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Notes from the Editor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2005

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Each year at this time it is my pleasure to acknowledge the contributions that hundreds of reviewers have made to the APSR and, through it, to the profession. The individuals whose names are listed in ‘APSR External Reviewers 2004–2005’ later in this issue served as reviewers—some of several papers—between mid-August 2004 and mid-August 2005. They have my sincere gratitude for their service, sine qua non.

Type
NOTES FROM THE EDITOR
Copyright
© 2005 by the American Political Science Association

Each year at this time it is my pleasure to acknowledge the contributions that hundreds of reviewers have made to the APSR and, through it, to the profession. The individuals whose names are listed in ‘APSR External Reviewers 2004–2005’ later in this issue served as reviewers—some of several papers—between mid-August 2004 and mid-August 2005. They have my sincere gratitude for their service, sine qua non.

IN THIS ISSUE1

Drafted by editorial assistant Lee Michael.

Notwithstanding ‘great man’ theories of history, effective political action—a successful revolution, an orderly implementation of a new policy, and so on—generally requires efforts that extend well beyond those of an isolated individual. This issue's cover image of a bridge visually fixes the common thread of interconnectedness that runs through the first four of our otherwise wide-ranging set of November articles. In these articles, cultures collide in the courtroom, advocates argue environmental policy, states vie for a competitive edge, and neighboring cultures learn to coexist—but never alone. Be it in societies, interest groups, or political jurisdictions, interests and preferences have far-reaching effects, reshaping the distribution of political winners and losers, reallocating resources and bragging rights, and redefining friends and foes.

Is it wrong to protect or accommodate racial or ethnic minority groups when doing so can imperil the rights of women within those minorities? Although many have posed the issue as one of multiculturalism versus gender equality, Sarah Song doubts that the matter is that clear-cut. In ‘Majority Norms, Multiculturalism, and Gender Equality,’ Song recommends scrutiny of minority groups' cultural claims, consideration of the biases of the majority culture, and monitoring for harmful spillover effects that accommodation might create. Analyzing controversies involving Indians' tribal membership, immigrants' criminal defenses, women's citizenship rights, and Mormons' polygamy, Song shows that American history has not been confined to instances in which the majority culture has condemned minority cultural practices, but also has offered examples of how each side can support, encourage, adopt, or overshadow biases in the practices of the other. More broadly, Song's thought-provoking article highlights how cultures change, for better or for worse, over time and in response to their surroundings.

Whereas cultures often just bump into each other, interest groups are often statutorily required to interact in certain policy arenas. In ‘To Trust an Adversary: Integrating Rational and Psychological Models of Collaborative Policymaking,’ William D. Leach and Paul A. Sabatier explore two different perspectives—a rational choice-based approach and a psychological one—to explain the factors that enabled members of watershed stakeholder partnerships in the American West to trust one another and work together on controversial environmental policies. Whereas the rational choice approach suggests a tit-for-tat model of trust-building based on the availability of information and of monitoring institutions capable of applying sanctions, psychological models focus on participants' beliefs, cognitive limitations, and perceptions of the legitimacy of the process. Rather than pitting the two explanatory approaches against one other, Leach and Sabatier allow for the possibility that they may operate jointly. The payoff comes when a welter of interview and survey data indicates that each model conveys insights into how these policy elites were able to build trust and work together. Leach and Sabatier's findings not only provide an example of how knowledge can be built on multiple theoretical bases, but help us understand real-life situations in which unlikely allies find themselves able to cooperate.

Interconnectedness is about more than winning culture wars or policy contests. Considerations of learning and economic advantage stand out in ‘Using Geographic Information Systems to Study Interstate Competition.’ William D. Berry and Brady Baybeck use geographic information systems, a new set of tools for political scientists, to some old questions: Do states learn from each other? Do they compete with each other? Berry and Baybeck reassess two often-studied state-level policy issues, lottery adoption and the generosity of welfare benefits, via this new technique, which treats states as geographic spaces with nodes of varying population densities. Just as different-sized planets and stars exert varying amounts of ‘pull’ on other objects in space, new techniques allow for the possibility that states like California and Montana exert differing levels of influence on their neighbors. These and related GIS technologies should be useful in studying not only interactions among American states, but also subnational politics elsewhere and policy diffusion at the international level.

Donna Bahry, Mikhail Koslapov, Polina Kozyreva, and Rick K. Wilson tear down the proposition that ‘good fences make good neighbors,’ in ‘Ethnicity and Trust: Evidence from Russia.’ Based on data from surveys in Tartarstan and Sakha-Yakutia, Bahry and her colleagues conclude that the amount of interaction among different ethnic groups and trust in government are the strongest indicators of inter-group trust. This novel finding has important implications for questions of group identity and interpersonal trust in multi-ethnic societies, particularly regarding the link between in-group trust and out-group trust, which the authors conclude are not inversely related. Their counterintuitive conclusion that generalized trust is not the best predictor of inter-group trust should be of considerable interest to a wide range of scholars who focus on issues of interconnectedness, such as collective action, ethnicity, and nationalism.

