More or less by accident, some issues of Perspectives on Politics have revolved around a dominant theme. Articles in an early issue focused on conflict, from civil war to labor union strikes; a more recent set considered connections between politics and change over time, from how individuals and polities learn to why a legislature passes a law in the afternoon that it had rejected in the morning. This issue of Perspectives turns out to address mainly issues of methodology in political science—how we do our work, why we should do it differently, and how methodological choices entwine with substantive interests and political commitments.

Only connect….” E. M. Forster's admonition in Howards End resonates with this issue of Perspectives on Politics in several ways. The connection that Forster pushes most insistently is “building … the … bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion.” Writing, reviewing, and editing an article for Perspectives is mostly about the prose. But the sorts of articles that belong in Perspectives have a passion—for politics, for inquiry, for a particular population or problem or region of the world—not too far below the surface. The trick, of course, is to use the passion to inspire, but not to control, the prose.

One pleasure of editing a journal such as Perspectives on Politics is that sometimes a manuscript will answer a question that I had only vaguely formulated, but nevertheless knew was intriguing and important. Such is the case with many of the articles in this issue; I hope that others find the same sense of satisfaction in now having an answer to a question lurking somewhere in their professional consciousness.

Some 50 countries officially allocate access to political power by gender, ethnicity, or both. Yet in the world's electoral democracies, the policies used for women differ systematically from those used for ethnic groups. The former receive candidate quotas in parties; the latter, reserved seats in legislatures. Why? My explanation focuses on the varying ways that gender and ethnic identities intersect with partisan cleavages and on the distinct “work” performed by the different remedies for underrepresentation. Quotas, which make space within existing parties, are appropriate for groups whose boundaries crosscut partisan divisions. Reservations, which create incentives for the formation of group-specific parties and permit them direct representation, suit groups whose boundaries coincide with political cleavages. Since gender is crosscutting while ethnicity tends to be coinciding, women receive candidate quotas while ethnic groups get legislative reservations. Claims for inclusion via quotas pose less of a challenge to liberal institutions than claims to difference through legislative reservations. Case studies of representational politics in France, India, and Peru illustrate the argument.Mala Htun is author of Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance and advice of Kanchan Chandra, Jorge Domínguez, Jennifer Hochschild, Mark Jones, Courtney Jung, Jim Miller, Victoria Murillo, Jack Snyder, Donna Lee Van Cott, Myra Waterbury, participants in colloquia at the New School and Columbia University, and anonymous reviewers.

The Rehnquist Court's federalism decisions have sparked contentious debate about the role of the Court in the American political system. This article examines the reasons behind the Court's revival of federalism and the controversy it has produced. The first part reviews the normative jurisprudential debate over the Court's role as it has been cast in the legal academy. In the second part, we turn to an historical-empirical, or “political regimes,” framework for understanding the role of the Supreme Court. Although this framework provides a better explanation of the Rehnquist Court's foray into federalism, the connections between this approach and normative jurisprudential debates remain important, and we explore them in the final section. The Court's recent jurisprudence on federalism reflects both consensus and division within the current political regime—consensus that federalism is an important value, but division over how best to protect that value. We argue that competing jurisprudential theories over the role of the Court illustrate these political divisions. Thus, this article highlights the special insights political scientists bring to the subject, but also demonstrates how the two approaches can be usefully combined to provide a more robust understanding of the Court's role in the American political system.The authors thank Richard Brisbin, John Dinan, Mark Graber, Ashley Grosse, Jennifer Hochschild, Tom Keck, David O'Brien, Bob Turner, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions along the way.

The Council of the American Political Science Association approved the appointment of a Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy in the fall of 2002. A fifteen-member task force was convened in January 2003 and collectively worked during the subsequent eighteen months to prepare extensive reviews of research on inequality and American democracy. (The research reviews are available on the APSA Web site—as are materials for undergraduate and graduate teaching—http://www.apsanet.org/inequality.) Based on three reviews, the task force prepared a short report, which forms the basis of the present text. It concludes that progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled—and in some arenas reversed. The task force's work was extensively and rigorously debated among its members, scrutinized by three distinguished independent peers, and reviewed by the APSA Council. This report is ultimately the responsibility of its authors; no opinions, statements of fact, or conclusions should be attributed to the American Political Science Association or to the Russell Sage Foundation, which provided some support to the task force. The members of the task force are: Lawrence Jacobs (Chair, University of Minnesota), Ben Barber (University of Maryland), Larry Bartels (Princeton University), Michael Dawson (Harvard University), Morris Fiorina (Stanford University), Jacob Hacker (Yale University), Rodney Hero (Notre Dame University), Hugh Heclo (George Mason University), Claire Jean Kim (University of California, Irvine), Suzanne Mettler (Syracuse University), Benjamin Page (Northwestern University), Dianne Pinderhughes (University of Illinois, Champagne–Urbana), Kay Lehman Schlozman (Boston College), Theda Skocpol (Harvard University), and Sidney Verba (Harvard University).

