“Social capital” is said to be strongly associated with better substantive outcomes as well as with civic and economic dimensions of equality in the United States. Robert Putnam argues in Bowling Alone that “the American states with the highest levels of social capital are precisely the states most characterized by economic and civic equality.” He adds: “[B]oth across space [i.e., states] and across time, equality and fraternity [social capital] are strongly positively correlated …. [T]he empirical evidence on recent trends is unambiguous …. Community and equality are mutually reinforcing, not mutually incompatible.”Putnam 2000, 358–63 (emphasis in original) and chapter 22 more generally; also see Rice and Sumberg 1997.He specializes in U.S. democracy and politics, especially as viewed through the analytical lenses of Latino and ethnic/minority politics, state/urban politics, and federalism. His book Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity in American Politics received the American Political Science Association's 1999 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award.

Why do we have so many ethnic partisans in the world ready to die as suicide bombers? Does a rational calculus lie beneath the nationalist pride and passions? Can it be discovered if only we apply our understanding of rationality more creatively? This article seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the nationalism of resistance. It argues that a focus on dignity, self-respect, and recognition, rather than a straightforward notion of self-interest, is a better prism for understanding ethnic and nationalist behavior, although self-interest is not entirely absent as a motivation in ethnic conflict. In the process of developing this argument, a distinction once made by Max Weber—between instrumental rationality and value rationality—is recovered and refined further. No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers …. They are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them …. The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism is much concerned with death and immortality. If the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings ….—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983He received many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. He would especially like to acknowledge the criticisms and suggestions of Gabriel Almond, Benedict Anderson, Robert Bates, Morris Fiorina, Ira Katznelson, Pratap Mehta, Vibha Pingle, Ronald Rogowski, James Scott, Kenneth Shepsle, Jack Snyder, Sidney Verba, the late Myron Weiner, Elisabeth Wood, Crawford Young, and three anonymous reviewers of this journal. Needless to add, not all of them agreed, so the standard disclaimers apply.

The study of local politics has been relegated to the periphery of political science and many explanations have been offered for the marginalization of the subfield. I offer three related arguments for why scholars should revisit the study of sub-state politics. First, the local level is the source of numerous political outcomes that matter because they represent a large proportion of political events in the United States. Secondly, there are methodological advantages to studying local politics. Finally, analyzing politics at the sub-state level can generate thoroughly different kinds of questions than a purely national-level focus and can offer different answers to questions that apply more generally. Research on local politics can and should contribute to broader debates in political science and ensure that we understand both how and why cities are unique.

A new conventional wisdom characterizes the comparative study of electoral politics. Social cleavages, once a stabilizing factor of electoral behavior in Western Europe, are on the wane. Voting decisions have become individualized and old social cleavages have been superseded by new value-related cleavages. This article challenges that view as an exaggeration.Martin Elff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Mannheim, Germany (elff@sowi.uni-mannheim.de). The author wishes to thank William Maloney, Anthony Mughan, Betty Haire Weyerer, Thomas Gschwend, Jan van Deth, Sigrid Roßteutscher, Simone Abendschön, Daniel Stegmüller, and especially Jennifer Hochschildt and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

Few, if any, political scientists currently study climate change adaptation or are even aware that there is a large and growing interdisciplinary field of study devoted not just to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions but to reducing our vulnerability to the now-inevitable impacts of climate change. The lack of political science expertise and research represents an obstacle for adapting to climate change, because adaptation is fundamentally political. Technical advances in adaptations for infrastructure, agriculture, public health, coastal protection, conservation, and other fields all depend on political variables for their implementation and effectiveness. For example, adaptation raises questions about political economy (adaptation costs money), political theory (adaptation involves questions of social justice), comparative politics (some countries more aggressively pursue adaptation), urban politics (some cities more aggressively pursue adaptation), regime type (democracies and authoritarian regimes may differently pursue adaptation), federalism (different levels of government may be involved), and several other fields of study including political conflict, international development, bureaucracy, migration, media, political parties, elections, civil society, and public opinion. I review the field of climate change adaptation and then explore the tremendous contributions that political scientists could make to adaptation research.

