The new editorial team at the University of Mannheim and London School of Economics and Political Science would like to take this opportunity, in our first “Notes from the Editors,” to express our great thanks to the APSA Presidents Jennifer Hochschild and David Lake, President-elect Kathleen Thelen, the APSA staff, the Council, and the Publications Committee, as well as to Cambridge University Press, for their support and guidance during this transition process. The decision to transfer the editorship of the Review to Europe has caused some astonishment on both sides of the Atlantic. And indeed, the collaboration of a British-German editorial team that will process manuscripts from scholars around the world seems to contrast the recent political events that herald scattered regionalism instead of global competition. Admittedly, we had to overcome organizational, legal, and political hurdles to realize this transfer. But with the help of APSA Executive Director Steven Rathgeb Smith, APSA Director of Publications Barbara Walthall, and Mark Zadrozny from Cambridge University Press, we were able to master all challenges. We would also like to thank John Ishiyama for his support during this process, which officially ended on September 1. Finally, we would like to thank the members of the APSR editorial board for their willingness to support our work over the upcoming years, and those reviewers who spent valuable time and resources to serve our profession.

As you might have seen, one of our innovations is to offer two publication formats. Manuscripts are the classic 12,000 word original pieces that advance our understanding of important political issues and are of general interest to the field of political science. Our new format, Letters, are 4,000 word pieces that address an important research problem or question, showing a novel perspective on existing research and encouraging scholarly debate in the discipline.

We also clarified our review process, prior publication, reproduction, and disclosure policies in our updated submission guidelines. In addition to improving representativeness and quality, we want to increase the transparency of the review process and better understand its effectiveness. This means that we will collect and present data on the number of (invited) reviewers, the duration of the review process, and the rules used for the editors’ decisions on the manuscript. In the end, however, the success of all of our efforts will depend on the support that we receive from our colleagues and their willingness to serve our profession.

This issue (Volume 111, Number 1) is the first produced by our team but all articles that are published were processed by our predecessors at UNT. Hence, most of the credit for this issue should be given to UNT. Due to a sizeable backlog we expect that this will also apply to the next issue (Volume 111, Number 2). We will continue their tradition of providing a brief introduction summarizing the basic arguments of every article in each issue. This issue's articles speak to a wide audience in political science, covering topics such as normative theory, comparative politics, international relations, political economy, and formal modeling. They address questions on trust, lobbying, power, conflict, elections, parties, and the working of democracy.

The relationship between trade liberalization and domestic market protection has been a focus for the study of political economy for the past decades. While most of the current work assumes that the variation in trade policy comes from interindustry differences, it remained an open question that explains the within-industry variation in tariff rates. In his article “Political Cleavages within Industry: Firm-level Lobbying for Trade Liberalization,” In Song Kim offers a theoretical explanation based on firm-level lobbying that predicts which firms lobby for product-specific liberalization. Accordingly, product differentiation eliminates collective action problems among exporting firms and further motivates productive exporting firms to lobby the government for lower tariffs. Also, product differentiation reduces the worries about product substitution among domestic firms and makes them less likely to oppose open trade. Kim examines his theory using an original data set that combines bill information derived from lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 and economic data from financial databases. Consistent with his theory, he finds that productive firms lobby more often when their industries are comprised of differentiated products, and firms lobby to reduce trade barriers on specific products. This is an important contribution that questions the standard assumptions about the origins of trade policy preferences and provides a successful application of firm-level data.

The conventional wisdom in the international relations literature suggests that states have strong incentives to achieve power balance against other states, and that equally powerful states are more likely to experience conflict. However, empirically we observe very few conflicts. Specifically, Douglas M. Gibler argues in his article “State Development, Parity, and International Conflict” that the correlation between parity and conflict is spurious. The reason is that state capabilities and dyadic power differences are largely fixed over time, while Gibler points to the nature and development of state capabilities that are the driving factors of conflicts. When uncertainty explains the parity-conflict relationship, which decreases with power asymmetry, the type and timing of state system entry predicts both the likelihood of parity in any given country-dyad, but also that dyad's propensity for conflict. State-making and system entry may change the situation and lead to more power symmetry, which promotes peace at a low and conflict at a high level. Using a well-established measure on dyadic power parity and the militarized dispute onset in the period of 1816–2001, Gibler reveals that there is no evidence for the parity-conflict relationship and that this relationship is simply a product of factors associated with state system entry.