The balance of this issue ranges far and wide, from levying war and concluding peace through domestic politics and institutional design to a bit of political science history as well. The topical smorgasbord begins with another round of war and peace scholarship.

Albert Einstein believed that ‘You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.’ In ‘Military Coercion in Interstate Crises,’ Branislav L. Slantchev challenges this notion by showing how military mobilization can deter an opponent in a crisis situation. Rather than relying on classic arguments about audience costs, Slantchev uses an elegant model to demonstrate how military mobilization simultaneously ties the hands of politicians and sinks costs, doubly signaling the mobilizer's resolve. This innovative treatment of tacit bargaining during crises directly challenges the contention of democratic peace theory advocates that democracies are better able to signal their intentions because they face higher audience costs. Slantchev's contention that autocracies are able to signal their intentions as well as democracies when military means are available to them is likely to spark several additional rounds of debate on the causes of war and peace.

When the fighting stops, peace is inaugurated with paperwork: treaties and other international agreements are often considered to be long-lasting guarantees of behavior and obligations between signatories. Visions of parchment, quill pens, and elaborate signing ceremonies in gilded halls or on carrier decks that usher in new eras of cooperation come to mind. However, Barbara Koremenos' research on international agreements on economics, the environment, human rights, and security, as reported in ‘Contracting around International Uncertainty,’ reveals that states more often than not make multiple short-term arrangements in the face of an uncertain international environment. Koremenos' analysis should be of interest not only to the international relations scholars, but also to others with interests in institutions and institutional design, including both Americanists and comparativists.

Those Americanists and comparativists will already be interested in identifying constitutional structures that give rise to ‘good government.’ John Gerring, Strom C. Thacker, and Carola Moreno take a broad view of this question in ‘A Centripetal Theory of Democratic Governance: A Theory and Global Inquiry,’ based on debates about presidentialism versus parliamentarianism, federalism versus unitarism, and single-member districts versus proportional representation. Gerring and associates believe that the latter types of institutions, which form the basis of centripetalism, facilitate higher standards of living and good governance compared to states with vertical and horizontal separations of power. In this sense, that government governs best which governs most—an argument that promises to reignite the debate about whether and in what ways centralized authority and broad inclusiveness are superior means to democratic ends.

Another important question about democratic ends concerns the role of the courts in democratic decision making. While judicial review is often interpreted as an assault on the policy making prerogatives of elected officials, Keith E. Whittington's ‘‘Interpose your Friendly Hand’: Political Supports for the Exercise of Judicial Review by the United States Supreme Court’ explores how courts serve the political and electoral needs of the dominant national coalition in overcoming barriers to implementing their political agenda. Using episodes of judicial review by the U.S. Supreme Court as case studies, Whittington sets out to determine when elected officials might find it advantageous to pursue policy and electoral objectives through the judiciary. The result is a novel contribution that should be read not only by only public law scholars, but by Americanists and comparativists who too often ignore the policy making role of the courts.

Asked when political science shifted toward its modern-day embrace of ‘science,’ most political scientists would probably identify the turning point as the ‘behavioral revolution’ of the mid-twentieth century. However, John G. Gunnell, in ‘Political Science on the Cusp: Recovering a Discipline's Past,’ argues that the changes of the 1950s and '60s were more like an academic reformation than a discipline-altering revolution. The turning point, according to Gunnell, took place during the 1920s. The true founding fathers of modern political science were scholars like G. E. G. Caitlin and W. Y. Elliott, whose works initiated a paradigm shift in political science. Gunnell provides evidence that these then-prominent but now largely forgotten figures deserve a more prominent place in our discipline's annals than they have received to date. (Our publication of this article serves the secondary function of providing another occasion to make known that our November 2006 issue will complete the one-hundredth volume of the APSR. As previously announced, our centennial issue will be given over to articles on the theme of the evolution of political science.)

In the December 2000 APSR, Beth A. Simmons argued in ‘International Law and State Behavior: Commitment and Compliance in International Monetary Affairs’ that reputational concerns lead states to comply with their treaty obligations. In the ‘Forum’ section of this issue, Jana von Stein contends in ‘Do Treaties Constrain or Screen? Selection Bias and Treaty Compliance’ that selection bias problems mask states' true motivation for obeying treaty obligations. The key factor, von Stein argues, is the set of conditions that led them to sign the treaty in the first place, not their concern about how other states would respond if they were to shirk. In ‘The Constraining Power of International Treaties: Theory and Methods,’ Simmons and Daniel J. Hopkins question the robustness of von Stein's findings, recast Simmons' model to mitigate von Stein's methodological concerns, and conclude that Simmons' original results still hold. This exchange ends here so far as the APSR is concerned, but research on the vital question of treaties and state behavior will surely continue.

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