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- Volume 3, 2000
Annual Review of Political Science - Volume 3, 2000
Volume 3, 2000
- Preface
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- Review Articles
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Preference Formation
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 1–24More LessThis review concerns political preferences—what they are and where they come from. We begin by documenting the close relationship between processes of preference formation and change. Rather than suddenly appearing, most preferences emerge from interactions between individuals and their environment. This aspect of preference formation poses a concrete challenge: to uncover the mechanics of these interactions in important social contexts. We then describe political science research that meets this challenge. We find an expansive literature that clarifies how phenomena such as parties, campaigns, and the need to act strategically affect preferences. This work provides many widely applicable insights.
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Constructing Effective Environmental Regimes
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 25–42More LessIn the environmental literature, accounts of cooperative progress commonly emphasize the activity and leadership of nongovernmental organizations, as well as the constitutive roles that environmental regimes play by legitimizing, by promoting reflectivist discourse, and by redefining roles. This essay lays out the differences between the constructivist and political-economic theories of environmental regime effectiveness and examines the extent to which the constructivist emphasis is empirically justified by three recent collections of case studies. Of the surprisingly modest effects that environmental regimes have had, most appear to have come through the use of mechanisms that already play a prominent role in the political economy literature. Constructivist processes, despite the attention they have received, appear to have had only a marginal impact.
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Globalization and Politics
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 43–62More LessThis chapter reviews the issues at stake in current public and scholarly debates over the impact of changes in the international economy on domestic politics and society. Over the past two decades, there have been dramatic increases in the flow of portfolio capital, foreign direct investment, and foreign exchange trading across borders at the same time as barriers to trade in goods and services have come down. These changes raise many new questions about the effects of trade and capital mobility on the autonomy of nation-states and the relative power in society of various groups. The first signs of realignments within and between political parties of both the left and the right over issues of national independence and trade openness suggest a rich new terrain for political inquiry.
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Alliances: Why Write Them Down?
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 63–83More LessStates formalize some relations into military alliances. A formal commitment could increase credibility by signaling an intention to come to the aid of another state or by creating commitment by altering the costs and benefits of such intervention. In this review, I lay out three considerations in a decision to intervene in a war. Signals require some costs to trasmit information, and I examine some possible costs in alliances. A state's willingness to intervene could be enhanced by audience costs for failure to honor a commitment. Neorealist arguments about alliances are flawed in asserting that security is a public good and in failing to realize that all states have both status quo and revisionist interests. This review surveys a number of smaller topics in alliances—the tradeoff between arms and allies, burden sharing, alliance management and duration, nonsecurity benefits, and domestic politics.
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Wheels Within Wheels: Rethinking the Asian Crisis and the Asian Model
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 85–115More LessThe East Asian economic crisis of 1997–1999 had its causes not mainly in the “East Asian model” nor even in departures from the model, but in international capital markets and the governments of the core economies, especially the United States and Japan. The post–Bretton Woods system, without any link between the dollar and gold, allowed the United States to finance persistent external deficits by creating US government bonds. These bonds raised the foreign reserves of the surplus countries, notably Japan and East Asia. The rise in reserves triggered credit booms that generated asset inflation and industrial overcapacity. The booms gave way to crisis. The East Asian variant differed from the earlier Japanese one by being fueled by very large capital inflows in the early to mid 1990s from recession-hit Japan and Europe, as well as from the United States. This perspective, which highlights causes outside of East Asia, suggests that emerging market economies will remain vulnerable to such crises in the absence of capital controls, a different system of international payments, and a more equal world income distribution. It also suggests unexpected directions for political science research.
To its credit [Korea] has acknowledged its faults with remarkable candour. It has not tried to blame foreigners for its troubles, nor has it hid behind tariff barriers or currency controls. Instead, it has pledged to abandon the economic system that took it from poverty to prosperity in a generation. (Economist 1999)
The Korean economy is another kind of leftover Cold War artifact, good for an era of security threats and close bilateral relations with Washington but of questionable use in the global “world without borders” of the 1990s…. It is a highly leveraged, highly political, manifestly corrupt nexus between the state and big business…. [It] has always been intrinsically unstable and therefore vulnerable to exactly the sort of financial calamity that has now befallen it. (Woo-Cumings 1997)
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Post-Soviet Politics
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 117–148More LessSince the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the area specialty of Soviet Politics has been transformed. Research on six themes is reviewed: state and revolution, democratization, federalism, economic growth, international relations, and institutional legacies reflecting the communist past. The review finds that post-Soviet research speaks directly to current trends in political science, and the findings of this research should impel generalists to re-specify their theories. A recommendation is offered that the study of post-Soviet politics should push political science away from a notion of institutionalization and in the direction of identifying institutional equilibria.
