficulty.Allison M. Martens is: Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Louisville (allison.martens@louisville.edu). She thanks Jeffrey Tulis, James Johnson and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions

How do economic shocks and financial resilience shape civic engagement, especially for the economically insecure? I turn to the early months of the coronavirus pandemic for insights. In April 2020, with more than 23 million adults unemployed, the US government asked residents to participate in the constitutionally mandated decennial census. I test how variations in income shocks from the shutdown and sources of financial resilience predict disparities in census completion, a civic act designed to minimize participation barriers. First, I use nationally representative survey data to demonstrate that policies that protect the economically vulnerable from the full impacts of economic shocks also predict higher census completion rates. Then, I use Google Trends data to show that high unemployment search volume interacted with low resilience to predict depressed census completion. Findings shed light on how economic crises can widen participation gaps—with representation and resource consequences—and how policies that lessen acute economic shocks may reduce participation disparities.

Immediately after coming to power, the Clinton administration declared the consolidation of market and democratic institutions in Russia to be a vital American interest. The administration's central tactic for promoting this outcome was to help Boris Yeltsin remain in power. In a major assault on Clinton's historical legacy, much of the scholarly community maintains that U.S. policy was fundamentally flawed, both morally and strategically. In the view of these analysts, post-Soviet Russia's founding president was an autocratic leader who derailed the country's progress toward democracy. However, this body of research focuses exclusively on the Russian Federation and fails to utilize comparative referents. In contrast, we analyze the experiences of the full population of post-communist states of Eastern Europe and Eurasia from 1991 to the present. Whether examined in cross-national or longitudinal perspective, we find that Russian democracy under Yeltsin was, relatively speaking, a success. We conclude that the Clinton administration's policy of support for Yeltsin both served various American foreign policy interests and strengthened the prospects for democratic consolidation in Russia, thereby fulfilling the dictates of both real- and idealpolitik. In addition, the relative success of Russia's democratization in the 1990s, the reversal of that pattern in this decade, and the magnitude of the transformation of the polity under Putin all demonstrate the pivotal role played by presidential leadership in Russia's transition.

Why did congressional Democrats upend the financial regulatory regime they had maintained since the New Deal? I argue that the congressional reforms of the mid-1970s paved the way for the Democratic Party’s turn against financial regulation. Prior to congressional reform, Democrats in Congress were especially parochial, and Southern populists dominated the House and Senate banking committees. These parochial and populist orientations complemented the radically decentralized banking system by New Deal financial regulations. The elimination of the seniority rule and other reforms reduced parochialism and strengthened Democratic leadership, enabling the party to enact deregulatory reforms that provided (short-term, at least) benefits to the diffuse interests of American savers and consumers at the expense of entrenched local industry groups. In the long run, however, these deregulatory reforms significantly accelerated the concentration of economic power held by the nation’s largest firms and wealthiest individuals.

Among social scientists, constructivism has long reigned supreme in the study of ethnicity, nationality, and nationalism. Accordingly, scholars have highlighted the role of cultural framing and political choice in the definition of ethnic categories, their fluidity, and their flexible boundaries. Conversely, they have deemphasized the historical roots of ethnicity and depicted nations as the contested products of nationalist movements and political leaders and as (merely) “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991). Although constructivism encompasses a broad gamut of theories that differ in the malleability ascribed to ethnicity (Chandra 2012, 19–22, 139–49), recent authors have emphasized its susceptibility to change by highlighting manipulation by political-electoral entrepreneurs (Wilkinson 2012) and focusing on “identity in formation” (Laitin 1998), “ethnicity without groups” (Brubaker 2004), and “imagined noncommunities” characterized by “national indifference” (Zahra 2010).

