APSA is pleased to announce the next editorial team for American Political Science Review. The new team, to be located at UCLA, will begin their term on July 1, 2007. Their Editorial Statement follows. Lee Sigelman, the current APSR editor, and his team at George Washington University will conclude their term in August 2007. The transition from the Sigelman's GWU team to the UCLA team will be complete by the end of the calendar year, and the change will be reflected on the APSR masthead commencing with the first issue of Volume 102 in February of 2008.

The cover graphic for this issue symbolizes the process of mourning, in recognition, as per our standard practice, of the theme of the issue's lead article. By unhappy coincidence, that theme is doubly appropriate, for it also marks the recent passing of Nelson W. Polsby, the editor of the Review from 1970 to 1976. A larger-than-life figure, innovative scholar, sage political commentator, indefatigable conversationalist, and beloved mentor, Nelson Polsby was truly one of a kind – sometimes cantankerous but unfailingly gregarious and never quite able, despite what sometimes seemed to be his best efforts, to disguise his essential kindness. He will be – already is – missed.

What does the choice of the Gettysburg Address as a eulogy for the September 11 dead reveal about public mourning in the polity that made it? Tracing the genealogy of the Address back to Pericles' Funeral Oration, this essay argues that Thucydides provides two models of public mourning: one based on the Oration alone, the other on the rituals surrounding the Festival of Dionysia. Each generates a particular patriotic perspective: one unquestioning and partial, the other balanced and theoretical. Using Plato's Menexenus to distinguish the models, the essay employs them as a lens to view two moments of American public mourning linked by the Gettysburg Address. Suggesting that 1863 saw a Dionysian approach; and 2002, one based on the Oration alone, it traces the beneficial impact of the 1863 choice for American politics, and considers the possible consequences of the 2002 reading in light of American and Athenian historical experience.

Even as he recommends it as the extra-constitutional solution to the inefficiencies and insufficiencies of legislative constitutionalism, Locke's Second Treatise is far more aware of the dangers of executive prerogative than the more optimistic accounts in the recent scholarship have appreciated, making Locke pessimistic about the permanent sustenance of legislative constitutionalism. This pessimism stems from Locke's recognition that the people are far too constitutionally passive for the vigilance essential to ‘umpire’ well the necessity of executive action outside the laws. In fact, liberalism itself can contribute to such passivity: the people are content to allow an executive to act with a significant degree of discretion outside the laws so long as those actions do not interfere with their short-term interest in security and prosperity. Understanding Locke's pessimism regarding popular vigilance casts into new light his argument for a legislative constitutionalism based on fundamental laws that establish a clear separation of powers. Such fundamental laws provide legislative elites with the constitutional ‘signals’ by which they can alert the otherwise slumbering people about an executive intent on usurpation and tyranny.

Leo Strauss's greatest project was his attempt to resurrect classical political philosophy by reawakening the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. This essay illuminates Strauss's view of that quarrel by considering a crucial stage in the development of his understanding of the most important differences between ancient and modern political philosophy. Strauss's critique of Hobbes in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes culminates in a striking comparison of Hobbes's distinctively modern approach to political philosophy with the approach of Plato and Aristotle. By examining Strauss's critique of Hobbes's “new political science,” this essay brings out the view of the deficiencies in modern political philosophy that led Strauss to conceive of the possibility of a genuine return to classical thought.

In this article I take up John Rawls's invitation to investigate the capacity of a given comprehensive ethical doctrine to endorse on principled grounds the liberal terms of social cooperation. In the case of Islamic political ethics, however, far more is at stake in affirming citizenship in a (non-Muslim) liberal democracy than state neutrality and individual autonomy. Islamic legal and political traditions have traditionally held that submission to non-Muslim political authority and bonds of loyalty and solidarity with non-Muslim societies are to be avoided. In this article, I examine the Islamic foundations for affirming on principled grounds residence, political obligation, and loyalty to a non-Muslim state. My research shows not only that such grounds exist even in classical Islamic legal discourses, but also that the concerns of Islamic scholars vindicate political liberalism's claim to successfully accommodate the adherents of certain nonliberal doctrines by refraining from proclaiming controversial metaphysical truthclaims.