In “A Problem-Based Approach to Democratic Theory,” Mark E. Warren criticizes the common style of thinking in the ongoing democratic theory debate about deliberation, elections, and other models of democracy that prescribe the organization of democracy into a political system. This leads to a variety of labels of democracy, such as electoral democracy, multiparty democracy, competitive democracy, or deliberative democracy, which only describe particular practices of procedural, organizational, or communicative responses to disagreement and preference and collective will formation without answering the question what we should expect to accomplish in a democracy. Warren proposes an alternative strategy to make democratic theories normatively more robust as well as sufficiently fine-grained when discussing democratic deficits in complex political systems. By distinguishing between functions/systems and practices/institutions he develops a problem-based approach that first asks for the kind of problems a political system has to solve if it is to function democratically. The second question addresses the strengths and weaknesses of generic political practices, such as deliberating, representing, voting, etc., as ways and means of addressing problems. To that respect, the conclusion is that a democratic political system should empower inclusion, form collective agendas and wills, and have capacities to make collective decisions. Based on these pillars, common democratic practices can then be theorized as to what extent they maximize a political system's democratic problem-solving capacities.

The (responsible) party government model of political representation has been a dominant form of democratic governance over the past decades. However, this model is accused of having lost the capacity to be responsive to the public and responsible for the policy outcomes. In “Will vs. Reason: The Populist and Technocratic Forms of Political Representation and Their Critique to Party Government,” Daniele Caramani proposes that populist mobilization—an often addressed factor—and technocratic management—a less discussed perspective—can be considered as two alternative forms of governance to the dominant party government model. Both alternatives share a unitary, nonpluralist, unmediated and unaccountable vision of society's general interest. However, technocracy stresses the delegation of authority to experts in order to identify the general interest from rational speculation for the people. In contrast, populism stresses responsiveness to the people through leaders who equate the putative interest with the will of the people. Caramani ends with an inspiring discussion about the difficulties for political parties to address both populist and technocratic challenges when trying to find a balance between responsiveness and responsibilities, respectively.

How does democracy promote well-being as our ability to live as we would like? Although the literature has generally agreed that democratic practice can provide citizens with better lives, there is still a wide variation in well-being across and within democracies that is associated with different standards in health, employment, and other economic and societal conditions. In “Democracy at Work: Moving Beyond Elections to Improve Well-Being,” Michael Touchton, Natasha Borges Sugiyama, and Brian Wampler attempt to uncover how exactly democracy promotes well-being by explaining the variation in infant mortality rates in Brazil. They examine whether civil, political, and social rights help people to live a better life. Using original data from Brazil covering 5,570 Brazilian municipalities for the period 2006–2013, they demonstrate how local policy councils and federal social programs interactively reduce infant mortality rates, while the results for the effect of competitive elections remain mixed. The findings suggest the strongest influence comes from the interaction between participatory institutions, innovative social programs, and local state capacity.

The perceived tension between Tocqueville's works on promoting democracy and defending the French Empire has raised an intense debate over the century. Should Tocqueville's defense of democratic liberty be discounted because of his support for the French colonial policy toward Algeria? Drawing on evidence from Tocqueville's published writings, parliamentary speeches, notes, and correspondence, Ewa Atanassow argues in “Democracy and Colonization: Tocqueville Reconsidered” that Tocqueville's views on democracy and colonialism are in fact reconcilable: he was critical of the French colonial regime and colonization in general. Accordingly, the image of Tocqueville as a committed colonizer is a common misperception that arises when ignoring the broader civilizational vision of his work that viewed European expansionism as an instrument of the global movement towards equality. This suggests that Tocqueville considered colonization as an important tool to disseminate democratic values. As a result, rather than a departure from democratic liberty, colonization serves as a pivotal moment in the democratizing process.

