In every respect, the 2000 election defied what had become the conventional wisdom about American presidential elections—that the electorate rewards the incumbent administration for good economic times and punishes it for bad economic times. Occurring at a time when the incumbent president enjoyed fairly high levels of approval and the nation enjoyed relative economic prosperity, it seemed the 2000 election had all the markings of an election in which voters would support the status quo and vote to return a Democrat to the White House. Indeed, a group of election forecasters gathered at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and offered predictions that Gore would win a plurality of the two-party popular vote that ranged from 52.8% to 60.3%.The forecasts were as follows: Alan Abramowitz, 53.2%; James Campbell, 52.8%; Thomas Holbrook, 60.3%; Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien, 55.4%; Brad Lockerbie, 60.3% (revised after the APSA roundtable); Helmut Norpoth, 55.0%; Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson, 55.2%. All forecasts are for the incumbent party candidate's percent of the two-party vote. Of course, we now know that although Gore did manage to win the popular vote by the slimmest of margins, he lost the electoral vote by an equally slim margin, and George W. Bush was elected president.

The Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 was a flashpoint in which the struggles of blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans converged with explosive consequences. Dubbed the nation's first “multiracial” riot, it drove home the point that racial dynamics in the United States cannot be understood through a simple black–white framework. The events in L.A. were only the most dramatic example of interminority conflicts that have emerged in many American cities during the post-1965 era, as economic restructuring and immigration have brought racial/ethnic groups into more extensive contact with one another, reshaping their identities and relationships and creating new pressure points for conflict. Rapid economic and demographic change has also opened up new possibilities for coalition and cooperation among racial/ethnic groups, from electoral politics to grassroots community activism. Asian Americans, often depicted as an “interstitial” group and a potential “swing vote,” have played and will continue to play a key role in interracial conflicts and coalitions in American politics.Although we focus on the post-1965 period in this article, conflict and cooperation between Asian Americans and other communities of color date back into the 1800s.

In the 2000 elections, women continued their slow advance into the halls of political power. Today women constitute 13.6% of the House of Representatives, 13% of the Senate, and 22.3% of state legislatures (Center for American Women and Politics 2000). The underrepresentation of women in politics has provoked concern from media commentators, political activists, and feminist scholars who believe that there is a connection between descriptive representation—being a woman—and substantive representation, the advocacy of women's interests (Mansbridge 1999; Phillips 1995; Pitkin 1967; Sapiro 1981). Predictions of the magnitude of women's impact on the policy process span a wide range. The pressure of frequent elections suggests that all representatives, regardless of gender, will zealously advocate the interests of their constituencies. On the other hand, it is possible that female legislators will devote special attention to the interests of women, children, and families. Additionally, women may exhibit a different style of leadership that will have consequences for the very process by which public policy is made. In this essay, I review the evidence concerning the nature of the policy impact of electing women and I suggest directions for future research.

I see four areas where the study of postsocialism has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, One is in providing an ideal laboratory for comparison. Here, I refer to three aspects of the region. First, it contains a large number of cases—28 in all and a good deal more, once we take into account “patch-work” politics and economics of the Russian Federation, for example. Second, the “great transformation,” to borrow from Polanyi and to refer in this instance to an even “greater” process involving the construction of economic and political regimes, nations, and states, deals with virtually all the fundamental issues of politics. Finally, the region exhibits enormous variation in political and economic outcomes, whether we focus on economic and political regime types and the institutional details of these regimes; economic performance, levels of economic development, types of economic reforms, and the role of foreign capital; the age and size of the state and its capacity to define and defend borders, command compliance and extract resources; and the national composition of the population. At the same time, causes are limited, largely because of the homogenizing effects of state socialism and the temporal similarities in when these great transformations commenced. This combination of variable outcomes and constrained causes is, of course, precisely what comparativists value.

