EDITOR'S NOTE

The subtitle's placement of its apostrophe means something: While all previous “front matter” (as well as the “In This Issue” summary that follows) has been a collective product, in this final “UCLA” issue I want to speak as Lead Co-editor, the post I have held for most of the Review's tenure here. (Dan Treisman served as Acting Lead in our initial year, and very special thanks are due to him).

Primarily, I want to express my profound gratitude, not only to Dan, but to all who have served as co-editors during this five-year stint: at UCLA, Kathy Bawn, Michael Chwe, Jeff Lewis, Kirstie McClure, Karen Orren, Dan Posner (since moved to MIT), Art Stein, and John Zaller; via videoconference from other locations, Greg Caldeira, Gary Cox, Jennifer Hochschild, David Laitin, and Arthur “Skip” Lupia. A special nod is owed to the co-editors who remained during the final year and the transition months: Caldeira, Cox, Hochschild, Laitin, McClure, and Stein. And, at the risk of repetition, I want again to acknowledge the extraordinary services of our Senior Editor throughout the five years, Joseph Riser. He has supervised a terrific staff of Editorial Assistants – graduate students who with few exceptions served only one year. I (or we) have named them all before in our end-of-year reports, and I forbear to do so again here; but they know who they are and what tremendous work they have done.

Our Editorial Board and its Executive Committee have also rendered yeoman service whenever called upon, usually to help us resolve a case of sharp disagreement among referees. I want to thank particularly Colin Elman, who has worked very hard (and with no little success) to bring qualitative work back to the APSR; also Claudine Gay, Peter Gourevitch, Paul Quirk, and Stephen White, who served on our third-year review committee and whose report helped us enormously to “tune up” our operation. At the American Political Science Association, Michael Brintnall, Polly Karpowicz, and five successive association presidents have given us unwavering support; at Cambridge University Press, Mark Zadrozny and his staff, including especially Jonathan Geffner, who have put up with our casual attitude toward deadlines and have brought us better design and better publicity and have contributed a great deal toward bringing the Review back to its status (now for the third year running) as the most-cited journal in political science.

This is beginning to sound like an Academy Awards acceptance speech, and I do hear the music beginning to swell to nudge me off the stage. I will only add that it has been a tremendous privilege and a profound learning experience to have served in this role and to have sat in on what must be one of the world's best seminars, namely our weekly meeting of co-editors. Thanks again, and I extend my (and our) very best wishes to the University of North Texas team as they carry on these responsibilities.

IN THIS ISSUE

Five of this issue's articles illuminate the broad question of whether, how, and by what standards voters can or do hold their elected representatives accountable. In our timely lead article, “Unemployment and the Democratic Electoral Advantage,” John R. Wright rebuts the common belief that unemployment turns voters away from the incumbent, regardless of that incumbent's partisan affiliation. Rather, Wright shows, high unemployment, controlling for other factors, normally advantages the Democratic candidate (gubernatorial or presidential, incumbent or challenger). The Democratic advantage from unemployment is greater under Republican administrations, but it prevails even when the Democrat is the incumbent. The reason, Wright conjectures, is that Democrats have come historically to “own” the issue of job creation; and many voters assume that, however bad the current situation, a Republican governor or president would make it worse. Readers likely will be receiving this November issue shortly after the 2012 presidential elections and should be able to assess the impact of high, but clearly declining, unemployment on a Democratic incumbent's chances.

If unemployment confers chiefly a partisan advantage, the “pork” that a district receives should benefit the incumbent representative regardless of party (and, as we've seen in another recent article, an incumbent president of the representative's party perhaps even more: Kriner and Reeves (2012), this Review, 106: 348–66). Yet a lot of mysteries remain: Why does pork matter, if it constitutes such a small part of federal spending? How do constituents learn about what pork the district receives, and who allocated it; and why should they take the effort to find out? When a representative claims credit for having won pork, does that claim resonate with voters and help build a personal vote? Most readers will be surprised to learn what Justin Grimmer, Solomon Messing, and Sean J. Westwood argue (in “How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The Effect of Legislator Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation”)—namely that the frequency of credit-claiming matters far more than the actual amount of pork garnered. Relying on both observational and experimental evidence, Grimmer and his colleagues find that voters respond more to messages that claim credit than to ones that provide non-partisan information, but that constituents' view of the representative's merit and effectiveness increases with the number of claims, not the total amount claimed. One implication is that a representative is wiser to bring many small tidbits of pork to her constituency (and to claim credit for each) than to garner a few large “sides” of pork.

Relatedly, and relying entirely on experimental evidence, Gregory A. Huber, Seth J. Hill, and Gabriel S. Lenz show (in “Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters' Limitations in Controlling Incumbents”)—that voters weigh recent incumbent performance more heavily relative to overall performance in office, even when incentivized not to do so; and—reminiscent of findings on “shark attacks”—even allow changes in their welfare from an unrelated lottery to influence their evaluations. While their findings are in line with much observational evidence (e.g., that voters evaluate an incumbent president by what happens in the last few quarters before election, weight trend more heavily than actual performance, and blame or credit the incumbent for events completely outside her control), they offer the first strong experimental confirmation of these findings.

