Because I spend so much time reviewing potential APSR articles, it pains me to admit what is undeniably true: that a great deal of the important intellectual work in our discipline comes packaged not as journal articles, but as books. Many disciplines help their members stay abreast of new books in their field by maintaining “official” single-purpose book review journals. In political science, this function has long been performed by the APSR, which despite its name is primarily an outlet for research, not for reviews. That long-standing arrangement is about to change, for book reviews will bid farewell to the APSR after the current issue. Hereafter, the book review section, which has occupied approximately one-third of our pages, will migrate to the APSA's new journal, Perspectives on Politics, where it will reappear in volume 1, number 1, in March 2003. Gone from the APSR but not forgotten will be the invaluable contributions made by book review co-editors Susan Bickford and Gregory McAvoy, the long line of APSR book review editors who preceded them, and, of course, the thousands of scholars who over the years have taken on the thankless (and often cursed at) task of writing book reviews for the APSR. The APSR, sans book reviews, will continue to be published on a quarterly basis, but beginning in 2003, our new cover dates will be February, May, August, and November.

Institutional approaches to explaining political phenomena suffer from three common limitations: reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and excessive emphasis on order and structure. Ideational approaches to political explanation, while often more sensitive to change and agency, largely exhibit the same shortcomings. In particular, both perspectives share an emphasis on discerning and explaining patterns of ordered regularity in politics, making it hard to explain important episodes of political change. Relaxing this emphasis on order and viewing politics as situated in multiple and not necessarily equilibrated order suggests a way of synthesizing institutional and ideational approaches and developing more convincing accounts of political change. In this view, change arises out of “friction” among mismatched institutional and ideational patterns. An account of American civil rights policy in the 1960s and 1970s, which is not amenable to either straightforward institutional or ideational explanation, demonstrates the advantages of the approach.

This essay makes a case for an anthropological conceptualization of culture as “semiotic practices” and demonstrates how it adds value to political analyses. “Semiotic practices” refers to the processes of meaning-making in which agents' practices (e.g., their work habits, self-policing strategies, and leisure patterns) interact with their language and other symbolic systems. This version of culture can be employed on two levels. First, it refers to what symbols do—how symbols are inscribed in practices that operate to produce observable political effects. Second, “culture” is an abstract theoretical category, a lens that focuses on meaning, rather than on, say, prices or votes. By thinking of meaning construction in terms that emphasize intelligibility, as opposed to deep-seated psychological orientations, a practice-oriented approach avoids unacknowledged ambiguities that have bedeviled scholarly thinking and generated incommensurable understandings of what culture is. Through a brief exploration of two concerns central to political science—compliance and ethnic identity-formation—this paper ends by showing how culture as semiotic practices can be applied as a causal variable.

A body of theoretical literature has developed that explains why historically disadvantaged groups should be represented by members of those groups. Such representatives are commonly referred to as descriptive representatives. This literature has also endorsed various institutional reforms aimed at increasing the number of descriptive representatives, e.g., party list quotas, racial districting, and proportional representation. However, this literature does not articulate criteria that should guide the selection of descriptive representatives to serve in these institutional positions. Indeed, some thinkers claim that such criteria cannot, or at least should not, be articulated. I argue that some descriptive representatives are preferable to others and that criteria for selecting preferable descriptive representatives can, and should, be articulated. Moreover, I recommend one such criterion: Preferable descriptive representatives possess strong mutual relationships with dispossessed subgroups of historically disadvantaged groups.

In pairwise voting, when a simple majority rule produces a winner, that winner is robust to the minority's preferences. The typical means of protecting the minority from the decisiveness of the majority is by increasing the required majority or by augmenting the simple majority rule with constitutional constraints. In the former case the required majority q becomes larger than one-half, and this implies that the q-majority rule becomes biased in favor of one of the alternatives, usually the status quo. In the latter case the augmented rule becomes biased in favor of the minority. The main issue examined in this paper is whether the amelioration of majority decisiveness can be attained by unbiased voting rules that allow some restricted expression of preference intensities. Our results clarify that the use of scoring rules provides a positive answer to the above question when voters resort to variable degrees of coordinated strategic voting. The results are illustrated in the special cases of the plurality and the Borda rules.

