As Perspectives on Politics enters its eighth year of operation, this issue marks some important changes in the journal. The most obvious change is the journal's cover design which, in bringing Perspectives in line with its two APSA sister publications, is intended to make the journal more inviting (and while you can't judge a journal by its cover, it's surely a good thing for a journal cover to look good and invite readers to discover what is inside). A second set of changes affect the journal's editorial philosophy and policy. When I assumed the journal's editorship last June I promised that I would soon share a general statement of my editorial vision. This statement immediately follows the Introduction you are now reading (it is also posted online on our website). As you will see when you read it, my editorial team and I intend to build upon the previous achievements of Perspectives at the same time that we attempt some exciting changes.
As the Editorial Statement makes clear, we will work hard to further enhance the journal's reputation and, even more importantly, its actual quality as a publisher of excellent, peer-reviewed political science research. We are equally committed to bridging diverse subfields and approaches in the discipline, and to promoting a broader, more integrative, and more thematic or “problem-centered” approach to political science research. Towards this end we will continue and indeed expand upon certain new formats that we have previously introduced to the book review section—symposia and critical author exchanges—each designed to encourage scholarly conversations that move scholars a bit beyond their normal comfort zones. At the same time, we intend to do other things to promote a more thematic perspective on political science, including the organization of special book review sections reflecting thinking beyond the standard four sub-field scheme that has long governed both the APSA book review and the discipline more broadly.
This issue of Perspectives is our first such experiment on a large scale—a special issue highlighting research articles and symposia with gender-related topics, and including a special book review section featuring books on the broad theme of gender politics. As far as I am aware, this issue is the first theme issue in the history of APSA journal publication. We have chosen, quite deliberately, to organize this issue to mark the journal's eighth year and its new design, but also as a way of underscoring our editorial team's philosophy and of foreshadowing some of the changes to come.
The gender politics theme emerged for two reasons, one logistical and one substantive.
The logistical rationale is quite simple. My predecessor, Jim Johnson, had already accepted a number of gender-themed research articles and also the two symposia on gender politics published below. (Indeed, while every piece published below has been line-edited by me, and many of the authors have worked with me to revise their pieces, all of the front-end research articles and gender symposia were originally submitted to and processed by Jim and his editorial team). There was thus clearly a “critical mass” of gender material in the editorial queue, and this body of work presented itself as an opportunity to highlight a theme. Such logistical considerations are important in the running of a journal. But they ought never to be decisive.
And so the main reason for our decision to highlight the gender politics theme in this issue is substantive: as many of the pieces below argue, gender is both a central category of political life and thus of political analysis, and an often overlooked category. By coincidence, as we were contemplating these matters, the New York Times magazine ran a cover story that featured an excerpt from Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDann's just-published book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Reading this article, and then the book, convinced me beyond any doubt that a thematically-oriented issue made good sense. (It also persuaded me that we should include a symposium on the book in the issue. I am pleased to report that due to the diligence of the reviewers writing under severe time constraints, and the hard work of Editorial Assistant Carolyn Holmes, the symposium is printed below). The fact that the gender-themed pieces have come out in March, which is Women's History Month, is simply an added bonus. Below I will say a few words about the gender-themed articles, symposia, and featured book reviews. But first a word or two about the issue's other “feature”: Peter Katzenstein's 2009 APSA Presidential Address, “‘Walls' Between ‘Those People’: Contrasting Perspectives on World Politics.’”
The APSA Presidential Address has been published in the March issue of Perspectives ever since the journal's founding. So it is a complete coincidence that this address coincides with our theme. And indeed, on the face of it the address—by tradition the journal's lead article—has little to do with gender. Its theme is nothing less than the entire world as a site of cultural production, social mobility and migration, intellectual and normative diffusion, and thus of politics. Katzenstein addresses American political science as an association of scholars who are part of a broader, pluralistic world of cultures, civilizations, political identities and communities. In challenging a “clash of civilizations” approach most closely associated with the late Samuel P. Huntington (APSA's 1986–7 President), Katzenstein develops a complex perspective on world politics that echoes “cosmopolitan” themes associated with economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum. This argument has ethical implications, from which Katzenstein does not shy away. But the argument is intended primarily as a contribution to our efforts to understand and explain rather than to prescribe. It focuses on the ways in which the complexities of the world elude some of our reified categories, and the ways in which our discipline can better comprehend these complexities. Katzenstein's version of “world politics” complicates our conventional subfields at the same time as it calls for attention, in different ways of course, from all of us who constitute political science as a discipline.
