In this Issue

In 2004, the Congress allowed the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban to expire. One second-order consequence of this policy decision was the greater availability of assault weapons in Mexican municipios near Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. This was not the case in California, which retained a pre-existing state-level ban. In “Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico,” Dube, Dube and García-Ponce capitalize on this unique natural experiment to answer the question: To what extent, and under what conditions, does access to arms fuel violent crime? They specify a conditional fixed effects Poisson model to examine the relationship between access to guns and violence under varying political conditions and ultimately find differential increases in homicides, gun-related homicides and gun seizures after 2004. Most interesting, however, killings increased disproportionately in municipios near Texas, Arizona and New Mexico when local elections were competitive prior to 2004, with the largest differentials occurring in high narco-trafficking areas. These findings suggest political competition destabilized the existing relationships between drug cartels and local incumbents and the increased accessibility/presence of military-style weaponry escalated the level of killings associated with these power struggles.

Sarah Elizabeth Parkinson, in “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War,” addresses the issue of the organizational resilience of rebel organizations. In a piece that uses methodologies not often found in the pages of the Review, she examines the internal dynamics within rebel organizations, not so much the male-dominated frontline units (which has been the focus of most studies of rebel organizations) but the female-dominated clandestine supply networks in the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Using very carefully done ethnographic research, involving dozens of interviews of participants in these support networks, she uncovers the social networks and mechanisms that helped sustain the organization during a period of extreme duress—Lebanon in the 1980s.

Marcus Agnafors maintains in “Quality of Government: Toward a More Complex Definition” that current understandings of what constitutes quality of government are flawed, not taking into account important factors that we agree should be weighed in assessing good governance. Efficiency and impartiality are important, Agnafors concedes, but they must be supplemented with consideration of the openness and rationality of the decision-making process, as well as the moral content of individual governing decisions, and the “beneficence” with which they are carried out. These in turn must rely on a “common morality” shared by all or most societies, and relevant elements of the local public ethos. Agnafors’ argument should significantly advance the debate on assessing quality of government, an issue of vital concern in world politics today.

In “Quality Over Quantity: Amici Influence and Judicial Decision Making,” Box-Steffensmeier, Christenson and Hitt apply the tools of network analysis to answer the question: What is the relative influence of interest groups on the decisions of the Supreme Court? More specifically, Box-Steffensmeier and colleagues employ a novel metric of interest group power, namely its position within the amicus network, to empirically demonstrate when and why certain groups have more success than others in their petitions to the court. They theorize that justices take into account more than just the number of supporters for the liberal or the conservative position and empirically demonstrate that when two sides of a case seemingly have similar levels of support, as determined by the number of amicus briefs filed, the arguments of the group positioned more centrally in the amicus network have more influence with the justices. Among the interesting findings in this paper is that the ideology of the justice moderates the effect of a liberal interest group's power or network position. That is, for more conservative justices, the presence of a powerful liberal amicus decreases their probability of casting a liberal vote whereas a powerful conservative amicus does not have the same effect on liberal justices.

Dara Kay Cohen's argument in “Causes of Rape During Civil War: Cross-National Evidence (1980–2009)” challenges existing explanations, which assert that wartime rape is associated with ethnic war and with gender inequality and also that wartime presents opportunities to engage in rape that are not otherwise present. Cohen argues instead that the occurrence of wartime rape is a function of the ways in which fighters are recruited to become part of combatant groups. Specifically, she shows support for her theory of combatant socialization, which holds that if rape is more frequent when fighters are forcibly recruited, they must be quickly socialized into a coherent combatant force.

Robert Goodin's “Disgorging the Fruits of Historical Wrongdoing” tackles the very serious issue of seeking justice in cases of past crimes by regimes or other actors. Although restitution or retribution might be appropriate in many such cases, Goodin argues that disgorgement—forcing those who hold gains that were ill gotten, even though they may not be the original perpetrators—is a workable kind of “partial justice” when neither the perpetrators nor the original victims are alive, or cannot be identified. Disgorgement represents an important additional tool for those attempting to right ancient wrongs, which is a perennial, and especially grave, problem of domestic and international justice.

Why has campaign spending by House incumbents skyrocketed in recent years, especially in districts with marginal support for the incumbent's party? In “Money, Reputation, and Incumbency in U.S. House Elections, or Why Marginals Have Become More Expensive,” Kim and LeVeck provide an interesting answer to this question. They note that the sharp rise in spending has occurred at the same time the parties in the House have become more cohesive in casting votes and more distinctive in terms of party reputation or brand with the public. They argue that these two phenomena are fundamentally linked. They develop a formal model and test it empirically using campaign spending data from 1972 to 2008 to demonstrate how the reputation of the incumbent's party affects voters’ prior beliefs about the incumbent's record and how this in turn affects how much the incumbent needs to spend in order to communicate her record to the voters in her district. Most interestingly, the analysis show that establishing a distinct personal voting record—one that consistently bucks the party line—provides the incumbent with an alternative to a difficult and costly campaign and a fairly inexpensive method of increasing attention from the voters in lieu of spending campaign money.