We develop an informational model of judicial decision-making in which deference to precedent is useful to policy-oriented appellate judges because it improves the accuracy with which they can communicate legal rules to trial judges. Our simple model yields new implications and hypotheses regarding conditions under which judges will maintain or break with precedent, the constraining effect that precedent has on judicial decision-making, the voting behavior of Supreme Court Justices, the relationship between a precedent's age and its authority, the effect of legal complexity on the level of deference to precedent, the relative stability of rules and standards, and long-term patterns of legal evolution. Perhaps most importantly, we demonstrate that “legalist” features of judicial decision-making are consistent with an assumption of policy-oriented judges.

Court-ordered redistricting in the mid-1960s eradicated severe disparities in the populations of U.S. state legislative districts. We examine the geographic distribution of money by states to counties. Cross-sectional analysis shows that counties with relatively more legislativeseats per person prior to redistricting received relatively more transfers from the state per person. Over time, counties that lost legislative seats subsequently received a smaller share of state funds per capita. We calculate that population equalization significantly altered the flow of state transfers to counties, diverting approximately $7 billion annually from formerly overrepresented to formerly underrepresented counties, an effect missed by past studies. For those concerned with the design of democratic institutions around the world today, the American experience provides clear evidence of the political consequences of unequal representation.

Other research has shown (1) that civilians and the military differ in their views about when and how to use military force; (2) that the opinions of veterans track more closely with military officers than with civilians who never served in the military; and (3) that U.S. civil–military relations shaped Cold War policy debates. We assess whether this opinion gap “matters” for the actual conduct of American foreign policy. We examine the impact of the presence of veterans in the U.S. political elite on the propensity to initiate and escalate militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 1992. As the percentage of veterans serving in the executive branch and the legislature increases, the probability that the United States will initiate militarized disputes declines. Once a dispute has been initiated, however, the higher the proportion of veterans, the greater the level of force the United States will use in the dispute.

Clyde Barrow's More Than a Historian provides a fascinating intellectual history of Charles Beard, a political scientist whom he places in the “pantheon of thinkers that most scholars no longer read” (p. xvi). With 42 books, scores of coauthored books, and hundreds of articles and book reviews, Beard can be only characterized as amazingly prolific. Yet the only book that still resonates in political science and American history is An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). Barrow's history of Beard gives us ample reason finally to read it or read it again.

How have our conceptions of politics changed, and how have these changes altered politics and its possibilities? These are the burning questions at one of the biggest campfires in political theory, and the answers are disputed as these three volumes show.

What is biopolitics? The authors are well-published scholars in this field, and their answer to this question supplied in this book should give hope to those who are disappointed with the direction and progress of political science. Many of the questions about politics that biopolitics addresses were first asked by ancient political philosophers, such as Aristotle. The field of biopolitics, however, is only 30 or 40 years old. Over that time the field has strengthened its institutional base. Of equal importance, it has produced a growing body of scholarship in such fields as political theory, comparative politics and international relations, methodology, political behavior and decision making, and public administration and public policy. Unfortunately, largely because the field is interdisciplinary, only a small portion of this scholarship has been published in the major political science journals, so that most political scientists and other social scientists are largely unaware of what this field is and what it has to offer.

Natural law theorizing, it seems, will not die, even in this so-called postmodern era. For some, apparently including David Braybrooke, this is reason to think that there is something true about natural law doctrine, and in Natural Law Modernized, he sets about to convince us of this very point. He thinks that natural law theory, once it is suitably modernized and refurbished in the fashion he recommends, has strengths that may make it preferable to alternative ethical theories, particularly utilitarianism and contractarianism.

There are differences between human beings, and some of these differences are, for many, a matter of identity. Some people are men, and some are white. Some people are poor, others are wealthy. These identity-constituting differences are deeply connected with different kinds of injustices. Susan Hekman's main contention in The Future of Differences is that a new epistemology is required if we are to acknowledge all these differences (p. 27) and, consequently, address these injustices.

What does liberalism imply about our duties to minority cultures, and what do the claims of such cultures imply about the nature of liberalism? These may seem like different ways of asking roughly the same question and, in a sense, so they are. Both formulations invite us to consider the relationship between liberalism and diversity, and both do so in the specific context of group, as distinct from individual, identity. However, and as these two books demonstrate, it makes a difference which question we take as our starting point. Emily Gill begins with a question about the fundamental commitments of liberalisn, and having answered that question, she then goes on to investigate the implications for cultural membership. By contrast, Monique Deveaux begins by asking what justice requires for cultural minorities, and having answered that question, she then goes on to investigate the implications for our understanding of liberal democratic theory and practice.