In his contribution to an important new collection on Asian-American politics, Don T. Nakanishi calls for “renewing a search for a paradign of Asian Pacific American politics” that takes into account “nondomestic political experiences and relationships” (2001, 106). This article addresses Nakanishi's challenge to consider efforts by Asian Pacific Americans to influence U.S.–Asia relations, especially in advocating changes in American foreign policy towards their countries of origin; the ways in which international processes and policies related to the flow of people, money, goods, and ideas impinge on the political behavior and status of Asian Pacific Americans; and the impact of international political conflicts and domestic political crises involving Asian homelands on interethnic and intracommunity political relations involving Asian Pacific American communities (2001, 106-7).

Introduction

In the latest election for Japan's House of Representatives (Lower House) in June 2000, 202 women ran, and 35 were elected.This is the record high under the New Constitution. Another women was elected in the special election of October 2000, elevating women to 7.6% of the House of Representatives. Reflecting the enactment of 1999's Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society in 1999, major political parties in Japan recruited more women candidates than ever before. The Social Democratic Party (SDP) headed by Takako Doi—a women—had the highest percentage of female representatives (52.6%, or 10 of its 19 HR members). The Japan Communist Party (JCP) also increased its percentage (20%, of four out of its 20 HR members). This shows, to some extent, the advantage held by female candidates from leftist parties that advocate feminist concerns, such as gender equality in political representation.

Having nailed down his party's presidential nomination with an early and decisive victory in the primaries, Al Gore will go on to defeat George W. Bush in the general election by a comfortable margin. The Democratic ticket, so the prediction, will take 55% of the major-party popular vote in November, compared to 45% for the Republican one—almost exactly the reverse of what national polls have been showing as late as June of the election year.

– A forecast issued July 26, 2000

“Prophecy is good business, but full of risks,” warned Mark Twain. How true in this election. Even though Al Gore edged George W. Bush by half-a-million votes in the popular count, he certainly did not win by the “comfortable margin” I predicted more than two months before the event. What was the basis of my prediction? And what may have cut it short?

In this brief overview, I argue that Africanist contributions to the study of politics have not been insignificant. While Africanists, like many other comparativists, have felt uncomfortable about the imperialist aspirations of rational choice, they increasingly see the future as a time when theoretical and methodological pluralism will prevail.

Debates over displays of the Confederate flag have roiled Southern politics in recent years. Opponents of the flag view it is a symbol of slavery and Jim Crow, and consequently an insult to black Americans and evidence of the refusal of many Southerners to let go of an inglorious past. Supporters of the flag, however, argue that the flag today has no linkage with slavery or Jim Crow, but instead symbolizes Southern heritage and tradition.

For political scientists studying the Middle East, the invitation to discuss the possible relevance of their work to comparative politics in general is a welcome and rare opportunity. There is, one senses, a gap between the Middle East political science community and the mainstream disciplinary generalists. To the extent that they even care about being part of the field, some Middle East political scientists feel ghettoized—their region and their work are ignored. Some feel as well that mainstream comparative politics theorizing has not offered much toward better understanding to Middle East politics. Such concerns motivated the establishment of the Conference Group on the Middle East, which organizes sessions in conjunction with, yet separate from, the main program at the APSA Annual Meeting. It is noteworthy that some of the most imaginative recent work on Middle East politics draws from anthropology, political economy, social history, and critical cultural and literary theory. “The Middle East political science community” is not populated exclusively by political scientists.

The Scarcity of Female Politicians in Japan

In elections held in April 1946, Japanese women voted for the first time. Due to the old electoral system, voters elected an unprecedented number of women: 39 out of a possible 464 candidates. Since then this record number has never been equaled or broken, and with the establishment in 1947 of the mid-size constituency single-vote system (3–5 seats), the number of women members of the House of Representatives hovered around 10 (2%) until 1986. Although the length of a term of office is set at four years, there are circumstances in which the House may be dissolved.

By any standard, the 2000 presidential election was close. It was close in the Electoral College, where Bush prevailed by the slimmest majority (271–266), and it was close in the national popular vote, where Gore edged Bush by about 540,000 votes in an electorate of more than 100 million. Needless to say, the 2000 election was also astonishingly close in individual states like Florida, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Oregon.

