IN THIS ISSUE

Our first two articles ingeniously exploit natural experiments to overcome seemingly intractable issues of endogeneity in two important areas of political science: Whether experience or socialization influences political attitudes more; and whether smaller jurisdictions promote a greater sense of political efficacy. Our third article advances guidelines, derived from Aristotle, on how to judge the deliberative efficacy of regimes.

In our lead article, “Caught in the Draft: The Effects of Vietnam Draft Lottery on Political Attitudes,” Robert S. Erikson and Laura Stoker combine data from a political socialization panel study of Class of 1965 high school seniors with the publicly known Selective Service lottery numbers that (for males only) were assigned in 1969 to each possible birthday.Footnote ¹ Because respondents were surveyed both before and after the lottery was instituted, the effect of having drawn a low lottery number (and hence running a higher risk of being inducted) can be established with some precision: The likely inductees became demonstrably more liberal, likelier to vote Democratic, and (least surprisingly) more opposed to the war than those males who drew “safe” numbers. The effect of this truly randomized intervention proves to have been stronger than that of our familiar mainstay of voting research, namely pre-adult socialization, and lingered, albeit in attenuated form, into re-interviews in the 1990s. This finding of course raises a larger point that would otherwise be hard to establish, namely that “generational” shocks—a war, purge, famine, or hyper-inflation—can leave even deeper political scars on affected populations, and can divide them more from people shielded from those disasters, than we have generally supposed.

A different exogenous intervention is exploited by David Dreyer Lassen and Søren Seritzlew, in “Jurisdiction Size and Local Democracy: Evidence on Internal Political Efficacy from Large-scale Municipal Reform,” to shed light on the ancient question of whether large jurisdictional size comports with democracy. Cross-sectional evidence manifestly cannot resolve the issue: Small jurisdictions might foster democratic efficacy, democratic efficacy might preserve small jurisdictions, or both might be caused by some third variable. Even consolidation or splitting of existing jurisdictions (a leading example: U.S. school districts) usually happens under local impetus (i.e., endogenously). Fortunately for political science (and perhaps unfortunately for the affected citizens), 238 out of 271 Danish municipalities were consolidated by central government fiat in 2007 into 65 larger units, of varying sizes, under the so-called Structural Reform. Only 33 municipalities were preserved in their original boundaries. Because the consolidation was proposed by an expert commission—in which no elected officials participated, and was enacted virtually unchanged by the national government—the intervention can be deemed exogenous, and one of its effects, as judged by pre- and post-consolidation surveys, seems clear: Increasing jurisdiction size diminished citizens' internal sense of political efficacy. This finding, if confirmed more broadly, will raise a host of other research questions: Does diminished internal efficacy correlate with weaker citizen oversight, hence greater administrative shirking? Do citizens who particularly value their political efficacy “exit” the newly consolidated jurisdictions to regain “voice” in smaller ones?

But efficacy may depend less on the size of a political unit than on the quality of its deliberations, and theorists of deliberative democracy offer us little guidance beyond the small group (or “mini-public”) environment: We can identify “deliberativeness” in individuals, or in face-to-face groups, but how does this connect with how “deliberative” a regime may be? On this crucial point, argues James Lindley Wilson—in “Deliberation, Democracy, and the Rule of Reason in Aristotle's Politics”—Politics, read alongside the Nicomachean Ethics, offers a standard of “integrative deliberation” that usefully informs current debates. Particularly through a right understanding of the metaphors that Aristotle used to support his doctrine of the “Wisdom of the Multitude,”Footnote ² we can see how the “rule of reason” served as a standard both for excellent rule and for excellent common deliberation—and when democracies do, and do not, meet that standard. Although present-day concerns almost certainly extend beyond (or stand in contradiction to) those that animated Aristotle, the structure by which he analyzed deliberative integration remains helpful, indeed indispensible.

Our fourth and fifth articles address how states, rather than citizens, behave—first toward internal dissidents, then toward each other. In “Divide and Conquer or Divide and Concede: How Do States Respond to Internally Divided Separatists?” Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham asks why states, faced with domestic movements for ethnic self-determination, sometimes resist and sometimes concede. Using a new dataset, she finds that states concede more readily to internally divided movements for ethnic self-determination than to unified ones—probably in the belief that success for the “moderates” will weaken the “extremists.” Paradoxically, however, concessions are likelier to resolve such a conflict when made to a unified movement. At least two conclusions could follow: States are consistently deluded about the usefulness of concessions to divided movements or, as Cunningham argues, states intend concessions as a bargaining tactic rather than as a means actually to resolve the dispute.