Contrary to conventional wisdom, nationalism remains alive and well across an increasingly integrated Europe. While most nationalisms are not violent, the desire for greater national voice by both states and groups continues to exist in both the East and the West. As the European Union deepens and widens, states and groups are choosing among four nationalist strategies: traditional, substate, transsovereign, and protectionist. The interplay among these nationalisms is a core part of Europe's dynamic present and future.

Post–World War II political science in America has been described (by me, that is) as an excuse, concocted by college professors, for avoiding actual political engagement while not actually achieving science. Too much work by too many colleagues over too many decades deserves that dismissive characterization, but not so for the report penned by the professors who led the American Political Science Association Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy. Theirs—ours!—is arguably the most important and timely report ever produced by APSA. As I told the task force when I served as one of its discussants, the report is terrific and makes me proud to be a card-carrying member of APSA.At Penn, John J. DiIulio Jr. serves as faculty director of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society. In 2001 he served as the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He is coeditor with E. J. Dionne of What's God Got to Do With the American Experiment?

Modern political science has created a separation between political theory and empirical political research that impoverishes both sides and is becoming increasingly outdated. I suggest that the work of Michel Foucault is profitably understood in the context of American social and political science, including the empirical research of Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, and Thomas Schelling, and that the social theorists' work is better appreciated within Foucault's rigorous philosophical framework. Foucault's use of an open “game” context converges with the positions of both Wittgenstein and Schelling to suggest a theory that provides insights into the nontyrannical theory Pitkin sought. It also opens prospects for a theoretically integrated agenda for empirical and normative political research.Ruth Lane thanks the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Perspectives for comments on the paper.

The essay advances a proposal that is addressed primarily to theorists, but with implications for the entire profession: the proposal to replace or supplement the rehearsal of routinized canons with a turn to global, cross-cultural (or “comparative”) political theorizing. I offer geopolitical and general intellectual reasons why the turn seems appropriate today, and I discuss a variety of theoretical or philosophical inspirations undergirding the turn. After highlighting some recent examples of comparative political theorizing, I conclude by responding to critical queries as well as indicating broader implications of the move “beyond monologue.”Fred Dallmayr's most recent publication is Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror,” which persists with no end in sight. In this paper, I focus on what these developments mean for social science. How should social scientists deal with the threats to civil liberties that always accompany the outbreak of war? Following the precepts of Max Weber, I argue that the flourishing of social science requires that social scientists take responsibility, individually and collectively, for promoting the liberal values that make our academic practices possible. That implies individual scholarly inquiry into the nature and consequences of the war, individual scholarly affiliation with associations that promote academic freedom, and perhaps intervention by professional associations and their affiliates on behalf of academic freedom and political liberties.Jeffrey C. Isaac's books include Democracy in Dark Times; Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion; Power and Marxist Theory; and The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline.

Drawing on the thought of political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, we present a framework for thinking about public policy rooted in a balancing of what Oakeshott called the poles of “faith” and “skepticism.” This approach takes seriously the maintenance of institutional forms in policy making, seeks to preserve order while maintaining social diversity, is sensitive to the likelihood of unintended consequences, and eschews the attempt to produce ideal end states, emphasizing instead remedying specific defects in existing arrangements. While it has some affinities with libertarianism and modern conservatism, this approach places less emphasis on limiting the scope of governmental interventions and more on shaping their character. Specific case studies of education, public health, and Social Security flesh out this argument, demonstrating that it differs from contemporary conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism.

According to the APSA report, “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” in the United States economic and political inequality are feeding on each another. Since the 1970s, earnings, income, and wealth have become more unequal, while politics is becoming more elitist. Rising inequality is corrupting our democracy, especially through the rising role that money plays in politics. At the same time a more exclusive government exacerbates, or at least tolerates, growing inequality.Lawrence M. Mead testifies regularly to Congress on poverty, welfare, and social policy and has written many books and articles on the politics of poverty and welfare reform, most recently Lifting up the Poor (with Mary Jo Bane) and Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin.