Political scientists working on clientelism have become interested in the relationships between brokers and the politicians and parties for whom they work. In most of this research, brokers are seen as inherently disloyal and normally act against the interests of their patrons, unless monitoring efforts are enacted. In contrast, we argue that territorial brokers have strong incentives to construct long-term, dependent relationships with their patrons, which diminishes the likelihood of cheating, while their patrons also wish to maintain durable ties with brokers to hold an assured voter base. We argue that politicians prefer brokers who have a good reputation for providing their voters with goods and assuring their votes. Still, sometimes brokers go rogue and cheat on their bosses. This study, which is based on more than fifty in-depth interviews with both local politicians and brokers in Mexico City, examines the conditions under which brokers remain loyal and those that promote cheating. We identify two factors that explain this variation—electoral competitiveness and the level of resource autonomy between brokers and politicians. Non-autonomous brokers working under conditions of low competition tend to have high probabilities of remaining loyal, while independent brokers working under high competitiveness will often resort to cheating.

Over the past decade, interdisciplinary programs such as gender studies, global studies, and environmental studies have proliferated quickly across the American academy. One study showed that the number of environmental studies programs at four-year colleges and universities doubled between 1990 and 1995, and more are still being added. Political science departments frequently find themselves at the center of these new programs, and courses in environmental politics are often in high demand among students. The complexity and persistence of environmental problems is finally forcing the academy to recognize the importance of interdisciplinary research and teaching. Consider the case of global warming. It is impossible to discuss this issue intelligently from the perspective of any single discipline. Political scientists might illuminate certain facets of the debate, such as how national and international political structures create few incentives for policymakers to aggressively address the issue. But however important such insights might be, they are far too narrow to even begin to encompass the complexity of the climate change issue, which requires literacy in the discourses of other disciplines, including environmental economics, atmospheric research, and environmental ethics. After decades of suspicion in the academy about the intellectual rigor of interdisciplinary approaches, the persistence of complex environmental problems, and simply the rapidly growing cohort of scholars engaged in environmental research and teaching, is driving increasing acceptance of such approaches.Philip Brick received the APSA's Pi Sigma Alpha Award for Outstanding Teaching in Political Science in 2000, and in 2004 he was named Outstanding Environmental Educator by the Environmental Education Association of Washington. His environmental field program is described at www.whitman.edu/semester_west, and he can be contacted at brick@whitman.edu. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild at Perspectives on Politics and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. He also thanks the research assistants at Perspectives on Politics and Whitman College student Kalin Schmoldt for gathering syllabi for this review.

The American Political Science Association is a global organization, and currently counts among its almost 15,000 members nearly 3000 individuals who are citizens of nation-states other than the US. And only half of its 1600 institutional subscribers are North American. At the same time, the contemporary political science discipline that it represents, however cosmopolitan, is deeply rooted in the distinctive historical experiences of the United States. As Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner observed in their 2002 Centennial edition of Political Science: State of the Discipline, the professional association responsible for publishing the words you are now reading was born in the United States during the Progressive Era, as an effort to more scientifically and thus more usefully understand the evolving American state and its national citizenship: “American political science has specialized in developing particular kinds of social knowledge. The modifier American has to be taken seriously” (3–4).

One does not have to look far to see that much of what has been written over the past 10 years reveals a decade filled with US foreign policy missteps, miscues, and failures. Popular books such as Thomas Ricks's Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), Jane Mayer's The Dark Side (2008), George Packer's Assassins' Gate (2005), and Bob Woodward's series on “Bush's wars” captured our attention and gave us a first cut on the history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the “global war on terror.” These riveting accounts provided rich, descriptive insights and exposed the wide range of ideological and bureaucratic feuding, the breakdown—and often deliberate circumventing—of institutional procedures and organizational practices, and the ad hoc and often chaotic process of policy selection. Embedded throughout these narratives is a broader theme that depicts the past decade as an extraordinary period of American foreign policy excess and a dramatic departure from the past.

The three books under review reflect a radically altered agenda in social science, affected by the attacks of September 11, 2001, in which international terrorism in general and suicide missions in particular are “hot” topics. But because (sadly) new cases are recorded daily, the analyses in these books must be considered exploratory.Eli Berman is professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego. David D. Laitin is James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.