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Notes from the Editor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2003

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Scarcely a day has passed in the last decade without reports appearing of yet another act of suicide terrorism (the subject matter of this issue's cover graphic) in the world's established and emerging hotspots. In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape posits that “Even if many suicide attackers are irrational or fanatical, the leadership groups that recruit and direct them are not.” Rather, such attacks are intended to achieve specific political purposes. To examine these acts, Pape has assembled a database of suicide attacks worldwide, 1980–2001. His findings–among other things, that suicide terrorism often “pays” from the perspective of group leaders because it leads governments to make concessions–will enable scholars to achieve a new understanding of this complex phenomenon. Nor does Pape shy away from considering the policy implications of his findings. Consequently, this important article is destined to inform not only scholarship but also policy-making for years to come.

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American Political Science Review , Volume 97 , Issue 3 , August 2003 , pp. iii - vii
Copyright
© 2003 by the American Political Science Association

The September 11 attacks “changed everything.” That, at least, is the contention of many students of national and international security, and of high-level policymakers as well. As Brian Frederking puts it in “Constructing Post-Cold War Collective Security,” the assumption is that “New threats from terrorist groups and weapons of mass destruction have transformed the international system” so thoroughly that, for example, President Bush's campaign pledges not to engage in nation-building or to become involved in military hostilities without a clear exit strategy are no longer operative. However, employing the tools of dialogical analysis to consider the debate over intervention in Kosovo in the late 1990s, Frederking uncovers themes that he deems “stunningly similar to the post-September 11 debates about the use of military force in Iraq.” His analysis thus poses a fundamental challenge to the notion that September 11 “changed everything.”

The authors of the third article in this issue consider a very different mode of dealing with political conflict, interparty competition. In “Electoral Institutions, Ethnopolitical Cleavages and Party Systems in Africa's Emerging Democracies,” Shaheen Mozaffar, James R. Scarritt, and Glen Galaich probe the impacts of the size of legislative districts, the proximity of legislative and presidential elections, and the fragmentation of ethnopolitical groups on the structure of African party systems, as observed in 62 legislative elections. Consistent with their expectations, these authors uncover a set of contingent effects. That is, rather than determining that party systems are shaped either by the institutions governing electoral contestation or by underlying ethnopolitical cleavages, Mozaffar, Scarritt, and Galaich find that the impact of either set of forces depends upon the other set of forces. This complex pattern, they conclude, makes them cautiously optimistic about the future course of democracy in Africa.

In “Democracy, Inequality, and Inflation,” Raj M. Desai, Anders Olofsgård, and Tarik M. Yousef pose a deceptively simple question: Do democracies suffer higher inflation than non-democracies? Analyzing data from 140 countries over the last four decades of the twentieth century, Desai, Olofsgård, and Yousef, find (much as Mozaffar, Scarritt, and Galaich do about the structure of African party systems) that the best general answer is “It depends.” Only when a nation's level of income inequality is taken into account, they show, can the impact of democracy on inflation be understood, for the relationship between democracy and inflation actually reverses from countries where incomes are more equally distributed to those where they are less equally distributed. This finding sheds new light on question of why inflation has had such different political impacts in different parts of the world.

Economic policy is also the focus of Philip Keefer and David Stasavage's “The Limits of Delegation: Veto Players, Central Bank Independence and the Credibility of Monetary Policy.” The emergence of independent central banks around the world has occasioned concern about the potential politicization of these powerful institutions and the resulting likelihood that the credibility of monetary policy could thereby be undermined. Keefer and Stasavage identify conditions under which credibility can be bolstered by a system of institutional checks and balances. They argue that a system in which the actions of one group can be “vetoed” by another semi-adversarial group can positively affect consumer confidence and thereby provide one basis for a stable currency. Methodologically, this is one of a growing number of articles that combine formal and statistical modes of analysis; theoretically, it advances the “veto player” perspective by specifying contextual elements that shape and constrain a government's ability to override the decisions of its semi-autonomous agencies.