If I had to sum up Katzenstein's point in a single injunction, it would be this: we political scientists ought to be skeptical of conventional scholarly and political boundaries, and of the false universals these boundaries often instantiate. And it is here that the Presidential Address, which is not “about” gender, actually provides a terrific lead to this issue. For if gender studies broadly is about anything, it is about a similar questioning of the false universals that have long organized political life and the scholarly study of it, relegating women—and their experiences, labors, and constraints—to a “private” sphere supposedly beyond politics and yet in fact political to the core. The gender-themed articles, symposia, and reviews featured in this issue of Perspectives attest to the ways that the study of the politics of gender has vastly expanded the scope of political science, to its advantage (at the same time, Kristen Monroe's June 2008 Perspectives article, “Gender Equality in Academia: Bad News From the Trenches and Some Possible Solutions,” makes clear that as structures of labor and professional development academic disciplines, including our own, still have a long way to go). Indeed, the great virtue of our book symposium on Half the Sky is that while its contributors disagree substantially in their assessment of the book's narrative and prescriptions, they agree that social science offers indispensible explanatory accounts of the gender inequalities documented in the book. The discussion thus underscores differences between the genres of journalism and social science, and also the complementarities of these forms of writing, both of which engage and seek to understand the same world of palpable, social experience.
This issue's first two peer-reviewed research articles exemplify ways in which the analysis of gender has enriched the study of American politics by raising important questions about the complex relationships among political identities, social movements, and interest group formation (also a topic of the September issue's book symposium on Dara Strolovitch's Affirmative Advocacy). Kristin Goss and Michael Heaney's “Organizing Women as Women: Hybridity and Grass-Roots Collective Action in the 21st Century” compares two “women's organizations”—the Million Mom March (a gun control group) and Code Pink: Women for Peace (an antiwar group)—that have employed “hybrid” organizing strategies to successfully reach beyond gender-specific issues and appeal to heterogeneous communities of women. And Barbara Arneil's “Boy Scouts vs. Girl Scouts of America” compares the two gender-based scouting organizations, demonstrating how both experienced a post-sixties decline, but only the latter was able to adjust to the new situation and revitalize itself, by merging a more gender neutral and egalitarian ethos with the GSA's “traditional” mission. Arneil's piece is much more than a comparative study of the Boy and Girl Scouts, for it raises fundamental questions about gender, organizational change, and the interconnectedness of the social and the political in American politics.
The next two articles also nicely complement one another. Both analyze the feedback relationships between gendered public policy and women's political status, and link the study of policy with the study of public opinion. Eileen McDonagh's “It Takes a State: A Policy Feedback Model of Political Representation,” argues that “the state's public policies constitute a political environment that has an effect on public attitudes about women's suitability as political leaders and women's election to political office.” Comparing the limited descriptive representation of women in the US relative to other political systems, McDonagh argues that the difference lies in the presence or absence of “maternalist” public policies—such as robust welfare policies and gender quotas—that institutionalize conventionally defined women's interests. Where such policies are weak or absent—as they are in the US—politics is more likely to be seen as a “male” domain, and thus it is likely to remain largely the province of men. In “What Do Women Really Know?” Dietlind Stolle and Elizabeth Gidengil address a similar question—the so-called “gender gap” in political knowledge. They argue that if one adopts a broader view of “political knowledge” that incorporates policy effects of particular concern to women, then survey data suggests a greater degree of women's political knowledgeability than the literature has recognized. Like McDonagh, they find that when the public policies of the state are more responsive to conventionally defined women's political interests, then women are more likely to consider themselves political stakeholders, and to become active as engaged citizens and political elites.
The importance of the kind of work exemplified by the four articles discussed above is the topic of our Symposium on Gender and Comparative Politics. Based on a 2007 colloquium organized by Karen Beckwith, this symposium brings together some of the top scholars of gender in comparative politics (Louise Chappell, Teri L. Caraway, Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer, Lisa Baldez, Mona Lena Krook, Miki Caul Kittelson, Mala Htun, S. Laurel Weldon, Georgina Waylen, Aili Mari Tripp, and Beckwith herself) to discuss the importance of gender research to comparative politics and the importance of comparative analysis to the study of gender. In the course of this dialogue a number of common themes emerge: the relational character of gender (which is not synonymous with “women”); the socially constructed meanings of masculinities and femininities, maleness and femaleness; the centrality of gender to all fundamental concerns of political analysis, including the structuring of political representation and leadership; the distribution of rights, entitlements, and social and economic opportunities; the enactment and the experience of vulnerability to violence, power and marginalization; and the ways in which specific public policies (anti-discrimination and equal opportunity; reproductive freedom; “domestic violence”; family policies; education) either reproduce or mitigate gender inequalities.