So do smart politicians intuitively understand voters' cognitive limitations? Do they favor their friends (or co-partisans) in the allocation of pork, do they do so especially in “swing” districts, and do they do so in democracies outside the United States? Yes, argue Fernanda Brollo and Tommaso Nannicini, in “Tying Your Enemy's Hands in Close Races: The Politics of Federal Transfers in Brazil.” Looking at intergovernmental transfers in Brazil, they find that cities whose mayors are allied politically with the incumbent national president receive about one-third more discretionary infrastructure allocations in pre-election years than non-allied mayors. More remarkably, opposition mayors who won narrowly in the previous election (and whose cities therefore count as “swing” constituencies) are especially short-changed in pre-election years, evidently in an effort to “tie their hands” on infrastructure expenditures and minimize these opponents' chances of re-election.

Reformers frequently assume that voters could, and would, monitor their representatives more effectively if only they had readier access to information: More transparency would translate into greater accountability—perhaps even in authoritarian regimes (cf. Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin 2009; this Review, 103: 645–68). For apparently the first time in this line of research, Edmund Malesky, Paul Schuler, and Ahn Tran subject that assertion to rigorous, randomized testing in the particular context of the Vietnamese National Assembly (in “The Adverse Effects of Sunshine: A Field Experiment on Legislative Transparency in an Authoritarian Assembly”). The actions—or inaction—of a random sample of delegates were publicized extensively in a widely-read online newspaper, while a control group received only the normal, rather restricted, publicity. Transparency in this semi-authoritarian context turned out to have perverse effects: The delegates whose activities were publicized curtailed their participation and reduced their odds of re-election. Transparency, Malesky and his colleagues conclude, likely increases accountability only in fully democratic settings.

Turning from politics within nations to relations between them, Branislav L. Slantchev offers a new insight into the old riddle of why fully informed states would ever risk a war. (Instead, we usually assume, they would reach a bargain that reflected their relative strengths, since these would be fully known to both parties). Even models that incorporate incomplete information or inability to commit credibly, Slantchev observes, cannot easily explain why wars last so long or why warring powers often advance even more unrealistic demands the longer the war continues (recall the case of Germany in World War I). A more convincing explanation, Slantchev argues in “Borrowed Power: Debt Finance and the Resort to Arms,” and one that holds even under complete information and an ability to commit credibly, is sovereign debt. Paradoxically, the fact that defeat usually entails repudiation of debt (whether explicitly or through inflation), encourages risk-taking and extravagant demands that would be impossible without the option of borrowing. Thus indirectly the ability of states to borrow can eliminate a bargaining range that would otherwise exist—whether before or during the war—and precipitate or extend destructive combat.

Our next three articles turn us back to questions of citizenship within states, and specifically of what democratic citizenship requires and entails. In “‘Writing a Name in the Sky’: Rancière, Cavell, and the Possibility of Egalitarian Inscription,” Aletta J. Norval takes up the question—particularly acute in emerging democracies—of how the previously voiceless manage both to be heard and to stake previously unheard-of claims; and how, once such an “interruption” has occurred, it can proceed to “inscription” that makes the previously excluded, and their issues, an ongoing part of the political order. Drawing on two aspects of theorists who have previously addressed such issues, Jacques Rancière and Stanley Cavell, Norval turns to specific events they have emphasized – the secession of the plebs in Republican Rome, Blanqui's self-identification as “proletarian” in an Orleanist French courtroom, Nora's hesitating proclamation of her new self in Ibsen's A Doll's House—to draw our attention to how such assertions are received, what kind of community emerges among the previously voiceless, and how – or whether – such communities become assimilated into the existing order, or (perhaps by continued disruptions) retain a separate identity. As Norval concludes, “moments of challenge and critique . . . are crucial to the deepening and sustaining of a democratic ethos, an ethos that foregrounds democratic responsiveness.”

Quite relatedly, but proceeding from a different theoretical perspective, Josiah Ober, in “Democracy's Dignity,” advances “dignity,” understood as “nonhumiliation and noninfantalization,” as a third crucial criterion (along with liberty and equality) of democratic citizenship.Footnote ¹ Advancing not only a normative argument for this position, Ober seeks to demonstrate, with simple game theory and historical examples (including a case from ancient Athens, prosecuted by Demosthenes, for the crime of “willful and harmful infliction of humiliation upon another”), that self-interested citizens can be motivated to defend others against threats to their dignity. Thus “a civic dignity regime is theoretically stable,” unlike such alternatives as meritocracy or universal human dignity. Ober's argument thus echoes Norval's: To the extent that we infantilize nominally equal fellow citizens, we leave them voiceless and deny them the reality of equal citizenship.

