IN THIS ISSUE

Many of this issue's articles deal with the broad subject of inequality: political, social, gender, or urban-rural. The first two continue debates initiated by the seminal work of Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson (AJR) on two related questions: Do today's economically backward and autocratic societies result from predatory institutions originally imposed by colonialists; and does democracy emerge as a “commitment device” in distributive struggles between the poor and the rich?

In our lead article, “The Autocratic Legacy of Early Statehood,” Jacob Gerner Hariri offers a corrective to the first AJR thesis, a “reversal of fortunes,” according to which colonialists imposed predatory institutions on originally prosperous societies. Rather, Hariri argues, autocracy lingers today in societies where states developed earliest and were already strong enough to fend off colonial control; or, at worst, to allow existing elites to work with colonialists in imposing “indirect rule.” In either case, autocratic rule persisted. Only where pre-colonial states were weak, absent, or of recent origin—according to Hariri—did colonialism lead to transplantation of institutions, and often of settlers, that carried with them some tradition of self-government. Hariri's account offers the startling and counter-intuitive insight that European colonialism may have fostered “good” institutions precisely where it was most successful, and even under colonialists (e.g., the Spanish and Portuguese) usually regarded as the most exploitative.

Relatedly, Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman ask, in “Inequality and Regime Change: Democratic Transitions and the Stability of Democratic Rule,” whether transitions to and from autocracy are linked to economic inequality and to distributional struggles. Acemoglu and Robinson, as many will recall, posit a U-shaped relationship between inequality and autocracy: Where inequality is low, autocratic elites will rarely be challenged; in the most unequal societies, elites rationally concede little and invest heavily in repression. Hence the major regime conflicts, and the major transitions to and from autocracy, should occur in societies of “moderate” inequality. Moreover, since an expansion of the franchise is chiefly a way for elites to commit credibly to future redistribution, conflicts over form of regime will almost always be, at root, distributional. By way of contrast and in the tradition of Tocqueville, Boix finds a monotonic link between inequality and autocracy: At least where capital is immobile, a transition to democracy becomes likelier with increasing economic equality; a transition to autocracy likelier with increasing economic inequality.

Neither hypothesis, Haggard and Kaufman argue, stands up to close empirical inspection of the transitions that occurred around the globe between 1980 and 2000. Employing a new qualitative dataset that they have constructed, Haggard and Kaufman find—on the most generous coding—distributional conflict in only about half of the transitions to democracy, and in less than a third of the reversions to authoritarian rule. They show that many of the transitions both to and from democracy result from conflict within elites or between ethnic groups—rather than between rich and poor—and a significant share of democratizations occur in highly unequal societies, something unexpected in either Boix's or Acemoglu and Robinson's theory. Based on their qualitative analysis, Haggard and Kaufman suggest alternative causes both of transitions and of instability.

In “Putting Inequality in Its Place: Rural Consciousness and the Power of Perspective,” Katherine Cramer Walsh employs quite a different methodology to address a very different kind of inequality—that between urban and rural Americans. Having conducted intensive participant observation of recurring informal groups in 27 rural Wisconsin communities, Walsh found—after overcoming respondents' initial distrust and reticence—powerful sentiments of solidarity and resentment.Footnote ² Her rural interlocutors increasingly revealed their perceptions of rural deprivation, urban condescension and bias, and—above all—a strongly separate and distinct rural identity. Convinced that government, even at the state level, is tilted against rural interests, these respondents emphatically advocate lower spending and a “small state.”Footnote ³ Students of public opinion err, Walsh concludes, to the extent that they privilege issues of class, values, or economic interest over ones of “place” and community. Methodologically, she urges that structured interviews and focus groups be supplemented by longer-term observation and simple “listening.”

Do women participate equally with men in the kind of discussions that Walsh observes, or in deliberation generally? Does the share of women in the group and, where voting is involved, the decision-rule, affect whether men and women participate equally and have equal odds of affecting the outcome? On a larger scale, does increasing the share of women in, e.g., parliaments, promote gender equality? In “Gender Equality in Deliberative Participation,” Christopher F. Karpowitz, Tali Mendelberg, and Lee Shaker seek answers in a controlled experiment. Varying both the share of women and the decision-rule (majority or unanimity) in small groups of subjects, they find a conditional effect: Women participate and drive outcomes equally when (a) there are few women but unanimity is required and (b) under majority rule, when there are many women. Otherwise, men participate more than women and achieve outcomes closer to their own preferences. Perhaps the most surprising result is that men dominate discussion and outcomes when they are relatively few in the group but unanimity is required. Their results, Karpowitz, Mendelberg, and Shaker argue, can inform the design of deliberative bodies in a variety of contexts.