While there is a vast and highly contentious literature devoted to understanding the economic, social, and political consequences of the welfare state, little attention has been paid to the fundamental question of whether social security programs actually improve the overall quality of human life. We attempt such an appraisal, using the extent to which individuals find their lives to be satisfying as an evaluative metric. Considering national rates of satisfaction in the industrial democracies from the 1970s to the present, we find that citizens find life more rewarding as the generosity of the welfare state increases, net of economic or cultural conditions. The implications for social policy are discussed.

Scholars and policymakers have highlighted institutions that enable community participation as a potential buffer against existing political inequalities. Yet these venues may bias policy discussions in favor of an unrepresentative group of individuals. To explore who participates, we compile a novel data set by coding thousands of instances of citizens speaking at planning and zoning board meetings concerning housing development. We match individuals to a voter file to investigate local political participation in housing and development policy. We find that individuals who are older, male, longtime residents, voters in local elections, and homeowners are significantly more likely to participate in these meetings. These individuals overwhelmingly (and to a much greater degree than the general public) oppose new housing construction. These participatory inequalities have important policy implications and may be contributing to rising housing costs.

The international intellectual property system provides an important illustration of how regime complexity shapes domestic and international strategies of states and non-state actors. This article describes and graphically illustrates the multifaceted nature of the international intellectual property system. It then analyzes the consequences of regime complexity for international and domestic politics, emphasizing the strategy of regime shifting and its consequences for chessboard politics and the domestic implementation of international rules.

Violence against women in politics is increasingly recognized around the world as a significant barrier to women’s political participation, following a troubling rise in reports of assault, intimidation, and abuse directed at female politicians. Yet conceptual ambiguities remain as to the exact contours of this phenomenon. In this article, we seek to strengthen its theoretical, empirical, and methodological foundations. We propose that the presence of bias against women in political roles—originating in structural violence, employing cultural violence, and resulting in symbolic violence—distinguishes this phenomenon from other forms of political violence. We identify five types of violence against women in politics—physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic—and three methodological challenges related to underreporting, comparing men’s and women’s experiences, and intersectionality. Inspired by the literature on hate crimes, we develop an empirical approach for identifying cases of violence against women in politics, offering six criteria to ascertain whether an attack was potentially motivated by gender bias. We apply this framework to analyze three cases: the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, and the murder of Jo Cox. We conclude with the negative implications of violence against women in politics and point to emerging solutions around the globe.

Which policymakers are most likely to enact legislation drafted by organized business interests? Departing from the business power scholarship that emphasizes structural, electoral, or financial mechanisms for corporate influence, I argue that lawmakers are likely to rely on businesses' proposals when they lack the time and resources to develop legislation on their own, especially when they also hold an ideological affinity for business. Using two new datasets of “model bills” developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a policy group that promotes pro-business legislation across the states, I find strong support for this theory. These results indicate that ALEC provides private policy capacity to state legislators who would otherwise lack such support, and relatedly, that low state policy capacity may favor certain organized interests over others—namely the business interests affiliated with ALEC. My findings have implications for the study of business influence in policymaking, as well as for state politics.

