In this Issue

We chose the cover image is to represent the issue taken up by our lead article, “Methodological Individualism and Holism in Political Science: A Reconciliation.” When is it appropriate to examine individual phenomena in isolation, and when can they only be understood as parts of a greater whole? Social science deals regularly with level-of-analysis problems—how to determine whether to analyze phenomena at lower, “individual” levels or higher, “holistic” levels. Analyses based on lower-level constituents are sometimes branded “reductionist,” whereas higher-level analyses are accused of attributing causation to entities that have no reality. Christian List and Kai Spiekermann take these questions to the level of the philosophy of science. They contend that these disputes are often beside the point: Sometimes individual-level analysis is appropriate, sometimes holism is, sometimes both are. Drawing on insights from across the natural and social sciences, as well as philosophy, they propose a complex typology of phenomena aimed at helping us decide when to use what type of analysis, and for what purposes. Perhaps more importantly, they help us clarify our conceptualizations of the problems we study. Their article should be of interest to political scientists of all persuasions, because it addresses concerns that are foundational to any study of politics.

In “Latin American Attitudes toward Women in Politics: The Influence of Elite Cues, Female Advancement, and Individual Characteristics,” Jana Morgan and Melissa Buice evaluate competing theories regarding the impact of context on progress towards gender equality. Due to the traditional marginalization of women in the public sphere in Latin America, it is an especially appropriate context to investigate whether gains in descriptive representation are rooted in increasing acceptance of women as political leaders, or whether women's gains reflect short-term frustrations and are subject to reversals. Morgan and Buice conclude that support for women in politics is indeed subject to reversals, although economic growth does facilitate the consolidation of gains toward gender equality.

Urban advocates have long argued that big cities in the United States are systematically discriminated against in their state legislatures. The historical explanation was the inherent hostility to cities on the part of over-represented rural and smaller town interests. However, electoral reforms have eliminated this over-representation. In “No Strength in Numbers: The Failure of Big-City Bills in American State Legistlatures, 1880–2000,” Gerald Gamm and Thad Kousser assess the relationship between city size and power in state legislatures. Using a new historical dataset, spanning 120 years and 13 states, they demonstrate that big cities with large delegations are at a distinct disadvantage in passing their district bills because size leads to increased internal divisions. Demographic divisions also help explain the low passage rates of district bills.

In “Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan,” Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai report on a survey experiment in villages located in areas sympathetic to the Taliban. They ask whether the attitudes of civilians towards combatants on either side in the conflict are shaped by experiences of harm done to them by these combatants. They find that the impact of such experiences is asymmetrical and dependent on the perpetrator of the harm. Support for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is reduced, and support for the Taliban strengthened, when civilians become “collateral damage.” The reverse is not true, however. When the Taliban inflicts harm, this does not result in stronger support for the ISAF. The authors conclude that this asymmetry has implications for understanding perceptions of harm as well as other aspects of the behavior of civilian populations during conflicts.

In “Keeping the Public Purse: An Experiment in Windfalls, Taxes, and the Incentives to Restrain Government” Laura Paler tackles a central issue in the literature on rentierism– that rents from windfall revenue fundamentally undermine political accountability. Indeed, it has long been argued that windfalls derived from external rents free leaders from the need to tax, hence producing a quiescent population. But how does windfall revenue affect whether citizens choose to participate politically, or to remain quiescent? Using a novel field experiment embedded in a public awareness campaign involving 1,863 citizens in Indonesia, the author finds that when citizens believe that revenue is generated mainly by taxes, citizen monitoring and anti-incumbent political action are increased. However, when given spending information, citizens in the windfall treatment cared just as much about misused revenue as those in the tax treatment. The findings have important implications for the real impact of windfall revenues on political accountability in resource-endowed states.

In “Co-Production, Polycentricity and Value Heterogeneity: The Ostroms’ Public Choice Institutionalism Revisited,” Paul Dragos Aligica and Vlad Tarko refine aspects of the approach pioneered by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. The refinements are designed to better understand problems of coordination in conditions of deep disagreement or “value heterogeneity.” The resulting approach, they maintain, is different from and in many respects superior to network theory. Aligica and Tarko distinguish different types of market failure that may result from value heterogeneity and argue that such failures require different solutions. Polycentricity—the dispersion of decision-making to diverse centers—is an appropriate solution to the co-production problem specifically, where a good is consumed by those who collectively produce it. This approach, they argue, has several normative consequences, beginning with our understanding of democracy itself, which may be conceived of as a grand co-production scheme. Polycentricity, Aligica and Tarko argue, would hold that decision-making in selected domains should be devolved to quasi-government, quasi-market institutions; such institutions are best suited to create public value in those domains.