Does equality of representation, or even of participation, affect perhaps the most fundamental of women's rights—freedom from male violence against women? Less than we might think, or than experiments might lead us to believe, answer Mala Htun and S. Laurel Weldon in “The Civic Origins of Progressive Policy Change: Combatting Violence against Women in Global Perspective, 1975–2005.” Using an original data set that—among other things—traces the adoption of comprehensive policies to combat such violence, Htun and Weldon find little effect of women in government, women in parliament, the strength of leftist (usually pro-feminist) parties, or even per capita GDP. By far the strongest effect, they find, comes from the development of autonomous women's movements in civil society, also traced in their dataset. Moreover, the rise of such movements domestically seems to lead to (and not to be precipitated by) feminist international norms, including most prominently a norm that censures violence against women. Their finding likely generalizes, they argue: To explain social change, scholars must examine not only the “usual suspects” such as wealth and descriptive representation, but rather “civil society in general, and social movements in particular.”

We often assume that victims of violence— regardless of gender—will be made unequal, so intimidated by their experience that they will be less inclined to participate in the larger society, in deliberation, and in voting. Surprisingly, recent articles in this Review have countered that belief, showing that those who have been harmed or threatened by civil war, genocide, or even experience as child soldiers, are actually more inclined to participate. In “Crime Victimization and Political Participation,” Regina Bateson asks whether this counter-intuitive finding extends to victims of “ordinary” crime—mugging, burglary, carjacking, etc.—in less conflictual societies. She not only finds that it does (in surveys across five continents) but indeed that crime victimization is among the most powerful predictors of political participation, even when the crime is non-violent (e.g., fraud). In most societies, Bateson demonstrates, becoming the victim of a crime raises political participation by about the same amount as an additional five to ten years of education. While in some cases this newly aroused participation has the predictable goal of tougher anti-crime policies, or even of support for authoritarian rule, in most cases victimization simply makes citizens likelier to speak out, join groups, and vote—on many issues. As Bateson acknowledges, the policy implication of her finding is puzzling: Do successful efforts to reduce crime have the side effect of depressing political participation?

The conventional wisdom about clientelism resembles our intuitions about crime: Patron–client relations inhibit participation, and in particular constrain what might otherwise be the kind of self-provision of collective goods whose study the late Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom so luminously pioneered. We have plenty of instances in which powerful patrons block the provision of public goods, but also cases in which patrons help their clients to gain access to such public goods as education and clean water. The crucial difference, Mahvish Shami argues in “Collective Action, Clientelism, and Connectivity,” is whether the community is isolated. Exploiting a natural experiment in rural Punjab, India—where the construction of a new highway gave some peasants in clientelistic settings access to the wider world, while neighboring clientelistic communities remained isolated—Shami finds that patrons continued to block community based projects only where their clients remained isolated. In the newly connected villages, patrons often came to assist peasants' collective action, presumably because only such a transformation could preserve the patron's usefulness to his clients. In thus unraveling one of the mysteries that Lin Ostrom left us, Shami pays homage to the research trail she blazed.

Political equality is conventionally taken as a defining feature of democracy, but its relationship to liberty is by no means self-evident. In “Competing for Liberty: The Republican Critique of Democracy,” Nadia Urbinati offers a “friendly rejoinder” to contemporary neo-republican theories that supplement the weaknesses of a liberal conception of liberty as “non-interference” through a concept of liberty as “non-domination.” Attending to the polemical character of conceptions of liberty, Urbinati reconstructs the ongoing historical contestations between two models of political liberty: the Athenian (with its twin values of isonomia and isegoria, i.e., equality in the making of laws and equal right of free speech) and the Roman (with its emphasis on aequa libertas as the equality of different status groups before the law and security from domination). The latter, she shows, was rooted in a misrepresentation of democracy as populism, and its subsequent elaboration as a tradition harbored a persistent suspicion of democratic participation. Modern neo-republicanism is strongly supportive of democratic constitutionalism, yet Urbinati discerns traces of that Roman model, along with its construal of democracy as populism, in the republican view that there is no “definitional connection” between liberty as non-domination and “democratic control.”Footnote ⁴ As an internal correction, then, to the neo-republican treatment of equal participation as a means to further liberty rather than an essential principle, Urbinati's broader argument defends political equality, understood as taking part in imperium, as an essential part of the “liberty side” of democratic citizenship.

Democracy is compatible with hierarchy, for in every democracy some bodies may overrule others: A state legislature may overrule a local ordinance, and national legislation often supersedes (pre-empts) state or local law.Footnote ⁵ In practice, however, lower bodies—most notably in the United States, lower courts—make most of the rules, doing so with an eye to whether higher instances (e.g., the U.S. Supreme Court) will overrule them. Every such situation produces a complicated strategic interaction, one that Clifford J. Carrubba and Tom S. Clark analyze formally in “Rule Creation in a Political Hierarchy.” Their model suggests that many of our cherished intuitions are wrong. In equilibrium, a higher court is least likely to overrule a lower one not only when its preferences agree most with those of the lower court, but when the preferences of the two courts diverge most—for, in the latter case, the lower court will normally craft a rule that is just “close enough” to the higher court's ideal point not to trigger the effort that would be involved in hearing the case and overruling the judgment.Footnote ⁶ Higher courts overrule lower ones most frequently when the two courts' ideal preferences diverge only moderately, leaving room for error in this strategic interaction. In the U.S. system, Carrubba and Clark show, this is exactly what happens; and they conclude by suggesting much broader implications of their analysis for hierarchical, or principal–agent, relationships more generally.