In “The Political Origins of Primary Education Systems: Ideology, Institutions, and Interdenominational Conflict in an Era of Nation-Building,” by Ben Ansell and Johannes Lindvall, the authors address a relatively unexplored relationship between politics and the development of primary education systems in the West and Japan between 1870-1939. Essentially, they identify three different patterns of development—centralization, secularization, and subsidization. Of great importance is their finding that a key part of diffusing religious conflict in religiously divided societies is the provision of public funding to private providers of education, particularly churches, a pattern exemplified by countries such as the Netherlands.

In “Rethinking Religious Reasons in Public Justification,” Andrew March tackles a thorny but very topical issue in political theory: When may citizens use explicitly religious reasons to advocate their positions in public debate? Some argue that religious reasons are off limits in public justification, or must be expressed in religiously neutral terms, whereas others allow religious reasons to be used much more widely in the public forum. March argues for a nuanced view: we should allow certain types of religious arguments but not others and we should allow them in certain issue domains and not others. His argument should not only advance an important conversation in political theory but help us to understand how some of the most contentious debates in our democracies should be conducted.

In “Empowering Women Through Development Aid: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan,” Andrew Beath, Fotini Christia, and Ruben Enikolopov report on a randomized field experiment they implemented across 500 Afghan villages. They investigated the impact of mandatory inclusion of women in the village councils that made decisions regarding development projects. Did women's inclusion have an impact on attitudes about the role of women? They find that the intervention did have an impact on women's participation in the community but did not find a broader effect on the role of women within the household or the broader society.

Cyrus Samii, in the article entitled “Perils or Promise of Ethnic Integration? Evidence From a Hard Case in Burundi,” addresses an important question regarding interethnic relations. Can ethnically integrating institutions such as the military help remove prejudices and behaviors that lead to social exclusion and conflict? Using evidence from the “hard case” of Burundi, a situation in which military reform was conducted to integrate Hutu and Tutsi military personnel after a bloody civil war, and data from a natural experiment comparing military officers who had been exposed to military integration with those who had not, Samii finds that exposure to ethnic integration decreases prejudicial behavior but does not necessarily reduce the salience of ethnicity. This piece has important implications about the effectiveness of ethnically integrative institutions, particularly in post-conflict environments.

In “The Semblance of Democratic Revolution: Revolutionary Coalitions in Ukraine's Orange Revolution,” Mark Beissinger argues that those who participate in urban civic revolution may not be motivated by a desire for democratic change. Instead, such revolutions may be driven by temporary coalitions of disparate groups that share only their opposition to the incumbent regime. Beissinger relies on evidence from two unusual surveys that took place around the time of the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine to evaluate the motivations behind participation in the protests. His findings have implications that help to explain the sometimes troubled aftermath of such urban civic revolutions.

“Market Freedom as Antipower,” by Robert Taylor, argues that neorepublicans should embrace markets as a mechanism for preventing domination, rather than as an instrument of domination. Contrary to the beliefs of some neorepublicans, Taylor maintains, the free market, properly regulated and supplemented, is not a danger to liberty as interpreted by neorepublicanism but rather is one of its most powerful safeguards. It is not, however, the free market of libertarians: the regulations and supplements it requires bring it closer to the Nordic model. Government measures must be in place, for example, to ensure real labor mobility, such as retraining programs. Taylor's essay adds a distinctive perspective to the ongoing project of building neorepublican theory.

Finally, Kamil Kivanc Karaman and Sevket Pamuk in “Different Paths to the Modern State in Europe: The Interaction Between Warfare, Economic Structure and Political Regime” test some long-held propositions regarding state building in early modern Europe—in particular, the relationship between warfare, economic structure, political structure, and the generation of tax revenue. Using a unique data set that standardizes tax revenues across different states, which facilitates comparative analysis, they find that the three determinants interact to produce different pathways in state building. In particular, when under pressure of war, representative regimes in urbanized commercial economies and authoritarian regimes in rural agrarian economies were most effective in extractive taxation and state building. These findings will cause scholars to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions made about state building in Europe, upon which much of our current theories of political development are based.

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American Political Science Review Vol. 106, No. 4

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INDEXING

Articles appearing in the APSR before June 1953 were indexed in The Reader's Guide to PeriodicalLiterature. 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 Journalof 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.