Aili Mari Tripp's contribution also sharply poses a compelling question: As the comparative analysis of gender has become an increasingly accepted part of political science, has this work also become “normalized” in ways that have diminished some of the feminist political concerns that originally animated it, and if so has this occurred to the detriment of gender studies? The Symposium makes clear that gender study in political science is a heterogeneous enterprise, and encompasses robust debate of both the politics and the meta-politics of gender. Our second symposium, on “Women's Choices and the Future of Feminism,” furthers this debate. Whereas the work mentioned above deals primarily with “empirical” analysis broadly construed, this symposium incorporates more normative concerns, bringing together a range of commentators (Jennet Kirkpatrick, Michaele Ferguson, R. Claire Snyder-Hall, Lori Marso, and Nancy Hirschmann) to debate the implications of “choice feminism” for political theory, public law, and public policy. The question at issue here is central to all of the research articles discussed above: What are the pragmatic and normative consequences of different ways of linking or uncoupling discourses of maternalism, women's empowerment, and gender-neutral citizenship (These normative issues are broached in Nancy Hirschmann's book Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political Theory, reviewed below by Avigail Eisenberg, and also in Wendy Gunther-Canada's extended review on women in the history of political thought.)
The books reviewed in our special review section span a wide range of subfields, methodological approaches, and topical foci—from opinion research and party politics to social movements, from law and public policy to the history of political thought. They demonstrate the richness and diversity of the study of gender in political science. They also underscore the very complexity of “gender” as a theoretical concept and as a political reality that involves not simply the structuring of relations between men and women but the very social construction of masculinity and femininity as binary categories shaping the way we think about our bodies, our attitudes towards sexuality, and our very sexual identities. This complexity of gender came to the fore during our staff meetings to plan this issue and choose the cover photo. The photo that was chosen was a topic of real controversy among my staff. Taken by political scientist Scott Pegg, an Indiana University colleague, it depicts a young Nigerian fisherwoman holding a machete, standing on a mangrove tree in a Niger Delta river. She can no longer fish because the fish population was decimated by an oil spill, so she is now trying to eke out a living by chopping down dead trees and selling them for firewood. Why, some of my assistants pressed, is this photograph a powerful representation of gender? Simply because it depicts a woman? Does this photo really capture the distinctive relational dynamics of gender inequality? Isn't this photo more about oil, or economics, or the environment, than about gender? These are powerful questions, and they precipitated productive conversation that echoed some of this issue's key themes. Ultimately, I selected the photo in question as the cover image for a number of reasons: because of its visually evocative character, because it poses some interesting questions and invites further analysis, but mainly because it visually represents a fundamental truth about gender—its complex determination and intersectionality. Gender is rarely experienced in “pure form,” any more than is any other social identity or relation. And in most situations, and for most women, it is precisely the complex intersections of gender, race, class, nationality, post-coloniality, etc., that constitute experience and shape political agency. The woman in the cover photo is a young, poor, laboring, and black woman, a post-colonial Nigerian subject, an inhabitant of an environmentally ravaged land, and a citizen of a fragile, multi-ethnic state shaped by a history of violence and the geopolitics of oil. She is all of these things, and her womanhood is inflected by these and other “subaltern” identities.
So gender is always intertwined with other categories. At the same time, gender is obviously not the only salient political category. And while this issue of Perspectives features the theme of gender politics, it also, unsurprisingly, features a range of other important themes and topics. We are pleased to be running a symposium on Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast's new book Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. The book advances an ambitious framework for understanding the synergistic and evolutionary relationship between the formation of non-predatory states, the securing of peaceful social order, the establishment of the rule of law, and the development of productive economies. In some ways the book nicely complements Robert Bates' When Things Fell Apart, the subject of a recent Perspectives symposium (June 2009). But whereas Bates analyzes the conditions generating “failed states,” North et al are interested in those circumstances where states “successfully” develop. Our symposium features four distinguished scholars—Larry Diamond, Jean Elshtain, Caroline Hartzell, and Jack Snyder—each of whom has dealt with questions of state formation and the organization and deployment of violence in their own work.
