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Notes from the Editors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

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Like our predecessors in this job, we in the UCLA group have been repeatedly surprised at how greatly subdisciplinary representation varies across issues purely from accidents of timing: when authors finish their revisions, when—still, alas, somewhat belatedly—we get articles to the press. Perhaps our surprise reflects the well-known psychological tendency to see patterns even in the most random data. If our previous issue (the third in this volume) was more formal and quantitative, the current one, by luck of the draw, inclines strongly toward political theory and judicial behavior. Four of its eight articles are on political theory (one of them on American political thought), two are on judicial behavior (both with a focus on European supranational courts), and two are on comparative politics.

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From the Editor: In This Issue
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American Political Science Review , Volume 102 , Issue 4 , November 2008, pp. iii - viii
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Copyright © American Political Science Association 2008

Like our predecessors in this job, we in the UCLA group have been repeatedly surprised at how greatly subdisciplinary representation varies across issues purely from accidents of timing: when authors finish their revisions, when—still, alas, somewhat belatedly—we get articles to the press. Perhaps our surprise reflects the well-known psychological tendency to see patterns even in the most random data. If our previous issue (the third in this volume) was more formal and quantitative, the current one, by luck of the draw, inclines strongly toward political theory and judicial behavior. Four of its eight articles are on political theory (one of them on American political thought), two are on judicial behavior (both with a focus on European supranational courts), and two are on comparative politics.

Speaking of timing, we are happy to announce that our backlog of submissions has substantially diminished and to express our gratitude to APSA for pitching in with temporary funding for additional Editorial Assistants. These valiant graduate students help us deal with the rising tide of submissions (about 850 annually, an increase of over 200 from Lee Sigelman's final year). Of more immediate consequence, their augmented numbers and increasing efficiency have rapidly whittled down the “gateway” time—from initial submission until a manuscript can be vetted and sent to one of the co-editors for assignment of referees—from almost four weeks this past September to currently just under one week. We believe that both authors and readers will appreciate the difference this makes. Certainly the co-editors do.

IN THIS ISSUE

In our lead article, “What Is a ‘Right to Have Rights’? Three Images of the Politics of Human Rights,” James D. Ingram notes that the contemporary question of human rights is “political not metaphysical”—more likely to be raised as a political concern for institutions, practices, and remedies than as a philosophical concern for foundations, justification, and validity. Taking up Hannah Arendt's enigmatic phrasing of the “right to have rights,” he engages a wide range of contemporary debates to distinguish three political approaches to human rights, each of which can be understood as entailing a commitment to a particular image of practical politics. First, in human rights as “Implementation,” Ingram finds an underlying Weberian logic in which “the politics of human rights is something the powerful do for the powerless.” Second, in human rights as “Right” or “Recht,” a neo-Kantian emphasis on justice and institutions comes to the fore. Third, human rights as “Democratic Action” become a “right to politics,” a creative dynamic in which rights are claimed from the bottom up. To the extent that these three images of human rights are, indeed, “political not metaphysical,” he argues, they also serve a critical function. On the one hand, they shed light on the sorts of situations to which each might be thought appropriate. On the other hand, they attune us to the limits of the most familiar forms of human rights, and in this regard they carry with them significant implications for the meaning and stakes of human rights activism more generally.

The next two articles, as noted earlier, look at European judicial institutions and address member governments' impact on supranational judicial institutions. The European Union, as both a new kind of political institution and one still “under construction,” is an ideal laboratory for assessing the development of independent judicial institutions.

Erik Voeten, in “The Impartiality of International Judges: Evidence from the European Court of Human Rights,” looks at judicial dissents in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and asks whether international judges act impartially or make decisions biased by ideology or national origins. He finds evidence that judges do have policy preferences but that their rulings do not reflect geopolitical biases. In “Judicial Behavior under Political Constraints: Evidence from the European Court of Justice,” Clifford J. Carrubba, Matthew Gabel, and Charles Hankla investigate the impact of two threats to judicial independence—those of legislative override and of executive noncompliance—on the decisions of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Their statistical analysis of ECJ rulings supports a conclusion that the preferences of member governments do affect court decisions. Both articles employ new datasets, and both draw upon and contribute to scholarship on judicial behavior. Moreover, their research designs exploit specific features of the ECtHR and ECJ to capture aspects of political constraints and judicial independence that would be impossible to unpack for other courts. Both articles also provide insight into the process of European integration and the development of an independent supranational judiciary.

Will the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 undermine or ultimately support the theory of the “unitary executive”? Will the theory prove to have been only a partisan instrument or an institutional sign of the times? As a candidate, Senator Obama spoke out against this and other manifestations of increasing power in the office he will now hold. Will circumstances of domestic emergency cause him to reconsider? In either case, Jeremy D. Bailey, in “The New Unitary Executive and Democratic Theory: The Problem of Alexander Hamilton,” has removed one of the theory's central claims, namely, support in the thought of Alexander Hamilton. Bailey demonstrates that Hamilton opposed placing the removal power under the authority of the president acting alone. Precisely because he sought unity and energy in the executive, Hamilton thought it necessary that the executive's subordinates enjoy duration in their offices if the government was not to fall into traditional republican vices.

