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Notes from the Editors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

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The first five of this issue's articles address how democracies work, or how they should work—what motivates voters, how democratic governments distribute public goods, how representatives are (or should be) constrained by their electorates' preferences, and whether episodes of civil violence spur or retard democratic participation.

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From the Editor: In This Issue
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American Political Science Review , Volume 103 , Issue 2 , May 2009, pp. iii - vii
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Copyright © American Political Science Association 2009

IN THIS ISSUE

The first five of this issue's articles address how democracies work, or how they should work—what motivates voters, how democratic governments distribute public goods, how representatives are (or should be) constrained by their electorates' preferences, and whether episodes of civil violence spur or retard democratic participation.

How do citizens construct or alter their social identities, and when does loyalty to a group (or to the nation as a whole) trump economic self-interest? This is about as basic and enduring a question as any in political science, central to recent controversies about U.S. voting, comparative studies of ethnicity, constructivist analysis in international relations, and normative inquiry on our duty to others. More recently, cognate disciplines—experimental anthropology and economics, cognitive psychology and brain-imaging—have contributed importantly to collective understanding. The first two articles in this issue advance this debate significantly, and from quite different perspectives.

In our lead article, “A Model of Social Identity with an Application to Political Economy: Nation, Class, and Redistribution,” Moses Shayo develops and tests an innovative and ambitious model of self-chosen and malleable social identity. Working with an exogenously given but impermanent matrix of social groups and of individual closeness to them, citizens choose the groups with which they will identify and the behaviors they will adopt, maximizing a weighted combination of status and post-tax income. Focusing on two social identities that are ubiquitous in industrial societies—nation and social class, Shayo draws out three central implications of his model: (a) that the poor will identify more strongly with the nation than will the rich; (b) that stronger identification with the nation will, all else equal, reduce political support for redistribution; and (c) that, particularly among the poor, identification with the nation will increase both with national power and prestige and with the growth of ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities. Shayo demonstrates, at both the national and the individual level, ample empirical support for all three propositions. Perhaps most importantly, his perspective can explain why, in sharp contradiction to the logically compelling Meltzer-Richard model, more unequal democracies often seem to redistribute less, rather than more: what Peter Lindert has called the “Robin Hood paradox.” And in his careful incorporation of findings from social psychology and experimental economics, Shayo provides a model of interdisciplinary discourse.

Loyalty to nation rather than faction was precisely something that French revolutionaries and American federalists wanted to instill. And, as The Federalist No. 10 famously argued, the “mischiefs of faction” would be fewer in a large republic. In our second article, “Moral Bias in Large Elections: Theory and Experimental Evidence,” Timothy Feddersen, Sean Gailmard, and Alvaro Sandroni demonstrate experimentally a fundamental part of this insight: The larger the set of voters, and thus the lower the likelihood that any single vote will be pivotal, the greater is the probability that the electorate will be animated by “moral” rather than “instrumental” (i.e., purely self-interested) concerns. Whether such moral voting is normatively good or bad, they emphasize in an early footnote, is a question they leave open (as does Shayo). But putting Shayo together with Feddersen, Gailmard, and Sandroni we can say—somewhat paradoxically—that voting will likely become less materialistically self-interested as the society becomes larger, externally more powerful, internally less equal, and ethnically more fragmented.

But suppose we stipulate that voting in democracies is self-interested. Does public policy then favor small and concentrated interests (as would follow from theories of collective action) or large and diffuse ones (as the median-voter theorem would imply)? More precisely, does widening political participation advantage concentrated or diffuse interests? While previous studies have examined democracy's effect on the supply of public goods, David S. Brown and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, in (pun intended) “The Transforming Power of Democracy: Regime Type and the Distribution of Electricity,” are among the first to hone in on how a specific public good, namely electric power, is distributed. Democratization, they find in a careful panel study involving 733 country-years, increases the share of electricity that goes to residential households (presumably a diffuse interest), while reducing the share received by industry (a concentrated one).