I begin with three general points about the relationship of area studies to political science, before turning to the specific contributions that Asia and China studies have made in advancing knowledge in political science.

On television's Law and Order, the police catch criminals and hand them over to the lawyers to get convictions. Part of the program's dramatic tension comes from the police operating under the scrutiny of a rigid and unforgiving legal system. The suspense increases as the lawyers try to do their job even though there is often a gap between justice and what the law requires.

On December 12, 2000, for the first time in America's history a court of law determined the outcome of a presidential election. Before an anxious citizenry, the United States Supreme Court issued the decision that would ultimately give George W. Bush the presidency, if not absolute victory. Remarkably, the U.S. Supreme Court justices were not the only jurists pulled into the fray. In numerous lawsuits, several Florida state courts rendered decisions that figured prominently in the 2000 presidential election.

The study of women and politics in the media is a relatively young subfield, blessed with scholarship from the fields of communications, cultural studies, history, sociology and political science. Members of these fields use methodologies—such as semiotics, qualitative analysis, and quantitative content analysis—to examine the content of communication about women and politics in news and advertising. Studies of the impact of messages use polls, experiments, and focus groups. Scholars draw primarily upon theories of framing (Entman 1993), hegemony (Gramsci 1971), and organizational structures (Epstein 1973; Sigal 1973) to explain why news content looks the way it does. Although most research focuses on content rather than causes and consequences, some studies are putting the pieces together to explain how efforts of groups and individuals influence coverage of women and politics and how audiences react to those messages.

As the initial results of the 2000 Census were made public, the December 2000 issue of PS was published. In that issue, articles by Lynne Billard (2000), Thomas Brunell (2000a), and by us (Anderson and Fienberg 2000a) explored the technical innovations for adjusting the census to ameliorate the effect of the differential undercount and the political controversies surrounding the implementation of some of those innovations in the 1990 census. We commented on Brunell (2000a) in Anderson and Fienberg (2000b). Brunell (2000b) responded to our article on mythmaking, which focused on the implication for apportionment of a computer error in the proposed adjustment. This is our response to Brunell's comments on our original article about census adjustment and apportionment in 1990. In particular we point out that Brunell misread both out tables and our discussion about the computer error. In his comments, Brunell (2000b, 2000c) also raises new issues about adjustment. We respond to these, albeit briefly.

It took some gentle prodding from professors Cynthia McClintock and John Harbeson, conveners of this session, to persuade me to participate. The reason for my reluctance may be obvious, considering the composition of this panel. My distinguished colleagues can speak about “them” when referring to the contributions of scholars from the regions on which they specialize. This, I gather, allows them some degree of objectivity when summarizing and assessing the works of their colleagues in the respective regions; instead, when I analyze the contributions of Latin Americans, I analyze “us.”

An official recount was required to determine the winner of a knifeedged election. A Senate candidate's untimely death resulted, surprisingly and circuitously, in the Democrats picking up an extra Senate seat. Amidst widespread allegations of fraud and irregularities, the winner of the popular vote in the presidential election failed for the first time since 1888 to win the decisive electoral-college vote. And thus was foiled the vice president's bid to emerge from the shadow of the president he had served for eight years. The year 2000? No. The year was 1960. The Democrat, John Kennedy, was the president-elect who failed to secure the plurality of the popular vote, while the Republican, Richard Nixon, was the vice president whose popular-vote majority offered him scant consolation in defeat.The Senate candidate was not, of course, Missouri Democrat Mel Carnahan, whose death in September 2000 seems to have spurred a large sympathy vote, resulting in a posthumous victory (which, in turn, permitted the appointment of his widow to fill the seat). Keith Thompson was the Republican senator-elect from Wyoming at the time of his death in December 1960. Immediately thereafter, Democratic governor J.J. Hickey resigned to make himself eligible for appointment to the vacant seat by his own successor, Democratic Secretary of State Jack Cage.

Introduction

This essay focuses on three questions: Why are so few women elected to public office in the United States? What theories might best explain that? Are the theories that explain patterns of women's office holding in one country useful in explaining patterns of office holding in other nations?