This article draws on a comparative case study design to refine formal-quantitative models of civil war, expanding them to highlight political processes that lead to civil war. It uses 21 case studies of civil war onset and avoidance to show the shortcomings in prominent rationalist models of civil war that rely heavily on economic variables. These shortcomings include measurement error, unit heterogeneity, model misspecification, and lack of clarity about causal mechanisms. Additionally, the greed/grievance distinction that underlies the economic models is misguided. This article analyzes civil war not as a discrete phenomenon, but rather as one phase in a cycle of violence. Economic models of civil war, however, rely on theories that cannot distinguish effectively between civil war and other forms of political violence. To explain civil war, we must explain why various and often conflicting micro-level motives combine to produce political violence with the characteristics that we attribute to civil war. If we cannot understand why we get civil war instead of other forms of organized political violence, then we do not understand civil war.Nicholas Sambanis thanks Keith Darden, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Jennifer Hochschild, Stathis Kalyvas, Bruce Russett, Jack Snyder, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, and seminar participants at New York University and the University of Chicago for very useful comments, as well as Annalisa Zinn and Steve Shewfelt for excellent research assistance. He also gratefully acknowledges financial support from the World Bank's Post-Conflict Fund and from the Russell Sage Foundation, where he was fortunate to spend a year of academic leave working on this and related projects. This research is part of the Political Economy of Civil War, a collaborative project between Yale University's U.N. Studies Program and the World Bank's Conflict and Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit.

Together, the final reports of the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy and its three working groups constitute a remarkable resource for students of contemporary American politics. Most striking in these materials is the depiction of a reinforcing cycle of political and economic inequality. The task force report argues that inequalities in political voice reverberate in patterns of governance, which in turn give rise to public policies that reinforce political inequalities.Margaret Weir has written widely on social policy and politics in the United States and is the author of several books, including Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States. The author would like to thank Jennifer Hochschild for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Democracies, and the citizenries that stand at their center, are not natural phenomena; they are made and sustained through politics. Government policies can play a crucial role in this process, shaping the things publics believe and want, the ways citizens view themselves and others, and how they understand and act toward the political system. Yet, while political scientists have said a great deal about how publics influence policies, they know far less about the ways policies influence publics. In this article, we seek to clarify how policies, once enacted, are likely to affect political thought and action in the citizenry. Such effects are hard to locate within the standard framework of approaches to mass behavior, and they are generally ignored by program evaluators and policy analysts. To bridge this gap, we direct attention toward a long and vibrant, but underappreciated, line of inquiry we call the “political tradition” of mass behavior research. Drawing this tradition together with recent work on “policy feedback,” we outline a framework for thinking about how policies influence mass politics. The major types of such effects include defining membership; forging political cohesion and group divisions; building or undermining civic capacities; framing policy agendas, problems, and evaluations; and structuring, stimulating, and stalling political participation.

In “Social Science and Liberal Values in a Time of War,” Jeffrey Isaac urges us to discuss “the responsibilities of social scientists during wartime.” He focuses specifically on the ethics of responsibility appropriate to the university-based scholar when political authority attacks the values, both moral and non-moral, that we implicitly presuppose when we function as academics in general, and political scientists in particular. Isaac invokes the authority of Max Weber to elucidate the precise boundaries of these obligations as well as to find a notion of responsibility on which all political scientists, whatever their partisan commitments, can agree.Peter Breiner is the author of Max Weber and Democratic Politics and articles on Weber and other German theorists. He is working on a book on the role of examples in political theory. The author thanks Jeff Isaac for a most useful interchange that helped him focus this response.

In contrast to statistical methods, a number of case study methods—collectively referred to as Mill's methods, used by generations of social science researchers—only consider deterministic relationships. They do so to their detriment because heeding the basic lessons of statistical inference can prevent serious inferential errors. Of particular importance is the use of conditional probabilities to compare relevant counterfactuals. A prominent example of work using Mill's methods is Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions. Barbara Geddes's widely assigned critique of Skocpol's claim of a causal relationship between foreign threat and social revolution is valid if this relationship is considered to be deterministic. If, however, we interpret Skocpol's hypothesized causal relationship to be probabilistic, Geddes's data support Skocpol's hypothesis. But Skocpol, unlike Geddes, failed to provide the data necessary to compare conditional probabilities. Also problematic for Skocpol is the fact that when one makes causal inferences, conditional probabilities are of interest only insofar as they provide information about relevant counterfactuals.Jasjeet S. Sekhon thanks Walter R. Mebane Jr., Henry Brady, Bear Braumoeller, Shigeo Hirano, Gary King, John Londregan, Bruce Rusk, Theda Skocpol, Suzanne M. Smith, Jonathan N. Wand, the editors of Perspectives on Politics, and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and advice.