How exactly does the personal appeal of a candidate in a high-profile race affect the vote outcomes for candidates in less salient races in concurrent elections? In “Exploiting Friends-and-Neighbors to Estimate Coattail Effects,” Marc Meredith convincingly answers this question using an impressive dataset of county election returns for all statewide executive office elections from 1987 to 2010. More specifically, Meredith takes advantage of the disproportionate support that candidates receive from geographically proximate voters, frequently referred to as the “friends-and-neighbors vote”, to isolate variation in the personal appeal of candidates. His estimates indicate that the increase in the personal vote received by the party's gubernatorial candidate clearly increases the vote shares received by the same party's secretary of state and attorney general candidates. However, increases in the personal vote received by down-ballot candidates do not affect vote shares received by gubernatorial or other down-ballot candidates from their parties.

In “Coordination, Collaboration, and the Evolution of Bilateral Cooperation Networks,” Brandon Kinne uses network analysis to test a set of hypotheses regarding how and why networks foster cooperation. He contends that bilateral cooperation agreements provide states with important information about other states and help overcome impediments to cooperation. He then empirically demonstrates that participation in bilateral agreements does indeed facilitate the formation of additional ties. Hence, such participation endogenously fosters the formation of additional ties and the creation of ever denser networks of cooperation.

In “Social Networks and the Mass Media,” David Siegel considers the complex interaction between social network and mass media influences on individual behavior. Modeling this interaction, he demonstrates that social network structure conditions media's impact. More specifically, he theoretically shows that social network interactions can amplify media bias, leading to large swings in aggregate behavior. The presence of unified social elites and multiple biased media outlets promulgating countervailing messages may limit the effects of media bias, but media outlets promulgating anti status-quo bias are thought to have an advantage. Thus media bias is generally more effective at driving the population away from a status quo option than toward it. He identifies and discusses several testable hypotheses derived from this theory.

Saumitra Jha in “Trade, Institutions, and Ethnic Tolerance: Evidence from South Asia” uncovers the mechanism by which interethnic cooperation evolved in South Asia. He examines why cooperation between Hindus and Muslims during medieval times created a legacy of ethnic tolerance in the trading towns of South Asia. Using novel town-level data spanning South Asia's medieval and colonial history, Jha finds that medieval ports, despite being more ethnically mixed, were five times less prone to Hindu-Muslim riots between 1850–1950 than other towns. He argues that this is because medieval Hindus and Muslims were able to provide complementary, non-replicable services and a mechanism to share the gains from exchange, which resulted in a sustained legacy of tolerance that continues to the present.

Sarah Kreps and Gustavo Flores-Macías, in their timely study “Political Parties at War: A Study of American War Finance, 1789–2010,” ask the question: What determines how a state finances war? States can choose to adopt war taxes or alternative means (such as borrowing or expanding the money supply) to obtain the resources necessary for war. Kreps and Flores-Macías argue that the choice of the means to finance a war has enduring, and often redistributive, implications for society. They show that partisan preferences affect how wars are financed, and conclude that—to the degree that certain strategies for financing war permit leaders to hide the real cost of war—the means of war financing has implications for democratic accountability.

Michael Tomz and Jessica Weeks investigate the role of public opinion in the consistent finding that democracies do not fight other democracies in their article “Public Opinion and the Democratic Peace.” This article relies on a survey experiment conducted in both the United States and the United Kindgom. Tomz and Weeks find that the public differentiates between democratic and autocratic opponents, and is substantially less supportive of military strikes against democracies than against virtually identical autocracies. Their experiments demonstrate that this difference in tolerance for military action is based on perceptions of threat and morality, rather than on expectations regarding the costs of war or the risks of failure. In this way, public opinion in democracies helps foster and sustain the democratic peace.

We close this issue with a forum on a series of issues that agitate political theory, political science, and the political world at large in this age of multiculturalism. What counts as a cultural disruption, of the sort that multiculturalism is pledged to avoid? Alan Patten put forward a “social lineage account” of cultural transmission in these pages in 2011; William James Booth objects in the current issue that this account suffers from significant defects. This account implicitly relies on an “essentialist” notion of culture, Booth maintains, taking certain aspects of a culture to define its essence, whose loss would be the loss of that culture. At the same time, it must regard liberal and illiberal cultures as equally worthy of preservation, because all are transmitted in the same way. Patten challenges the assertion that he relies on any form of essentialism, and arguing that the social lineage account is fully able to disqualify illiberal elements of culture. We must bear in mind, he says, that even cultures with illiberal elements have other elements that are fully compatible with liberalism. The Patten-Booth discussion sheds light on the thorny questions surrounding cultural respect and preservation in the politics of today's multicultural societies.

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American Political Science Review Vol. 106, No. 4

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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.