In “New Politics and Class Politics in the Context of Austerity and Globalization: Welfare State Regress in 18 Countries 1975–1995,” Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme sustain this focus on the interplay between politics and social forces–this time in the context of the impact of class-related parties on social welfare programs. If politics is, in the Lasswellian formulation, a matter of “who gets what, when, and how,” then Korpi and Palme's focus is crucial. Taking issue with a prominent interpretation, Korpi and Palme contend that class-based political forces have remained important during an era of welfare state regress; a decline in the extension of welfare state policies does not reflect a decline in class-based politics, which continues to play a key role in the era of retrenchment.

The next two articles in this issue present text-based analyses of the thought of two very different political theorists. The first of these centers on the liberal ideal of freedom of choice, which is supposed to promote individuality. Poststructuralists criticize liberals for assuming that choice can be truly free; because being “normal” itself acquires value and guides behavior, choice is always constrained. In “Freedom and Normalization: Poststructuralism and the Liberalism of Michael Oakeshott,” Jacob Segal analyzes the confrontation between liberalism and normalization through the lens of the thought of Oakeshott. One of Segal's contributions is to show that the problem of normalization arises from the perspective of radical critics of liberalism but also from that of Oakeshott – hardly a radical critic of liberalism! Another is to show how Oakeshott reformulates liberalism in the course of grappling with the challenges to it that normalization poses.

A long-recognized dilemma of democratic politics involves the simultaneous needs for widespread participation in decision-making, on the one hand, and for expertise, on the other. This dilemma seems to arise in an especially acute form in the writings of Rousseau, the “theorist par excellence of participation” whose arguments for both majority rule and commissaires to set the legislative agenda have often been seen as irreconcilable. In “Rousseau on Agenda-Setting and Majority Rule,” Ethan Putterman refutes such criticism by returning to Rousseau's writings on the role of representatives. Rousseau's thinking about representatives, Putterman argues, was consistent with his thinking about majority rule, and if proper checks on representatives are in place, the dual advantages of democratic participation and learned leadership can be simultaneously achieved.

A merger of Korpi and Palme's emphasis on distribution and Putterman's on representation occurs in Steven Ansolabehere, James M. Snyder, Jr., and Michael M. Ting's “Bargaining in Bicameral Legislatures: When and Why Does Malapportionment Matter?” The starting point for this analysis is the oft-documented finding that the greater a jurisdiction's representation in a legislature, the greater its share of public expenditures. It follows that malapportionment can produce inequities in resource allocation – a possibility that underlies much criticism of the U.S. Senate in particular. Strikingly, though, Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Ting contend that unequal representation, or “malapportionment,” is not itself the cause of uneven distributions of resources; when a bicameral legislature distributes resources, the share of every jurisdiction's resources should be equal as long as, as is the case in the U.S. Congress, one chamber is not malapportioned and possesses authority to initiate spending legislation. The root causes of the uneven distribution of resources lie elsewhere, e.g., in supermajoritarian rules like cloture. Buttressed by empirical results that these authors have reported elsewhere, these analytical results have undeniable implications for what reforms should be pursued if the goal is to attain a more equitable distribution of resources.

Finally, in “Acting When Elected Officials Won't: Federal Courts and Civil Rights Enforcement in U.S. Labor Unions,” Paul Frymer provides a well-developed analysis that may well lead many Americanists to rethink the importance of the judicial system in the United States. Drawing on archival and other historical sources from the middle of the twentieth century, Frymer builds a deep understanding of the circumstances surrounding the impact of U.S. courts on the racial integration of labor unions. Frymer contends that the courts alone forced unions to cease discriminatory practices. It was the courts that ruled discrimination illegal, that rewrote civil rights statutes, and forced unions to comply with these statutes – not Congress or the executive branch.

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