In this article we propose that evolutionary biology can supply political science with a theory of the ultimate causes of human preferences and behaviors that it otherwise lacks. For the most part, political scientists are either unfamiliar with the social side of evolutionary theory or misidentify its key features. Far from being genetically deterministic or leading exclusively to predictions that all human behavior will be selfish, modern evolutionary theories stress that adaptive behavior is frequently characterized by a guarded sort of cooperation. We describe modern biological theory, offer our own version of it, discuss new and potentially useful interpretations of political attitudes and public policies, and present scientific evidence, drawn from research on autistic individuals and monozygotic and dizygotic twins, of the startlingly important role genetics plays in shaping politically relevant attitudes and behaviors.The authors are grateful to Chris Larimer, Levente Littvay, David Rapkin, Kevin Smith, Jeff Spinner-Halev, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Gridlock in the multilateral climate negotiations has created growing scholarly and practical interest in the use of minilateral forums. A large variety of climate club proposals have been developed in recent years, which promise more effective bargaining among the main climate powers, better incentives to encourage mitigation efforts and discourage free-riding, and new ways to align international power asymmetries with the interests of the global climate regime. I investigate the three dominant rationales that underpin minilateralist proposals. I offer a critical review of their potential as well as their limitations in promoting global climate action. I argue that minilateralism is unlikely to overcome the structural barriers to a comprehensive and ambitious international climate agreement. However, climate clubs can enhance political dialogue in the context of multilateral negotiations and can provide a more conducive environment for great power bargaining. They can create club benefits that strengthen mitigation strategies and help reduce the dangers of free-riding for so-called coalitions of the willing. And they can help re-legitimate the global climate regime against the background of profound power shifts that have slowed down progress in the multilateral negotiations.

We suggest that the 2003 war in Iraq received high levels of public support because the Bush administration successfully framed the conflict as an extension of the war on terror, which was a response to the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our analysis of Bush's speeches reveals that the administration consistently connected Iraq with 9/11. New York Times coverage of the president's speeches featured almost no debate over the framing of the Iraq conflict as part of the war on terror. This assertion had tremendous influence on public attitudes, as indicated by polling data from several sources.Amy Gershkoff (agershko@princeton.edu) and Shana Kushner (skushner@princeton.edu) are graduate students in the Department of Politics, Princeton University. The authors thank Larry Bartels, Gary Jacobson, Douglas Foyle, seminar participants at Princeton University, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Authors' names listed in alphabetical order.

Over recent decades, Islamism—the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life—has become a powerful force throughout much of the Muslim world. Through a discussion of the Egyptian case, this essay shows how the rise of Islamism can be illuminated by findings of the literatures on revolution and civil society, and vice versa. As many leading theories on revolutions would predict, the necessary precondition for Islamism's rise has been the declining efficacy and legitimacy of the state. Yet what has occurred in Egypt (and other parts of the Arab world) is not a successful revolution but a peculiar stalemate in which the existing regime retains political power while ceding substantial control over the societal and cultural spheres to the revolutionary challenger—an outcome that the literature does not envision. This stalemate, in turn, is largely a consequence of Islamists' ability to expand their presence in civil society. This expansion in Egypt and other Arab countries over recent decades is thus best understood as a sign not of benign liberalization, but rather of profound political failure, and as an incubator for illiberal radicalism.

International courts, like domestic courts, protect liberal limits on majoritarianism. This sometimes puts these courts in a position to protect the property rights of the “corrupt elites” that are targeted by populists or the civil liberties of those who are targeted in domestic populist identity politics. Moreover, populism offers an ideology to attack the authority of a court rather than just its individual rulings. An empirical examination illustrates the plausibility of this argument. A large number of backlashes against international courts arise from judgments that reinforce local populist mobilization narratives. Populist backlashes against international courts are not just about sovereignty but often follow efforts to curb domestic courts, usually for similar reasons. Yet populist backlashes do not always succeed, either because populist leaders do not follow up on their exit threats or because populism is too thin an ideology for creating successful multilateral reform coalitions.

Much research in the study of U.S. politics has argued that female candidates for elected office are treated differently—and often worse—than male candidates in the press and by the public. Although these patterns do not doom women to electoral failure, they raise a formidable series of obstacles that often complicate women’s path to elective office, slowing the move toward gender parity in representation. Broad changes to the American political landscape, as well as methodological limitations of previous work, however, suggest the need for an updated assessment. We rely on a detailed content analysis of local newspaper coverage from nearly 350 U.S. House districts and nationally representative survey data from the 2010 midterms to provide a comprehensive evaluation of whether women experience a more hostile campaign environment than do men. We find that candidate sex does not affect journalists’ coverage of, or voters’ attitudes toward, the women and men running for office in their districts. Rather, reporters’ portrayals and citizens’ assessments of candidates stem primarily from partisanship, ideology, and incumbency, not the sex of the candidate. Although our results differ from much of the existing literature, we regard them as a valuable point of departure for answering pressing questions about gender and representation in contemporary politics, both in an American and comparative context.

