Dissertations into books? and Editors' correction.

James Madison contributed much to political science and to the art and science of governing democratic regimes. A major contribution was his recognition of the multiple threats facing the newly established Confederation (see, e.g., Dougherty 2001). Madison was willing to invest heavily in converting these threats into new opportunities. In his “Preface to Debates in the Convention” ([1984] 1840, 19), Madison reflected on the causes for alarm.James Madison Award lecture presented at the American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., September 1, 2005. The author is appreciative of support from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Science Foundation and useful comments by Bill Blomquist, Eric Coleman, Sue Crawford, Joshua P. Hill, Marco Janssen, Robert Keohane, Mike McGinnis, Lesa B. Morrison, Amy Poteete, Mike Schoon, David Schwab, and Kenneth Shepsle on an initial draft of this paper. As always, I deeply appreciate Patty Lezotte's careful editing.

It was my good fortune to have known John Gaus and to have attended a lecture course and participated in a seminar that he offered in 1949. His Alabama lectures entitled Reflections on Public Administration, published in 1947, included such titles as “The Ecology of Government” and “Politics and Administration.” His concluding chapter, written after the initial presentations, was entitled “A Theory of the Process of Government.” Gaus was broadly engaged in reflections about the place of public administration in systems of governance and the constitution of order in human societies.The author is appreciative of detailed comments by Paul Aligica, Barbara Allen, Krister Andersson, Robert Bish, Sheldon Gellar, Stephan Kuhnert, Michael McGinnis, Elinor Ostrom, Andrew Revelle, Filippo Sabetti, Amos Sawyer, Sujai Shivakumar, Mark Sproule-Jones, and Lihua Yang.

There was and continues to be nothing easy about being poor in the Big Easy, or anywhere else in America for that matter. The callous or incompetent handling of the evacuation of the poor from New Orleans smacked of Marie Antoinette's concern for the hungry of Paris, and underscored both the existence and consequence of income inequality in America.

A large body of research has documented comparative levels of inequality among nations and also the substantial change in inequality across and within nations. Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have used these databases to make a number of claims about changes in inequality and their interrelations with economic and political life, patterns of redistribution, social institutions, and social and individual wellbeing more generally.

American society has witnessed an extraordinary widening of economic inequality in the period since World War II that is unmatched among advanced industrialized countries. In 2003, the most affluent fifth received 47.6% of family income, the middle class (the third and fourth fifths) earned 15.5% and 23.3%, respectively, while the bottom two quintiles each received less than 10%. (Twenty-one percent of family income went to the top 5%.) In other words, the richest 20% obtained nearly half of the country's income. That income (and wealth) is unevenly distributed is neither new nor necessarily disturbing. What is remarkable is the large and unmistakable increase in the concentration of income at the top (Mishel, Bernstein, and Allegretto 2005).

On June 7th, 2004 the American Political Science Association (APSA) issued a Media Advisory announcing, “Leading Political Scientists Warn of Threat to American Democracy in Rare Nonpartisan Statement” (APSA Press Release 2004). The subtitle reiterated this alarmist tone: “New Study will Report Economic Disparities Deny Many Americans A Political Voice; Money Buys Access; Gains in Civil Rights Threatened as Well.” Note, we are speaking of “threats” (to democracy) that are “profound.” Furthermore, “research shows a devastating erosion of political equality in America” (italics added). Have these distinguished professors possibly discovered a conspiracy to cancel elections, repeal the First Amendment, or otherwise impose a racist plutocracy? Are retired generals and multinational CEOs about to launch a coup d'état?

Many Americans were shocked and shamed by the televised images of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Scenes of physical devastation were juxtaposed with even more disturbing scenes of human devastation. Thousands of residents, mostly Black and poor, seemed to be trapped in a Hobbesian state of nature, abandoned by government and civilized society. An untold number starved to death; for days their corpses floated in the streets.

The APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy's Report (2004), American Democracy in an Age of Inequality, concludes that progress toward realizing our ideals of democracy “may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed” as a result of growing inequality. Political participation, whether through voting, or campaign contributions, or organizational activities, reflects the distribution of economic resources, and as resources come to be more unequal, so is participation increasingly skewed toward the better-off. As a result, the Report goes on to argue, the issues and positions of the affluent are heard by politicians, and louder voices give the affluent greater influence. I agree with this conclusion, so far as it goes. Disparities in voting, money, and organization matter in the political process, and economic inequalities inevitably affect these disparities. None of this is new, of course. While inequalities have increased during the past three decades, they have increased during earlier periods in American history. This is normal politics in the United States, sometimes worse, sometimes better.