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International Institutions and System Transformation
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 149–166More LessStarting in the 1990s, scholarship has produced interesting, new, nuanced ideas about the potential role of international institutions in transforming the global political system. Political scientists have achieved a new understanding of how the Westphalian system came into being, and this understanding has provided a rudimentary model of the dynamics of system transformation. The new institutionalism has provided insights into the possible role of institutions. Scholars have developed new understandings of secondary consequences of conducting interactions among nation-states through international institutions. The study of a particular institution, the European Union, has been revitalized and important knowledge has emerged about its dynamics and trajectory. Finally, scholars have begun to raise questions about the properties of a non-Westphalian system, especially about how democratic accountability could be established. This chapter examines each of these developments in turn.
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Success and Failure in Foreign Policy
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 167–182More LessThe field of foreign policy analysis needs a common set of concepts and analytical frameworks to facilitate comparison of alternative policy options. Not only is general agreement lacking, there is not even a common understanding of what is meant by success. In order to build policy-relevant knowledge concerning success and failure in foreign policy, the following questions must be addressed: How effective is a policy instrument likely to be, with respect to which goals and targets, at what cost, and in comparison with what other policy instruments? Failure to address each question may lead to serious policy mistakes.
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Economic Determinants of Electoral Outcomes
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 183–219More LessEconomic conditions shape election outcomes in the world's democracies. Good times keep parties in office, bad times cast them out. This proposition is robust, as the voluminous body of research reviewed here demonstrates. The strong findings at the macro level are founded on the economic voter, who holds the government responsible for economic performance, rewarding or punishing it at the ballot box. Although voters do not look exclusively at economic issues, they generally weigh those more heavily than any others, regardless of the democracy they vote in.
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Emotions in Politics
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 221–250More LessThe study of emotion in politics has been active, especially as it relates to the personality of political leaders and as an explanation for how people evaluate significant features around them. Researchers have been divided into two groups—those who study leaders and those who study publics. The research programs have also been divided between those who use emotion to explain reliance on early experience that dominates contemporary judgment and those who use emotion to explain why people respond to the immediate contemporary circumstances around them. More recently, theory and research have attempted to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory roles by integrating them. Emotion's role in politics is pervasive both because emotion enables past experience to be encoded with its evaluative history and because emotion enables contemporary circumstances to be quickly evaluated. More recently still, theoretical models and supporting evidence suggest that there are multiple channels of emotional evaluations.
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The Causes and Consequences of Arms Races
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 251–276More LessThis chapter reviews the literature on causes of arms races, their consequences, and when a state should build up arms and engage in an arms race if necessary. The literature tends to equate external causes with threats; the chapter argues for a broader understanding that includes all causes of rational arming behavior. Internal causes of arms races are then understood to be factors within the state that lead it to adopt suboptimal policies. Although the causes and consequences of arms races are usually dealt with separately, in fact they are closely connected. When a state engages in an arms race because this is its best option, the state is acting rationally, the causes of the arms race are external, and the arms race has no consequences of its own. In contrast, when a state arms because domestic interests have distorted its policy, the arms race produces negative consequences. Research on the consequences of arms races has been hindered by the lack of a fully developed theory of when a state shouldrace; progress on defensive realism is helping to fill this gap.
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Constitutional Political Economy: On the Possibility of Combining Rational Choice Theory and Comparative Politics
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 277–303More LessRational choice theory has typically used either noncooperative game theory or cooperative, social choice theory to model elections, coalition bargaining, the prisoner's dilemma, and so on. This essay concentrates on the ideas of William Riker and Douglass North, both of whom, in very different ways, studied events of the past in an attempt to understand constitutional or institutional transformations. The key notion presented here is the “belief cascade,” a change in the understanding of the members of a society when they face a quandary. This idea is used to critique simple vote-maximizing models of elections, derived from Downs' earlier conception of party competition. Inferences are drawn on the possible applications of rational choice theory to the study of constitutional political economy in order to provide some insight into the differences between democratic polities.
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Foucault Steals Political Science
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 305–330More LessThe subject matter of what has been traditionally considered central to political science, namely, power and government, has been stolen by Foucault while central trends in the discipline as a whole have departed markedly from serious engagement with those topics. Yet Foucault's discussions and analyses of power and government are so original, so striking in their import not only for the way we do political science, but for our lives, thought, and practices as scholars, that his work ought by now to have become a focal point for the resurrection of these topics and their restoration to centrality in the discipline.