What are the political consequences of militarizing law enforcement? Across the world, law enforcement has become increasingly militarized over the last three decades, with civilian police operating more like armed forces and soldiers replacing civilian police in law enforcement tasks. Scholarly, policy, and journalistic attention has mostly focused on the first type, but has neglected the study of three main areas toward which we seek to contribute: 1) the constabularization of the military—i.e., when the armed forces take on the responsibilities of civilian law enforcement agencies, 2) the extent to which this process has taken place outside of the United States, and 3) its political consequences. Toward this end, we unpack the concept of militarized law enforcement, develop theoretical expectations about its political consequences, take stock of militarization in Latin America, and evaluate whether expectations have played out in the region. We show that the distinction between civilian and military law enforcement typical of democratic regimes has been severely blurred in the region. Further, we argue that the constabularization of the military has had important consequences for the quality of democracy in the region by undermining citizen security, human rights, police reform, and the legal order.

This article examines the effect of overlapping institutions in trade policy, where the World Trade Organization, preferential trade agreements, and other economic negotiation venues give states many options for negotiating rules and settling disputes. This article argues that overlapping institutions influence trade politics at three stages: selection of venue, negotiation of liberalization commitments, and enforcement of compliance. First, lobby groups and governments on both sides of a trade negotiation try to choose the set of rules that will favor their preferred outcome. WTO rules that restrict use of coercive tactics outside of the WTO generate a selection process that filters the most difficult trade issues into WTO trade rounds or dispute adjudication while easier issues are settled in bilateral and regional fora. This selection dynamic creates a challenge at the negotiation stage by disaggregating interest group pressure for liberalization commitments. The narrowing of interest group lobbying for the multilateral process may impede negotiation of liberalization agreements that could only gain political support through a broad coalition of exporter mobilization. At the enforcement stage international regime complexity creates the potential for contradictory legal rulings that undermine compliance, but also adds greater penalties for noncompliance if reputation effects operate across agreements.

Since 2013, protests opposing police violence against Black people have occurred across a number of American cities under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.” We develop a new dataset of Black Lives Matter protests that took place in 2014–2015 and explore the contexts in which they emerged. We find that Black Lives Matter protests are more likely to occur in localities where more Black people have previously been killed by police. We discuss the implications of our findings in light of the literature on the development of social movements and recent scholarship on the carceral state’s impact on political engagement.

Authoritarian ruling parties are expected to be exceptionally resistant to democratization. Yet some of the strongest authoritarian parties in the world have not resisted democratization, but have embraced it. This is because their raison d'etre is to continue ruling, not necessarily to remain authoritarian. Democratization requires that ruling parties hold free and fair elections, but not that they lose them. Authoritarian ruling parties can thus be incentivized to concede democratization from a position of exceptional strength as well as extreme weakness. This “conceding-to-thrive” scenario is most likely to unfold when regimes (1) possess substantial antecedent political strengths and resource advantages, (2) suffer ominous setbacks signaling that they have passed their apex of domination, and (3) pursue new legitimation strategies to arrest their incipient decline. We illustrate this heretofore neglected alternative democratization pathway through a comparative-historical analysis of three Asian developmental states where ruling parties have democratized from varying positions of considerable strength: Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia. We then consider the implications of our analysis for three “candidate cases” in developmental Asia where ruling parties have not yet conceded democratization despite being well-positioned to thrive were they to do so: Singapore, Malaysia, and the world's most populous dictatorship, China.