The members of the Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy were not of one mind about any of the subjects they took up—and this is one reason, among many, that it was the most vibrant and stimulating professional collaboration I have had the privilege to be part of. It would be presumptuous of me to speak for anyone but myself in explaining and justifying the Task Force's work. And yet, there does seem to me at least one note of common explanation required up front. All the members of the Task Force, I am certain, saw their work as only the beginning of a discussion within the discipline—and, indeed, more broadly—about the relationship between inequality and contemporary American governance. Although we hoped to showcase and integrate the best existing research and theory, our main goal was to spark new questions, new research, new thinking, and new debates. And judging from this forum, as well as from the recent scholarship showcased in Larry Bartels's (2006) and Kay Schlozman's (2006) essays, we have.

The American Political Science Association's (APSA) Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy (2004) asserts that inequality is on the rise in the U.S., and democracy's future may be dim. These assertions are allegedly supported by empirical evidence.

In the assembled critiques, the report of the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy is labeled simultaneously “dangerous quackery” and a “timid document.” Are we all reading the same report? At least when it comes to Stephen Earl Bennett's commentary (2006), probably not.

We agree with the Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy that not only the quality but the very legitimacy of American democracy is threatened by persistent and rising inequalities of political power and influence. Class conflict is as old as democracy itself, and there is an intrinsic tension between the inequalities generated by free markets and the political equality that is at the core of democracy. No institutional fixes or policy remedies will fully overcome this tension, and in some respects it may be a useful tension. But current institutional and policy arrangements—especially at the local level—are exacerbating inequalities and political divisions in ways that are toxic for democracy.Because our discussion here draws heavily on our book Democracy at Risk, we wish to fully acknowledge and thank each of the book's co-authors, including Yvette Alex-Assensoh, Jeffrey M. Berry, Michael Brintnall, David E. Campbell, Luis Ricardo Fraga, Archon Fung, William A. Galston, Margaret Levi, Meira Levinson, Keena Lipsitz, Richard G. Niemi, Robert D. Putnam, Wendy M. Rahn, Rob Reich, Robert R. Rodgers, Todd Swanstrom, and Katherine Cramer Walsh. Our co-authors in that effort have contributed significantly to our understanding of the issues we discuss here, including by offering prose that we have relied on and put to use in this article. While we acknowledge our deep debt to our colleagues, any errors remaining are, of course, ours alone.

Within polling places, does the scarcity of voting machines cause longer lines and thereby dissuade some people from voting? Are voting machines scarce in some areas because turnout would be low, irrespective of the availability of voting machines? In Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, the answers to these questions carried very real and significant political stakes. Consider the following from Franklin County, the second most populous county in the state. In precincts where voting machines were plentiful (i.e., where there were fewer registrants per available voting machine), turnout was especially high and John Kerry's share of the presidential vote was low. In contrast, in areas of machine scarcity (i.e., precincts with many registrants per available voting machine), turnout was lower and Kerry's vote share was higher. These relationships are shown in Figures 1A and 1B. Given the strong association between machine availability and the Kerry vote, if machine (un)availability was a cause of (low) turnout, then Kerry may very well have received fewer votes than he would have had more machines been available or had the distribution of available machines been less skewed toward precincts that were more supportive of George W. Bush.I appreciate input from SSRC Commission members Henry Brady, Martha Kropf, Walter R. Mebane, Jr., and Michael Traugott with whom I collaborated on the SSRC's “Interim Report on Alleged Irregularities in the United States Presidential Election of 2 November 2004” (Brady et al. 2004). I also thank Benjamin Bishin for comments on the paper. The Social Science Research Council and its staff, including Jason McNichol, Dashiell Flynn, and Sarah Alexander, provided generous support for this work. The views expressed in this paper are not necessarily shared by other SSRC Commission members or the Social Science Research Council.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded more than 80% of the city of New Orleans. As the stories of hurricane victims, mostly African Americans, dominated the national news coverage, New Orleans' racial politics in particular, and the racial divisions in general, once again invited public debate. Why did a city that had been firmly controlled by African-American politicians from the mayor's office to the city council exhibit such a clear racial image? What role did Whites play in the city's political establishment?This project was supported by research grants from the American Political Science Association and the University of Wisconsin, which allowed the author to travel to Memphis and New Orleans to collect original data and interview the mayor of Memphis and other politicians. The author would also like to thank Susan Reed, Martin Gruberg, Wayne Parent, and David Siemers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the article. Special thanks go to the three reviewers and the editors of PS: Political Science and Politics, and to Laura Fisher-Guex, James Vanderleeuw, and Susan Howell for their invaluable assistance with the data-collection/recording process.