The question of “state formation” and “state-building” is obviously central to contemporary world politics and to US foreign policy in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is just as central to contemporary political science and is a question addressed by a number of other discussions below. These include Scott Straus' review of Rene Lamarchand's The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa; Mitchell Seligson's review of Bruce Gilley's The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy; Henryk Spruyt's review of Philip G. Roeder's Where Nation States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism; Ashutosh Varshney's review of Henry Hale's The Foundations of Ethnic Politics: Separatism of States and Nations in Eurasia and the World; and Brian Shoup's review of three books on ethnic conflict and political institutions in the Asia Pacific. In addition, we feature illuminating reviews of a number of recent books dealing with post-conflict peace-building and state-building as deliberate objects of policy: Jack Goldstone's review of Virginia Page Fortna's Does Peace-Keeping Work: Shaping Belligerents' Choices After Civil War; Timothy D. Sisk's review of Caroline Hartzell and Matthew Hoddie's Crafting Peace: Power-Sharing Institutions and the Negotiated Settlement of Civil War; Patrick Thaddeus Jackson's review of Anna K. Jarstad and Timothy D. Sisk's anthology From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding; and Ramesh Thakur's review of Lise Morjé Howard's UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars. It is perhaps worth noting that this topic is not unrelated to gender, for it has been widely documented that when states fail and civil wars ensue, women are often primary targets of organized violence in general and sexualized violence—rape—in particular.
One issue raised by a number of the North et al discussants is whether the book's rational choice framework accords sufficient weight to the independent force of normative commitments and of social movements—especially democratic movements—energized to promote peace, the rule of law, or democracy by such normative commitments. The pieces by Larry Diamond and Jean Elshtain raise this question most emphatically, but the theme of the “cultural infrastructure” of democracy is also discussed in a number of other entries beyond this symposium, including Waltraud Q. Morales' review of Donna Lee Van Cott's Radical Democracy in the Andes and Pippa Norris' review of Ethan B. Kapstein and Nathan Converse's The Fate of Young Democracies. It is also raised in Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence, and John Side's article on “Self-Segregation or Deliberation: Blog Readership, Participation and Polarization in American Politics,” which employs a unique dataset on blog readership to consider the potential and limits of this new technology as a medium of democratic citizenship. And it is the central theme of our critical exchange between William E. Connolly, author of Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, and Lisa Wedeen, author of Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen. Wedeen's book joins “comparative politics” and “political theory” to analyze the cultural foundations of an incipient democratic public sphere in Yemen, not conventionally considered a “democratic” state; while Connolly's deploys a distinctively “postmodern” political theory to analyze the cultural foundations of conservatism in the US, typically considered the prototypical democracy. The dialogue between these authors makes clear the complex entwinements of politics and culture and especially religion. It also highlights the fragility of democratic praxis and thus the difficulties in sustaining it.
The precariousness of democracy, particularly in the US, was a central theme of last issue's lead article, Benjamin I. Page and Jeffrey Winters' “Oligarchy in the United States?” It is also a theme broached in a number of pieces below on American politics. Scott Barclay's “In Search of Judicial Activism in the Same Sex Marriage Cases” engages, and debunks, an idea widely circulated by conservatives, that US judges and courts have pursued an activist agenda of thwarting clear public preferences opposing same sex marriage. Barclay challenges this view's reading of both public opinion and the actual case history of the courts, and in doing so he offers a more nuanced view of the role of the courts—and the rule of law—in a democracy (a theme engaged by articles by Mariah Zeisberg and Annabelle Lever in our December issue). Andrew Polsky's “Staying the Course: Presidential Leadership in Time of War,” describes how Presidential political rhetoric can lock US Presidents into costly military ventures even in the face of obvious flaws with these ventures. Based on a comparison of Vietnam and Iraq, this piece is directly relevant both to current US policy challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan and to broader discussions of the growth of executive power—and the contradictions of this power—associated with the ability to declare and act upon “crises” of “national security.” This theme is broached, even more generally, in Seyla Benhabib's extended review of Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Wolin is one of the most important political theorists of the past half-century, and his book is a sobering prognosis of the state of US democracy.
Finally, a propos the current challenges facing American politics in connection with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I recommend Celestino Perez Jr.'s extended review on the ethics of war, which cogently discusses the complex relationships between the ethical responsibilities of those sent into battle and the responsibilities of those who send them there. “Tino” Perez is a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army and an Assistant Professor at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he teaches courses on military strategy and ethics. He wrote and completed his entire Indiana University doctoral dissertation—on the political theories of Jurgen Habermas and Pope John Paul II—while serving a tour of duty in Iraq in which he personally led daily armed patrols on the outskirts of Baghdad. His review, and the experience that informs it, is a vivid reminder that political science reaches far beyond the academy, in no doubt complex ways, and that our scholarly inquiries and debates matter in the world.