Recent scholarship has largely considered that political parties are in crisis and that parties may no longer serve as the mediator between society and state. In their article “The Crisis of Party Democracy, Cognitive Mobilization, and the Case for Making Parties More Deliberative,” Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti and Fabio Wolkenstein attempt to identify the potential cause of the crisis of parties and then propose that parties need to become more internally democratic and deliberative. Drawing on evidence from the empirical literature on civic culture and party democracy, they identify the transformation in the nature of the demand by a more informed and educated electorate as a convincing answer for the reason of the crisis of party democracy (as compared to the overall decrease of this demand). Accordingly, if political parties are perceived as too bureaucratic and elite-dominated by a more informed and educated electorate, their prescriptive model of deliberative intraparty democracy describes the necessary change in the parties’ organizational structure. This model includes an empowering of local party branches, the discussion in executive committees, and the creation of function-specific fora within (technology-friendly) parties. Walking through potential objections, they defend their model as the most appropriate response to the demands of an increasingly more cognitively mobilized citizenry, if parties want to regain their mediation function between society and the state.

In their article “Moral Power: How Public Opinion on Culture War Issues Shapes Partisan Predispositions and Religious Orientations,” Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp examine the fascinating question of whether partisan and religious predispositions drive individuals’ positions on culture war issues, or whether it is the other way around. Contrary to conventional wisdom and issue-based models of opinion change, Goren and Chapp argue that culture war attitudes are foundational elements in the political and religious belief systems that lead individuals to update their partisan and religious predispositions. Using data from panel studies covering the period 1992–2012, the study shows that opinions on culture war issues promote a revision of individuals’ partisan affinities and religious orientations. More specifically, the analysis of the heatedly debated issues about abortion and gay rights reveals that partisan alignment and religious predisposition impact the issue-specific evaluation, while individual perspectives on these culture war issues update party loyalties and religion affiliation. This reversal finding of reversible partisanship and religiosity will have a major impact on fields including public opinion, political psychology, political parties, and religion and politics. It incentivizes scholars to reconsider the extent to which cultural attitudes need to be incorporated in models of party identification, religiosity, and public opinion.

How does incumbency affect representation work in countries where term limits and party weaknesses constrain the accountability of parties to voters? Rather than being privileged, incumbent parties are often situated at a disadvantageous position when it comes to winning municipal elections in Brazil. Marko Klašnja and Rocío Titiunik examine this puzzle in their article “The Incumbency Curse: Weak Parties, Term Limits, and Unfulfilled Accountability” by connecting this empirical regularity to institutional contexts, namely term limits and weak party discipline. Klašnja and Titiunik theorize that these factors discourage individual politicians to be accountable to both voters and political parties, which further result in electoral punishments. With an original Brazilian data set and a comparative data set in five additional Latin American countries, they find strong support for their argument. Specifically, they find that incumbent parties in mayoral elections tend to be electorally vulnerable, that the disadvantage to incumbent parties is concentrated in municipalities where a mayor is in the last term, that such disadvantage does not occur for the Brazilian Workers Party since it is a programmatic, cohesive, and high-disciplined party, and that the disadvantage is not limited to Brazil. This suggests that the interaction between party weakness and electoral rules that restrict reelection can compromise accountability in a way that perpetuates the weakness of a party system as a whole.