Arash Abizadeh, on the other hand—in “Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement Theory”—turns to the question of why states supposedly inhabit an anarchical “war of all against all.” Realist students of international relations, Abizadeh observes, conventionally take Hobbes as their authority, reading him to say that states, like humans, (a) innately and ruthlessly seek self-preservation; hence (b) are both insecure and aggressive; and (c) lacking a common sovereign, can have no enduring peace. But this is actually a misreading, which, according to Abizadeh, owes more to Morgenthau than to Hobbes. Read as a whole and in his historical context, Hobbes attributes humans' bellicosity less to our drive for self-preservation than to slights to our glory, however trivial. We too readily interpret mere disagreement as contempt not only for our views but for ourselves. Hence, exactly as Hobbes argued of the English Civil War in Behemoth, it is ideological divisions that most threaten both domestic and international peace. The good news in such a reading is that international anarchy, of itself, need not lead to perpetual war among states. Rather, interstate conflict can be held in check by institutions and domestic forms of soft power that contain ideological disagreement and limit competition for status. Abizadeh's article, we know from our referees, will excite interest and controversy among Hobbes scholars, but it should also be required reading for students of international relations, who too easily absorb Hobbes into their realist canon.

Self-interest, we have understood at least since Downs, can explain a lot of partisan politics in democracy and should especially help us to understand the politics of redistribution. As Meltzer and Richard argued in their pathbreaking 1981 article,Footnote ³ a rational median voter should support more redistribution, under some pretty unproblematic assumptions, the greater the difference between her income and that of the average citizen (i.e., the greater the given society's economic inequality).Footnote ⁴ Again and again, however, scholars have found only a weak, or even a negative, relationship between inequality and redistribution in democracies, a regularity that Peter Lindert has cleverly labeled the “reverse Robin Hood paradox.”Footnote ⁵ In “The Structure of Inequality and the Politics of Redistribution,” Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontusson offer a very plausible resolution of the paradox, albeit one that raises its own bevy of questions. It seems not to be the degree of inequality that matters (e.g., the brute difference between the mean- and the median-income voter), but rather what Lupu and Pontusson call the “skew” of the income distribution: the extent to which the median voter's income more closely resembles that of low- or high-income voters. Where the median voter's income is closer to that of the bottom decile of earners (and farther from those in the top decile), the median voter will align with low-income voters to support redistribution. Where the median voter's income more closely resembles that of the top decile than the bottom decile, support for redistribution will be weak.Footnote ⁶ While Lupu and Pontusson find strong empirical support for their proposition, both in the actual extent of redistribution and in survey about redistribution among middle-income voters, they remain somewhat agnostic about the reason for the regularity, which will probably have to involve mechanisms of social identity rather than “pure” rationality.

Our next three articles address more specifically partisanship in democracies: in two cases, within legislatures; in the third, among deliberative publics. Their common question is just this: Why, in most democracies, are politics organized along strongly partisan lines? Most representative assemblies exhibit strong party discipline; most policy debates form along partisan lines; most voters (and, as parents will know, even most pre-voters) align with a particular party.

In “Strategic Opposition and Government Cohesion in Westminster Democracies,” Torun Dewan and Arthur Spirling bring new evidence to bear on a recurrent pattern in those democracies, namely the tendency of the loyal opposition to vote almost unanimously against whatever the government proposes (even, somewhat astonishingly, against measures that they themselves advocated in the most recent electoral campaign). The traditional answers are: (a) simple similarity of preferences among MPs of a given party; (b) “whipping” by party leaders, plus their ultimate threat of withdrawing the party label in the next election; and (c) the exigencies of a (mostly) two-party system and a first-past-the-post electoral system. If the last were true, argue Dewan and Spirling, we should not observe the same pattern of a unified opposition in the newer Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish assemblies, which are elected by proportional representation and, consequently, are not dominated by two parties. Yet, here too, virtually all parties not included in the ministry vote against anything it proposes. If threats to renomination were involved, party discipline should be far weaker in the (non-elected) House of Lords; yet the same pattern obtains there. And if intra-party similarity of preferences explained the pattern, MPs of a given party should vote the same at Westminster as at Holyrood; yet they do not. The likelier explanation—Dewan and Spirling contend—is a variant of the agenda-setter model, in which MPs can commit in advance to a particular voting strategy (e.g., voting against whatever the government proposes). That strategy of unconditional opposition turns out to be best for opposition MPs and, incidentally, to moderate policy outcomes.

