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Notes from the Editors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2009

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This issue introduces a new cover design for the APSR, which is its first external “makeover” since Volume 97 (2003) and the first to share major features of its layout with other APSA journals. We hope, as do the designers and Cambridge University Press, that our new graphical presentation will make the contents more visible and accessible to our readers. We of course invite feedback, both on the overall new design and on the particular photographs or images we use on our covers.

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From the Editor: In This Issue
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American Political Science Review , Volume 103 , Issue 1 , February 2009, pp. iii - vii
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2009

This issue introduces a new cover design for the APSR, which is its first external “makeover” since Volume 97 (2003) and the first to share major features of its layout with other APSA journals. We hope, as do the designers and Cambridge University Press, that our new graphical presentation will make the contents more visible and accessible to our readers. We of course invite feedback, both on the overall new design and on the particular photographs or images we use on our covers.

IN THIS ISSUE

Six articles in the present issue deal with problems of democracy, representation, and political corruption and “pork.” Half of those six, we are happy to see, draw their evidence from outside the United States—in two cases, from the experience of Indian democracy.

Our lead article by Daniel Ziblatt, “Shaping Democratic Practice and the Causes of Electoral Fraud: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Germany,” reaches across the Atlantic and back in time. (It also serves as the inspiration for the image on our cover.) Ziblatt uses rich and previously unexploited data from electoral challenges to show that, in elections to the Imperial-era Reichstag, nominally conducted by universal manhood suffrage, electoral fraud occurred most frequently where landholdings were most unequal. In very unequal societies, he generalizes, elites have incentives and opportunities to circumvent formal democracy through electoral fraud.

Our second and third articles address issues of underrepresentation and its proposed remedies. In “Do Electoral Quotas Work after They Are Withdrawn? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in India,” Rikhil R. Bhavnani uses data from Mumbai to show that electoral quotas—in this case, for women—have a lasting effect even after they are withdrawn, making the subsequent election of a woman in an affected district about five times likelier than if the quota had never been imposed. (The brilliance of the natural experiment is that quotas were imposed, on a one-time only basis, for a random selection of districts.)

In a quite different context, Zoltan L. Hajnal offers a new perspective on an old question: Do winner-take-all elections—in this case, at various levels of government in the United States—systematically disadvantage particular minorities? Proposing a new but quite plausible measure of underrepresentation, namely, how many voters back losing candidates, Hajnal finds in “Who Loses in American Democracy? A Count of Votes Demonstrates the Limited Representation of African Americans” that African Americans are underrepresented significantly more than other groups, except in one major category of elections: those to the U.S. House of Representatives. The exception suggests possible remedies for the otherwise systematic underrepresentation he demonstrates.

Do voters and candidates behave as Downsian spatial models assume, or do voters—as Converse argued—mostly lack a coherent vision of the policy space? This third question about democracy, also with a long pedigree, is answered with novel precision and unexpected results by our next two articles.

In “Spatial Voting in the 2004 Presidential Election,” Stephen A. Jessee uses a new survey design (described by several otherwise jaded co-editors as “very cool”) to test directly the foundations of spatial theory by placing voters in the same ideological space as candidates, namely one assessed by up-or-down “votes” on actual issues before Congress. Voters, Jessee shows, indeed have meaningful ideologies, but these accurately predict Presidential vote choice only among independent voters. Partisan voters are systematically biased in all cases, though the bias diminishes—and vote choice thus approaches, although never actually reaches, what spatial theory would predict—as partisan voters become better informed.

On a related but distinct note, Michael Tomz and Robert P. Van Houweling, in “The Electoral Implications of Candidate Ambiguity,” employ survey experiments to see how vagueness about candidates' positions in the policy space affects votes and outcomes. By manipulating the imprecision of candidates' positions, they show that vagueness may actually make a candidate more appealing to voters. Voters in partisan settings are particularly affected, perceiving ambiguous candidates of their own party “optimistically,” that is, closer to their own positions, without perceiving candidates of the opposing party “pessimistically.” Turning from experiment to the real world, they find that candidates often take, and voters often perceive, ambiguous positions, and that ambiguity is often a winning strategy, particularly in partisan elections.

Our sixth article takes up a different implication of spatial theory, emphasized by such students as Dixit and Londregan as well as Persson and Tabellini, namely that ideologically committed voters, whom candidates can take for granted, will systematically receive fewer material rewards than “swing” voters. In “When Do Legislators Pass on Pork? The Role of Political Parties in Determining Legislator Effort,” Philip Keefer and Stuti Khemani examine Indian data on Constituency Development Funds (CDFs: an increasingly common kind of public spending program in developing countries) to show that representatives exert significantly less effort to “bring home the bacon” in constituencies that are party strongholds. They draw out implications, not only for the impact of CDFs but also for our understanding, of political incentives and the dynamics of party formation.

Our final two articles address important topics from other domains of political science. In “Exporting the Bomb: Why States Provide Sensitive Nuclear Assistance,” Matthew Kroenig takes up the crucial issue of nuclear proliferation, but does so from the previously underexamined “supply side”: why and when nations that already possess the “bomb” would pass that sensitive knowledge on to previously nonnuclear states. Powerful states, Kroenig argues, will rarely transfer their nuclear knowledge to weak ones, nor will weaker nuclear states that are vulnerable to superpower pressure. Weak nuclear states are likeliest to transfer their knowledge when they are least vulnerable to superpower pressure and to transfer to states with which they share a common enemy. Economic considerations (e.g., wealth for technology) rarely play a role.

Finally, in “Analysis and History of Political Thought,” Peter J. Steinberger mounts a critique of Quentin Skinner's approach to the history of political thought by returning to precisely the theories of language (Austin, Searle, Grice) on which Skinner's variant of Cambridge contextualism chiefly relies. Those theories of language, Steinberger argues, in fact point us “toward a decidedly non-Skinnerian approach” that focuses more on structures of argumentation internal to theoretical texts than on the recovery of the broader political languages of their historical contexts. Though duly appreciative of the significance of Skinner's historiographical contributions, Steinberger nonetheless makes a strong claim for philosophical analysis as a key to understanding the doctrinal elements of historical texts as well as their continuing implications.

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