Majority rule is a hallmark of modern liberal democracy. It is also a complicated, and contentious, idea. It has been subjected to extensive criticism by a range of philosophers, political theorists, and constitutional scholars ever since Plato. And it has been subjected to a range of qualifications and constraints by political elites and constitutional engineers intent on instituting supermajoritarian requirements. Melissa Schwartzberg’s Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is a careful historical and analytic critique of supermajority rule. As Schwartzberg argues: “Although supermajority rules ostensibly aim to reduce the purported risks associated with majority decision making, they do so at the cost of introducing new liabilities associated with the biased judgments they generate and secure.” This is an important argument, of relevance to normative and empirical scholars of democracy and democratization. And so we have invited a range of scholars working on these topics to review the book. — Jeffrey C. Isaac

The 2005 Danish cartoon crisis has been the topic of much discussion among political science scholars. In September 2011 we ran a symposium on Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook the World that centered on the tensions between multiculturalism, civility, and freedom of expression disclosed by the controversy. Paul M. Sniderman, Michael Bang Petersen, Rune Slothuus, and Rune Stubager’s Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy: Islam, Western Europe, and the Danish Cartoon Crisis (Princeton 2014) revisits the Danish crisis. Drawing on randomized experiments linked to broader survey research, the authors offer a nuanced account of Danish public opinion, and argue that the sensitivity of Danes to civil liberties concerns explains why the cartoon controversy did not result in an anti-Muslim backlash. The topic, the argument, and the methodology are important, and so we have invited a range of political science scholars to review the book. — Jeffrey C. Isaac