Almost two decades ago (1994), Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba undertook an endeavor—by no means the first, but arguably the most influential—to set out common methods of inquiry for quantitative and qualitative social science. In “Socratic Method and Political Science,” Christopher Meckstroth renews that effort, albeit from the very different starting point of ancient Greek theory. As Meckstroth shows from a far-ranging survey of Platonic texts, Plato's Socrates proposed a well-developed and sophisticated method of scientific inquiry: “elenchus,” rendered roughly as “cross-examination.” While akin to what Karl Popper argued, namely that we gain confidence in a proposition to the extent that it withstands efforts to disconfirm it, Socrates advocated repeated questioning of both the logic and the implications of any theory, normative or positive. Applied to modern-day political inquiry, elenchus requires us always to consider alternative explanations and to search out possible contradictions in the one(s) we entertain. While the position that Socrates adopts anticipates much of current thinking about causation (e.g., issues of potential endogeneity) in quantitative research, it equally provides standards for qualitative inquiry; and it provides a way to develop question-specific standards of objectivity.

Ancient Athenians seemed confident that democratic citizens could correctly understand causation, and hence in politics could rightly attribute blame or praise. Modern students of democracy have lost much of this confidence: If, as Achen and Bartels found, voters punish politicians for “drought, flu, and shark attacks,”Footnote ⁷ analyzing who actually deserves credit or blame for economic trends—consistently seeming to influence voters' decisions most profoundly—seems well beyond their ability. Even more problematic, as illustrated by the current U.S. presidential campaign, is assessing how much of a country's own economic performance results from events or decisions outside its borders: Does the Euro crisis, or the slowing of Chinese economic growth, hobble the U.S. economy; and, if so, could we really expect the average voter to calibrate her judgments accordingly?

Surprisingly, the evidence suggests that voters are indeed this sophisticated, both at the aggregate and the individual levels. As Mark Andreas Kayser and Michael Peress argue in “Benchmarking across Borders: Electoral Accountability and the Necessity of Comparison,”Footnote ⁸ voters in OECD democracies not only gauge their own country's recent economic performance (measured by growth in real GDP and by unemployment) against the “yardstick” of average OECD results, they also hold leaders accountable far more for the domestic than the international component of economic growth or contraction. More precisely, once one decomposes the given country's recent economic performance—ia fairly sophisticated econometrics—into its international and domestic components, the latter affects voters' assessments almost twice as much as the former. While voters likely manage this feat of decomposition only indirectly, i.e., by shrewd interpretation of media reports on the economy, the Kayser-Peress results indicate: (a) that we too easily underestimate voters' sophistication, at least in the aggregate and (b) that students of voting and public opinion err by treating the national economy as if it were autarkic. Once again, scholars turn out to be not quite as shrewd as the voters to whom they so readily condescend. Evidently, these results, if sustained in further research, have large implications for the growing literatures on the effects of natural disasters, import- or offshoring-related layoffs, and governmental quality. If one country responds markedly better (or worse) to an earthquake, a hurricane, or a set of plant closures; or if one manages to provide good health care or schools at low cost—while a neighboring land levies high taxes but achieves poor outcomes—will voters (a) be aware of those facts and (b) reward or punish politicians accordingly? The question, curiously, has rarely been asked, and then only in a local context (e.g., municipalities). Certainly there is a lot of room for more “benchmarking” research in political science.

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Articles appearing in the APSR before June 1953 were indexed in The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Current issues are indexed in ABC Pol Sci; America, History and Life 1954– Book Review Index; Current Contents: Social and Behavioral Sciences; EconLit; Energy Information Abstracts; Environmental Abstracts; Historical Abstracts; Index of Economic Articles; Information Service Bulletin; International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences; International Bibliography of Periodical Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences; International Index; International Political Science Abstracts; the Journal of Economic Literature; Periodical Abstracts; Public Affairs; Public Affairs Information Service International Recently Published Articles; Reference Sources; Social Sciences and Humanities Index; Social Sciences Index; Social Work Research and Abstracts; and Writings on American History. Some of these sources may be available in electronic form through local public or educational libraries. Microfilm of the APSR, beginning with Volume 1, and the index of the APSR through 1969 are available through University Microfilms Inc., 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 (www.umi.com). The Cumulative Index to the American Political Science Review, Volumes 63 to 89: 1969–95, is available through the APSA.