In every contested election there are inevitably winners and losers, both among the candidates and among the voters. Some candidates will take their seats as elected officials, and others will not. Some voters will be happy with the outcome, others will not. Here I seek to better understand the relationship between whether a voter casts a ballot for the winning candidate in U.S. House elections and that voter's evaluations of her representative. I build on a burgeoning literature on the relationship between voters and their elected governments to derive and test a theory about this connection. The data will show that voters whose preferred candidate wins a seat in the House of Representatives are systematically happier with their representative than those voters whom did not vote for the winning candidate. While this finding is not especially groundbreaking, the implications for the way in which we draw congressional and state legislative district lines are quite provocative. Specifically, since district lines in the House are necessarily an artificial construct, I argue that map makers ought to “pack” districts with as many like-minded partisans as possible. Trying to draw “competitive districts” effectively cracks ideologically congruent voters into separate districts, which has the effect of increasing the absolute number of voters who will be unhappy with the outcome and dissatisfied with their representative. I discuss the benefits of fundamentally rethinking the way in which we draw congressional and state legislative districts, as well as address likely concerns that might be raised about drawing districts this way.I would like to thank Jim Adams, Valerie Brunell, Bruce Cain, Geoff Evans, Bill Koetzle, Bernie Grofman, Sam Hirsch, Michael D. McDonald, Iain McLean, Sam Merrill, Glenn Phelps, David Rueda, Alec Stone Sweet, Chris Wlezian, and the Politics Group at Nuffield College for their comments.

“Here is a telling statistic. One hundred fifty-three of California's congressional and legislative seats were up in the last election, and not one, I repeat, not one, changed parties. What kind of democracy is that?”

In “Don't Blame Redistricting for Uncompetitive Elections” in this issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning (2006) argue that redistricting is not responsible for the decline in the number of competitive districts, defined as a district with a near balance of partisanship. Further, the authors claim that non-partisan redistricting institutions are not correlated with the number of competitive districts. The relationship between redistricting institutions and competitive districts is of importance not only to academics who study redistricting and elections, but also to policy makers and reformers who advocate redistricting reform. If these claims are true, then policymakers are expending much misguided effort to enact redistricting reform to treat the greater problem of the decline of electoral competition in recent U.S. congressional elections.

In “Drawing the Line on District Competition,” Michael McDonald (2006) challenges our conclusion that redistricting is not responsible for declining competition in House elections. McDonald claims that this conclusion is incorrect largely because our measure of district partisanship in 1992 is flawed. According to McDonald, using the normalized 1992 major party presidential vote as a measure of House district partisanship in 1992 seriously overstates the competitiveness of House districts in that year because of the impact of the vote for Ross Perot. McDonald recommends instead using the 1988 presidential vote to measure district partisanship in 1992, or using a procedure developed by Gelman and King (1994a) to estimate the partisan bias of House districts. With either of these methods, McDonald claims that a significant proportion of the decline in competitive districts between 1990 and 2002 was caused by redistricting. In addition, contrary to our finding that nonpartisan redistricting commissions have failed to produce increased competition in House elections, McDonald claims that nonpartisan redistricting in Arizona provides a positive example of what can be accomplished by nonpartisan redistricting commissions elsewhere.

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning's (2006b) rejoinder to my critique of their article appearing in this same issue entitled “Don't Blame Redistricting for Uncompetitive Elections” (2006a). We should have had a scholarly debate that informed the profession and raised interesting questions in one of the widest read journals. Instead, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning mischaracterize my arguments as if this was a political talk show debate, and it is telling that they never directly quote me in their rejoinder. The few sources cited in support of their methodology, upon close inspection, provide no support to their measurement choice or findings. I hope that fair-minded readers will carefully evaluate all material, including cited sources, to reach their own judgment. I conclude this article with some thoughts that I hope shed light on the low levels of electoral competition that Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning and I agree characterize current congressional elections.