How should social media platforms be constructed to allow for interactions which are marked by democratic principles such as reciprocity, equality, and inclusion? In “The Architecture of Political Spaces: Trolls, Digital Media, and Deweyan Democracy,” Jennifer Forestal draws from the work of John Dewey to outline a theory of democratic interactions focusing on the spatial dynamics of social media. She identifies boundedness and flexibility as two key characteristics of this space. With clearly demarcated boundaries one is more likely to enhance reciprocity. Flexibility, on the other hand, is necessary for developing new ideas and experiences. Using these criteria, Forestal evaluates Kinja, Gawker Media's commenting platform, both before and after trolls attacked the site in 2014. The trolling attacks took advantage of the website's anonymity and effectively disrupted the normal flow of conversations. However, by reintroducing tiered comments to prevent future trolling, Kinja failed to fully uphold the kind of creative flexibility which fosters the diversity of opinion and interest that characterizes democratic space. Thereby, Forestal's study illustrates the importance of (software) architectures for democratic discourses. Moreover, the findings highlight the common challenges that exist for both real and digital environments when trying to establish democratic principles that govern social (media) activity.

Under which conditions do politicians prompt bureaucrats to provide effective public services? The piece “Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Development: Evidence from India” by Saad Gulzar and Benjamin J. Pasquale compares two types of systems in which bureaucrats are supervised by either single or multiple political principals in the implementation of a key large-scale development program in India—the Natural Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Gulzar and Pasquale argue that the political/bureaucrat relationship is critical for such programs and that electoral incentives are decisive for their success. The reason is that politicians face stronger incentives to motivate bureaucrats if they can internalize their own electoral benefits rather than sharing them with other politicians through overlapping jurisdictions. Using an original data set from the world's largest employment program covering nearly all villages in India, they apply a geographic regression discontinuity design, in which geographically proximate villages are compared with each other on treatments and controls. The findings show that the quality of public service decreases if bureaucrats have multiple political principals. This impressively highlights not only the relevance of principal agent-problems between political principals and bureaucratic agents, but also the importance of electoral incentives for the successful implementation of such program.

Courts produce legal outcomes out of factual scenarios by taking into account precedent cases and available doctrines. This creates challenges at each level of the judicial hierarchy where lower-level courts need to not only learn the facts of any legal dispute but also find the doctrine that resolves dispute and extrapolates on the implications of dispute resolution for future cases. Consequently, higher-level courts select specific cases to formulate doctrines that guide lower-level courts through all possible cases. The authors of “Precedent and Doctrine in a Complicated World,” Steven Callander and Tom S. Clark, capture this learning process by modeling the mapping of case facts to legal outcomes in hierarchical judiciary decision making as a Brownian motion. This model of judicial learning and communication explores how lower-level courts can optimally adjudicate the gap between case facts and precedents, and how higher-level courts can optimally select cases. However, since uncertainty drives judicial decision making on all levels, the case selected almost never favors a winner party nor is it the most novel dissimilar one. This implies that this path-dependence increases complexity of law, legal carve-outs in adjudication, and a doctrine that is difficult to predict.

It has become common to comprehend Machiavelli's Florentine Histories as a break with his earlier writings of Discourses and The Prince due to the neglect of founders and princely redeemers. In contrast, John P. McCormick suggests in his essay “Faulty Foundings and Failed Reformers in Machiavelli's Florentine Histories” that the Histories continues to delineate the ways in which potential founders and reformers ought to exploit political opportunities, which was pervasive in Machiavelli's earlier writings. McCormick argues that the Histories presents Giano della Bella and Michele di Lando as political leaders whom Machiavelli implicitly advises to exploit the opportunities generated by soci(et)al conflicts for their own benefit and that of their patria. Similar to Moses, Romulus, and Brutus, Giano and Michele are confronted with opportunities that could and should have resulted in the vigorous reordering of politics. Thus, instead of solely being a historiography, McCormick shows that Machiavelli's Histories is a proposal of how Florence could have been refounded by a virtuous leader. He argues that, while Machiavelli explicitly writes that the designated audience for the Histories is the Medici prelates, friends, and florentine aristocracy, who “merchandised” Florence for their own purposes, Machiavelli intends for readers to apply what they learned from Discourses and The Prince to Histories, thereby convincingly demonstrating how the Histories functions as an implicit criticism of Florence's principality rather than a change in Machiavelli's political orientation.