Scholars of world politics enjoy well-developed theories of the consequences of unipolarity or hegemony, but have little to say about what happens when a state's foreign relations take on imperial properties. Empires, we argue, are characterized by rule through intermediaries and the existence of distinctive contractual relations between cores and their peripheries. These features endow them with a distinctive network-structure from those associated with unipolar and hegemonic orders. The existence of imperial relations alters the dynamics of international politics: processes of divide and rule supplant the balance-of-power mechanism; the major axis of relations shift from interstate to those among imperial authorities, local intermediaries, and other peripheral actors; and preeminent powers face special problems of legitimating their bargains across heterogeneous audiences. We conclude with some observations about the American empire debate, including that the United States is, overall, less of an imperial power than it was during the Cold War.

Elected officials are commonly accused of being ideologically rigid, or failing to alter their positions in response to relevant policy information. We examine this phenomenon with a theory in which politicians have private information about their ideological leanings and expected policy consequences. The theory shows that in many circumstances the informational differences create a context in which elections induce ideological rigidity. Correspondingly, elections often fail to provide incentives for information-based moderation, in which both left- and right-leaning politicians become more likely to use policy information. These seemingly perverse incentives occur because politicians wish to signal that they share voters' leanings; indeed, the motivation to signal preference similarity can induce rigidity even when voters want politicians to be responsive to new information. We show that such incentives for rigidity are greater when voters have less information about policy and politicians' preferences, and discuss possible tests of these predictions.

Most political observers agree that incumbent legislators have a considerable advantage over nonincumbents in modern congressional elections. Yet there is still disagreement over the exact source of this advantage and the explanation for its growth over time. To address this debate we utilize a unique set of historical elections data to test for the presence of an incumbency advantage in late-nineteenth-century House elections (1872–1900). We find a modest direct effect of incumbency and a substantial candidate quality effect. Moreover, the cartel-like control of ballot access by nineteenth century political parties created competition in races that the modern market-like system simply does not sustain. Our results suggest that candidate quality is a fundamental piece of the puzzle in understanding the historical development of the incumbency advantage in American politics.

We develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents, in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters. Given incumbent failure in office, challenger entry is more likely, but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed. At the same time, challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voter's positive assessment of incumbent qualifications. How a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running, depending on the electoral environment. The model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting, the incumbency advantage, and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare, while pointing to new interpretations of, and future avenues for, empirical research on elections.

This paper explores three competing accounts of judicial review by comparing the enacting and invalidating coalitions for each of the fifty-three federal statutes struck down by the Supreme Court during its 1981 through 2005 terms. When a Republican judicial coalition invalidates a Democratic statute, the Court's decision is consistent with a partisan account, and when a conservative judicial coalition invalidates a liberal statute, the decision is explicable on policy grounds. But when an ideologically mixed coalition invalidates a bipartisan statute, the decision may have reflected an institutional divide between judges and legislators rather than a partisan or policy conflict. Finding more cases consistent with this last explanation than either of the others, I suggest that the existing literature has paid insufficient attention to the possibility of institutionally motivated judicial behavior, and more importantly, that any comprehensive account of the Court's decisions will have to attend to the interaction of multiple competing influences on the justices.

Building on previous research on the effects of racial priming on the opinions of White Americans, this paper engages the question of how exposure to racial cues in political messages shapes the opinions of African Americans. I argue that explanations of racial priming that focus exclusively on White Americans are insufficient to explain how racial cues influence the opinions of Black Americans, as they fail to account for the activation of in-group attitudes and mis-specify the role of explicit racial cues. In two separate laboratory experiments, I test the effects of explicitly racial, implicitly racial, and nonracial verbal cues on both Black and White Americans' assessments of an ostensibly nonracial issue. The results point to important racial differences in the effectiveness of explicit and implicit racial verbal cues in activating racial thinking about an issue. Only frames that provide oblique references to race successfully activated racial out-group resentment for Whites. Among Blacks, explicit references to race most reliably elicited racial thinking by activating racial in-group identification, whereas the effect of implicit cues was moderated by the activation of negative representations of the in group. These findings not only demonstrate that racial attitude activation works differently for African Americans than for Whites but also challenge conventional wisdom that African Americans see all political issues through a racial lens.

Why would government officials in authoritarian and transitional systems where formal democratic and bureaucratic institutions of accountability are often weak ever provide more than the minimum level of public goods needed to maintain social stability? Findings from a unique combination of in-depth case study research and an original survey of 316 villages in rural China indicate that even when formal accountability is weak, local officials can be subject to unofficial rules and norms that establish and enforce their public obligations. These informal institutions of accountability can be provided by encompassing and embedding solidary groups. Villages where these types of groups exist are more likely to have better local governmental public goods provision than villages without these solidary groups, all other things being equal.