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Assessing the Capacity of Mass Electorates
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 331–353More LessThis is a highly selective review of the huge literature bearing on the capacity of mass electorates for issue voting, in view of the great (mal)distribution of political information across the public, with special attention to the implications of information heterogeneity for alternative methods of research. I trace the twists and turns in understanding the meaning of high levels of response instability on survey policy items from their discovery in the first panel studies of 1940 to the current day. I consider the recent great elaboration of diverse heuristics that voters use to reason with limited information, as well as evidence that the aggregation of preferences so central to democratic process serves to improve the apparent quality of the electoral response. A few recent innovations in design and analysis hold promise of illuminating this topic from helpful new angles.
Never overestimate the information of the American electorate, but never underestimate its intelligence.
(Mark Shields, syndicated political columnist, citing an old aphorism)
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Unions in Decline? What Has Changed and Why
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 355–377More LessBetween 1950 and 1980, labor markets grew increasingly organized in advanced industrial societies. Union membership in most countries expanded more rapidly than the labor force, centralized wage setting became more common, and union members became increasingly concentrated in a small number of large unions. Between 1980 and 1992, however, union density fell on average, and centralized wage setting grew increasingly rare. Only union concentration continued to increase in the 1980s. Existing theories of union organization and collective bargaining institutions are largely successful in explaining both the trends over time and much of the cross-national variation from 1950 to 1980, but they fail to account for the dramatic declines in union strength that some (but not all) countries have experienced since 1980.
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The British Constitution: Labour’s Constitutional Revolution
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 379–400More LessThe Labour government elected in the United Kingdom in May 1997 has embarked on the country's biggest ever program of constitutional change. This chapter sets out the main constitutional measures adopted so far and identifies further changes that will need to follow in order to accommodate these early changes. The new constitutional architecture in the United Kingdom is a form of quasifederalism in which new institutions will have to be created to rebalance the political center if the Union is to hold together.
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The Continued Significance of Class Voting
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 401–417More LessClass voting is supposedly in severe decline in advanced industrial democracies. However, this conventional wisdom derives from research using problematic methods and measures and an overly simple model of political change. This chapter overviews past and current comparative research into changes in and explanations of class-based political behavior and argues for the continued significance of class voting and, by extension, class politics in contemporary democracies. I particularly emphasize the importance of using more appropriate methods and the application and testing of theories that integrate developments in this area with those in studies of voting behavior more generally. This translates into a need for the systematic testing of bottom-up/top-down interactions in the relations between social structure and political preferences and the precise specification and measurement of explanatory mechanisms that can account for the association between class position and voting.
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The Psychological Foundations of Identity Politics
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 419–447More LessThis chapter reviews social psychological theories relating to political identity and group behavior. We define individual and social identity, examine the main social psychological explanations of social identity, and discuss work on intergroup relations, boundaries, and conflict. We suggest several particular substantive political debates that would benefit from knowledge of this literature.
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Electoral Realignments
Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 449–474More LessAmerican electoral realignment theory, as constructed in its classic form chiefly by Key, Schattschneider, Sundquist, and Burnham, can be sorted into 11 distinct empirical claims. These pertain to dichotomization of election types, periodicity, a cyclical dynamic, high voter turnout, durable new issue cleavages, ideologized elections, nationalization of issues, major changes in government policy, redistributive policy, effective and consequential voter voice, and the “system of 1896.” These claims are assessed for their empirical validity and illuminative power.
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Previous Volumes
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Volume 26 (2023)
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Volume 25 (2022)
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Volume 24 (2021)
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Volume 23 (2020)
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Volume 22 (2019)
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Volume 21 (2018)
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Volume 20 (2017)
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Volume 19 (2016)
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Volume 18 (2015)
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Volume 17 (2014)
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Volume 16 (2013)
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Volume 15 (2012)
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Volume 14 (2011)
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Volume 13 (2010)
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Volume 12 (2009)
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Volume 11 (2008)
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Volume 10 (2007)
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Volume 9 (2006)
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Volume 8 (2005)
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Volume 7 (2004)
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Volume 6 (2003)
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Volume 5 (2002)
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Volume 4 (2001)
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Volume 3 (2000)
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Volume 2 (1999)
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Volume 1 (1998)
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Volume 0 (1932)