Turning to an even broader international topic than those raised by the two articles on the European judiciary, can individual states legitimately act altruistically in the international arena to punish war crimes or crimes against humanity? In “Punishment, Property, and the Limits of Altruism: Locke's International Asymmetry,” Alex Tuckness develops a provocative argument against altruistic punishment by recourse to Lockean consent theory. Agreeing in part with recent “libertarian” analyses of the pivotal role of property in Locke's contractualism, Tuckness focuses on the domestic costs of international intervention to reject the common view that Locke's theory of international relations legitimates the state's power to punish violations of natural law as strictly parallel to individuals' power to punish in the state of nature. Instead, he contends, Locke installs a significant asymmetry between states and individuals by limiting states' actions to the preservation of the lives and property of their own members. Thus, while individuals may choose to punish altruistically in the state of nature, states cannot legitimately expend their members' “blood and treasure” on altruistic punishment in the international arena. In an interesting twist, however, Tuckness draws out the implications of this view to cast Locke as a “lax libertarian,” willing to countenance, on the basis of natural duties to preserve mankind as a whole, the public enforcement of charity in international as well as domestic contexts. In the end, he argues, the gaps and slippages between universalism and particularism that afflict Locke's “international asymmetry” remain visible today, particularly in debates over global inequality, in ways that Locke's theory itself is ill-prepared to address.

Political theory, of course, can be inventive as well as reflexive, and contemporary dilemmas can invite new ways of thinking. In “Discursive Representation,” John S. Dryzek and Simon Niemeyer adapt discourse theory to generate a creative point of intersection between current debates over “rethinking representation,” deliberative democracy, and institutional design. Representation, they argue, need not be limited to such familiar entities as groups or individuals, interests or opinions. Neither, they suggest, must deliberative democracy be limited to such fora as citizens' juries, consensus conferences, deliberative opinion polls, citizens' assemblies, and the like. Rather, these diverse strands of contemporary political and theoretical attention might be productively conjoined with institutional innovation through the representation of “political discourses.” This challenging essay not only mounts a complex justification for the representation of “political discourses,” it also limns the possible contours of “Chambers of Discourses” and suggests various ways in which “discursive representatives” might be selected. Such Chambers might be given greater or lesser duration, might be charged with deliberating diverse sorts of issues or policies, and might be constituted as advisory or authoritative, just as they might be elaborated in any number of possible relations to existing institutions of governance, domestic or international. In both practical and ethical terms, the authors contend, “discursive representation” could address dilemmas spawned by the decline of the demos and the diffusion of authority, but in any case could provide criteria for the evaluation of current, more familiar forms of unelected representation in the broader public sphere.

If we think cross-nationally about the theme addressed by Bailey, “unitary executives” are rare even in a more limited sense. Most parliamentary governments are coalitions, composed of more than one party. Political scientists understand some of the empirical regularities that govern coalition formation, but predicting which parties will participate in government remains a tricky business. In “The Role of Parties' Past Behavior in Coalition Formation,” Margit Tavits demonstrates an important dynamic effect: a party that defected from an existing coalition is less likely to be included in future governments with the same coalition partners. Using data from Europe between 1960 and 2006, Tavits shows that this “punishment effect” prevails only among former coalition partners; parties that defect do not become pariahs in the eyes of other parties. Moreover, the lower likelihood of future coalitions only results from defections that bring down the government. That is, the lower coalition odds seem to result from defectors' being punished; they do not seem merely to reflect the conflict that led to defection in the first place.

Finally, and on a more specific front of comparison, Scott Desposato and Ethan Scheiner look at legislators' behavior in Brazil and Japan. The two countries are rarely studied together because of obvious differences in culture, history, institutions, and level of economic development. Yet the two are similar in the roles ideology and pork play in structuring coalitions and, thereby, affecting government policy. In both countries, pork is important; ideology, not so much. Moreover, both countries have experienced episodes of party-switching by politicians at the national and subnational levels. In “Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan,” Desposato and Scheiner conjecture that, in both cases, party-switching is motivated at least in part by politicians' desire to maintain access to pork. They provide evidence for this conjecture by exploiting differences in the “pipelines” through which pork is delivered: in Japan, exclusively through the national government; in Brazil, through a process that involves both national and state governments. Desposato and Scheiner theorize that institutional difference affects which parties are able to lure away politicians from other parties. They show that, in Brazil (1991–99), politicians are drawn into parties in the President's coalition at the national level and into parties in the Governor's coalition in their home state. In contrast, in Japan (1993–94), party-switchers appear to respond only to national-level incentives.

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