Modern work on the electoral connection, and on principal-agent problems more generally, actually complicates the Burkean dilemma about how an elected representative “ought” to behave—as merely a delegate (voting on each issue as her constituents desire), or as a trustee who brings to each issue independent judgment and perhaps better knowledge. As previous scholarship has shown, even a representative who seeks only re-election may be moved, if she understands better the consequences of a proposed policy, to defy constituents' short-term wishes. In “Representation Rethought: On Trustees, Delegates, and Gyroscopes in the Study of Political Representation and Democracy,” Andrew Rehfeld revisits this normative issue and argues that three separate questions are involved: the aims of legislation, representatives' proper source of judgment, and representatives' motives. Viewed in this way, the conflict between the representative as trustee and as delegate can be subsumed into a more general and nuanced problematic that characterizes broad categories of decision making.

Finally, under the rubric of democratic theory in its broadest sense, how does prior civil violence affect subsequent democratic participation? Most of us, probably, would conjecture a priori that participation would diminish. But Christopher Blattman, examining the experience of northern Uganda, finds in “From Violence to Voting: War and Political Participation in Uganda” that a history of forced participation in violence—typically via abduction—seems to increase voting and civic engagement among ex-combatants without affecting their nonpolitical forms of participation. Blattman notes that these findings, if they can be generalized, challenge our conventional theories of political participation, and for a possible answer he turns to psychological research on the impact of traumatic events.

Moving to a more direct emphasis on political violence, our sixth article, “Should Peacemakers Take Sides? Major Power Mediation, Coercion, and Bias,” by Katja Favretto, asks how conflicts, whether civil or international, are affected by the intervention of a powerful outside party. Where conventional wisdom assumes that such intervention can work only if the would-be mediator maintains strict neutrality between the belligerents, Favretto finds empirically a U-shaped relationship. Although unbiased intervention by powerful outsiders indeed raises the likelihood of successful resolution, so does intervention that is strongly biased in favor of one of the disputants, chiefly because that bias reveals convincingly the intervener's readiness to enforce an agreement militarily. Turning then to some recent real-world examples of intervention, Favretto argues that attention to this nonlinear relationship can resolve what appear to be contradictory conclusions from previous empirical work.

On a different note, two complementary articles deal with the link between governance and privatization in post-Communist societies. In “Helping Hand or Grabbing Hand? State Bureaucracy and Privatization Effectiveness,” J. David Brown, John S. Earle, and Scott Gehlbach exploit extensive regional variation in post-Communist Russia to examine whether a large state bureaucracy hinders or helps privatization. Surprising to those of us drawn to kleptocratic or “grabbing hand” views of the state, they find that privatization is systematically more effective and corruption less prevalent where bureaucracy—and, presumably, state capacity—is larger.

State capacity also seems to play a role in determining who, at the mass level, supports or opposes privatization. Working from survey data in a larger set of 28 post-transition economies, Irina Denisova, Markus Eller, Timothy Frye, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya find, in “Who Wants to Revise Privatization? The Complementarity of Market Skills and Institutions,” that, as governance grows more democratic and effective, high-skill workers tend more to support, and low-skill workers to oppose, privatization. Conversely, where government is autocratic and institutions are weak, the difference between low- and high-skill workers' support for privatization disappears.

Many, perhaps most of us, were raised on the view that Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws was the brilliant but incoherent work of an aristocratic dilettante who could not be troubled to impose a unified structure or argument on his work. A minority view, or rather views, has held that there is some coherent structure, but few agree on what it might be. In our final article in this issue, “The Design of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws: The Triumph of Freedom over Determinism,” Ana J. Samuel advances a genuinely novel thesis: The work is organized dialectically around an antithesis of human freedom and determinism, with freedom emerging triumphantly in the second half of the work.

Once again, we think we present a collection of first-rate articles that will be read with profit and enjoyment by a broad spectrum of political scientists—and, indeed, by a wider public. We congratulate the authors, and we look forward to the conversations that their contributions will stimulate.

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