A more general account of parties in legislatures is offered in the ambitious and innovative article by Daniel Diermeier and Razvan Vlaicu. In “Parties, Coalitions, and the Internal Organization of Legislatures,” Diermeier and Vlaicu develop a model of partisan agenda setting that subsumes as special cases the three dominant (and seemingly contradictory) accounts of legislative parties: the “weak parties” pivotal politics model (in which parties do not matter), procedural cartel theory (emphasizing agenda control), and conditional party government (which stresses leaders' control of resources). The “weak parties” model obtains, they show, only where both polarization and opportunity costs are zero, whereas party organization becomes tighter the higher are opportunity costs or the more polarized are legislators' preferences. By integrating the apparently opposing accounts, Diermeier and Vlaicu hold out the promise of setting a research agenda that can apply to the whole variety of legislatures, including historical ones.

Even if we can understand partisan organization in legislatures, why should partisanship matter for ordinary citizens, particularly in models of deliberative democracy? In “On Partisan Political Justification,” Jonathan White and Lea Ypi extend deliberative democrats' qualified acceptance of the relevance of adversarialism for political justification by defending partisanship as one of its paradigmatic forms. Distinguishing partisanship from factionalism by its articulation of a common good, they identify four dimensions of partisanship as fundamental to the overall quality of public political justification, two ideal-typical and two attentive to the distortions or failures of real-world conditions of public political debate. On the ideal side, (1) its constituency of address is the public as a whole and (2) its circumstances of justification include comparative assessments of alternative positions, an adversarial posture, and public visibility. In the grittier world of current democratic realities, partisanship, properly understood, can (3) address dilemmas of inclusion and inequality by serving as a vehicle of intellectual and political empowerment and (4) play a necessary role in making political justification persuasive by identifying and shaping common-sense schemes of political judgment to improve the normative assessment of alternative courses of political action. Acknowledging what Russell Muirhead calls “the pathologies of partisanship,”Footnote ⁷ White and Ypi argue in closing that partisan political justification nonetheless harbors resources for enhancing civic engagement and principled deliberation. If the flaws of actually existing partisanship are clear, their spirited defense of partisan political justification as a practice of public argument shows its essential role in making collective authority responsive to normative concerns.

Our final two articles both deal with the role of law in politics—in the first case, within states, and in the second, between or among them. In “Judicial Review as a Response to Political Posturing,” Justin Fox and Matthew C. Stephenson shed new light on the efficacy of judicial review. Their intuition will be familiar to any academic department that relies on higher bodies (deans, academic councils) to rescue them from ill-advised tenure decisions. Judges, similarly, may rescue politicians from bold but potentially disastrous policies; but, by so doing, may actually embolden politicians, secure in the knowledge that their bad but popular initiatives will never actually come into force (initiatives that Fox and Stephenson label as “posturing”: Does anyone recall the Terri Schiavo debacle?). On the other hand, because judicial nullification of silly actions may expose a politician's incompetence to voters, judicial review may discourage posturing. Two surprising results of the Fox and Stephenson model of this process are (a) that more competent judges may actually decrease voter welfare (by encouraging posturing) and (b) that when politicians are ambitious for higher office, judicial review may increase voter welfare, but cannot do so (and may decrease voter welfare) when politicians are unambitious. The latter being because unambitious politicians have nothing to lose from having their incompetence exposed. Fox and Stephenson thus contribute importantly to the ongoing legal debate about the democratic justification for judicial review.

Just as the value of judicial review is disputed within states, so is the value of international law between states. Does international law actually make peaceful settlement of international disputes likelier? Yes, answer Paul K. Huth, Sarah E. Croco, and Benjamin J. Appel, but only when the relevant principles of international law are unambiguous and clearly favor one side in the dispute. In “Does International Law Promote Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes? Evidence from the Study of Territorial Conflicts since 1945,” Huth, Croco, and Appel examine all territorial disputes between 1945 and 2000 and find that, when those conditions are satisfied, states are likelier (a) to seek territorial revisions by negotiation rather than force, (b) to prefer adjudication or arbitration to bilateral negotiations, and (c) to arrive at a final settlement. The logic behind the empirical finding, they argue, is that the legal “bright lines” provide a Schellingesque focal point for distributive conflicts.

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