If the United States lacks a Demosthenes, let alone a Pericles, it has at least a Supreme Court that has, on occasion, given voice to the voiceless and dignity to the humiliated (see, respectively, Gideon v. Wainwright and Brown vs. Board). But, as the Court's power has grown – and as appointments to it have become correspondingly more contentious – attorneys, Senators, and the chattering classes generally have tried to identify the “swing” or median Justice and to contemplate both how to frame arguments to appeal to that Justice and how a possible new appointment would, or would not, shift that median. That approach is misguided, argue Benjamin E. Lauderdale and Tom S. Clark in “The Supreme Court's Many Median Justices.” Not only does the “median” Justice vary over time, even with no shift in personnel (a point already widely accepted), but a more finely grained analysis of the Court's decisions from 1953 through 2006 (a total of 4186 non-unanimous decisions, involving 29 different Justices) reveals: (a) that the “median” Justice varies depending on the type of caseFootnote ² and, correspondingly; (b) that one cannot reduce Justices' preferences, at any time, to a single left-right dimension. More clearly understanding the Court's evolution, and more accurately predicting its decisions, requires closer attention to the Justices' positions on particular kinds of cases. As Lauderdale and Clark note, in principle the same method can be used on other courts, city councils, legislative committees, etc. Thus, while we have grown accustomed to ideological mappings of the U.S. Congress, of the parliaments of many other countries, of supranational bodies, and most recently of U.S. state legislatures (Shor and McCarty 2011; this Review, 105: 530–51), efforts to do so for smaller bodies have been (as it seemed, inevitably) less precise. The estimator employed by Lauderdale and Clark holds out a possible remedy.

Historians of the period between the World Wars are acutely aware of what democratic theorists have come to call the “boundary problem,” i.e., that one cannot decide democratically whom to include in (or exclude from) a given democracy's territory. One can conduct a plebiscite (as in Alsace-Lorraine or Schleswig-Holstein), but how can one decide democratically within what territory to hold that plebiscite? To put the question most sharply: Can the “demos” be democratically demarcated? Likely not, argues Arash Abizadeh in “On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy, and the Boundary Problem.” All efforts to date, at any rate, display seemingly insurmountable difficulties: Efforts to define the boundary culturally collapse, inevitably, into ethnic nationalism. And once we see the demos as unbounded, we can easily arrive at a vague, institution-free, appeal “to humanity as some kind of pre-political, global demos.” The best we can do in practice, Abizadeh concludes, is to insist on fully democratic practices that include, as a minimum, “expression, contestation, negotiation, [and] justification,” particularly toward those regarded as outsiders vis-à-vis the given boundaries. At a more fundamental level, however, Abizadeh concludes, “the demos is both everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere: in principle unbounded. It is nowhere: a regulative ideal that no actual, politically articulated collectivity can ever fully succeed in instantiating.”

In twentieth-century practice, many boundary problems were solved violently, by expulsion, flight, and “ethnic cleansing.” Among the most horrific examples was the Partition of India, in which probably 12 million people were displaced and up to a million killed. Yet the death rates varied enormously across regions, for a variety of reasons: Sometimes minorities remained scarcely touched, sometimes they emigrated unscathed; on the other side, some local majorities engaged in organized butchery, while among others violence was rare and disorganized. Efforts to attribute the differences to prior intercommunity amity, exposure to lurid rumor, or even on-site visits by Gandhi, have yielded at best partial success. In this issue's final article (“Does Combat Experience Foster Organizational Skill? Evidence from Ethnic Cleansing during the Partition of South Asia”), Saumitra Jha and Steven Wilkinson find greater power in a very different explanation, one that focuses on means rather than motive: whether the given area (and community) had veterans who had experienced combat in World War II and hence presumably possessed the military and organizational skills to provide an effective defense (or, for that matter, offense).

Imbued with our received images of European and East Asian soldiers, we easily forget that 2.5 million Indians—some 3 per cent of the adult male population – enlisted for service in World War II. The great majority of them saw combat, for weeks, months, or years. Where exactly a unit served, and how much combat it experienced, seems to have been virtually random. Building an impressive new dataset that relies both on the detailed unit histories compiled by the British Armed Forces and on the Imperial War Graves Commission, Jha and Wilkinson are able to ascertain the extent to which a community (Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Parsi, etc.) in a given locale included combat veterans. Their finding is stark: Where a local minority included combat veterans, its death rate was significantly lower—either out of deterrence or, more commonly, because the minority conducted a well-organized and well-defended emigration and did not fall prey to the frequent slaughters (often along railway lines) of ill-organized refugees. Sadly, it seems also to be the case that local majorities with combat experience were more effective at ethnic cleansing, presumably because they could more effectively intimidate (or, intimidation failing, more effectively butcher) local minorities. Far from being of interest only to historians of modern India, or indeed to students of ethnic conflict, Jha and Wilkinson's work (as they observe) carries implications for students of revolutions, mass movements, and seemingly peaceful expansions of the franchise. It has long been observed that all of these phenomena multiply after major wars, and it may well be that masses whose ranks include combat-experienced former soldiers present a more formidable threat to the elites of their day.

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Articles appearing in the APSR before June 1953 were indexed in The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. 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 Journal of 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.