Christopher Eisgruber takes a pragmatic approach to judicial review. Most judges and scholars would decide whether a branch of government acts legitimately by asking whether its actions were authorized or prohibited by some provision in the Constitution. The common assumption is that during the constitutional convention, states agreed to give up some of their powers in order to establish a new federal government with enumerated powers, at the same time explicitly setting limits both to the federal government and to states. By turning to the terms of this agreement, Supreme Court Justices seek to answer whether Congress, the president, or the state or local government in question acted within its rights. Eisgruber regards such assumptions about state sovereignty as “mystical” (p. 186). Instead, he would have us question, in deciding whether, say, Congress should be permitted to regulate the possession of guns in school zones, that this is the sort of thing a national government can “do well” (p. 186). Whether it was the intention of those who wrote or ratified the Constitution to give Congress this power is, to Eisgruber, more or less irrelevant.

In this book Liah Greenfeld tackles the problem that preoccupied Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). Like many others, she disputes Weber's claim that modern capitalism emerged uniquely in Northwest Europe because of the attitudes and behavior promoted by Protestant Christianity, especially in its Calvinist variety: The “worldly asceticism” and peculiar form of economic rationality involved spawned an economic system that eventually helped change the world. Critical of this precise argument, Greenfeld is in the Weberian camp in centering the problem where he did and in stressing the differences between modern capitalism and age-old commercial profit making found virtually in all civilizations. Similarly sound is Weber's methodological posture that sees culture, that is, ideas, ideals, and values dramatically influencing the emergence, growth, and durability of economic systems. Those who, like the whole Marxist tradition, maintain that underlying “structural” factors such as technology and environment are the prime movers of history have succumbed to untenable deterministic philosophies. History and social structures, unlike the works of simple nature, are constructed by human agency, which itself is often provided by outstanding thinkers and doers.

Just over 50 years ago, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, an essay on the situation of women written from the point of view of an existentialist ethic. Her essay had an enormous impact and spawned influential descendants, most of which rode roughshod over the essay's existentialist and phenomenological background. De Beauvoir's great success in The Second Sex was to have described the experience of becoming a woman in such a way as to allow many women to theorize their situation, and she spurred a generation to attempt to change it. Effectively, however, her insights became absorbed into the liberal feminist tradition, and with the rise of poststructuralism, have been criticized for their abstract individualism, commitment to a discredited Enlightenment notion of the subject, and participation in a logocentric philosophy of the Same. Sonia Kruks attempts, in this series of linked essays, to defend de Beauvoir and the tradition to which she belonged from being so quickly dismissed. She sets out the perspective of existential phenomenology and argues for its superiority to the poststructuralist philosophy that has become influential during the last 30 years.

Joseph Schumpeter's “elitist” theory of democracy has been the subject of much discussion in political theory. It is commonly considered to have been seminal for the “empirical” approaches to democracy that emerged in American political science after World War II. In this excellent book, John Medearis presents an impressive, careful, and relatively comprehensive account of Schumpeter's writings on the topic of democracy. He argues that Schumpeter has been widely misunderstood, and the richness of his thinking has been wrongly reduced to the chapters of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) in which the “elitist” theory is developed.

Nature is political, John Meyer argues, because it constitutes people and so their politics; moreover, interpretations of nature can only be controversial and so contested. Meyer is an environmentalist who believes that contemporary theoretical thinking about politics and the environment is mostly mistaken. Environmental philosophy, in particular, is criticized as involving wasted effort because it emphasizes justifications for intrinsic value in nature. This emphasis implies that the political challenge is one of convincing enough people to adopt some ecologically benign worldview. But as Meyer rightly points out, most people already evidence a vague commitment to environmental values, and so the real question is how to activate such commitments.

Few political scientists would recognize the name Frederick Winslow Taylor. Yet by Char Roone Miller's analysis, Taylor's early-twentieth-century “scientific” reforms in management and administrative practices play out in a ubiquitous and subtle process that shapes citizenship in modern America. The application of Taylor-inspired techniques to the reform of the military in the mid-twentieth century and their curiously parallel application in educational reforms receive Miller's closest attention. Much in the spirit of Michel Foucault's (1975) Discipline and Punish, Miller is concerned with demonstrating that ostensibly progressive efforts at efficient organization effectively routinize the production of consciousness, desire, and even the body.