In 2018, David Laitin and Pål Kolstø engaged in a discussion at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held at Columbia University, New York. The panel was a 20-year retrospective on Identity in Formation: the Russian-speaking populations in the Near Abroad (Laitin 1998).

A critical barrier to generating cumulative knowledge in political science and related disciplines is the inability of researchers to observe the results from the full set of research designs that scholars have conceptualized, implemented, and analyzed. For a variety of reasons, studies that produce null findings are especially likely to be unobserved, creating biases in publicly accessible research. While several approaches have been suggested to overcome this problem, none have yet proven adequate. We call for the establishment of a new discipline-wide norm in which scholars post short “null results reports” online that summarize their research designs, findings, and interpretations. To address the inevitable incentive problems that earlier proposals for reform were unable to overcome, we argue that decentralized research communities can spur the broader disciplinary norm change that would bring advantage to scientific advance. To facilitate our contribution, we offer a template for these reports that incorporates evaluation of the possible explanations for the null findings, including statistical power, measurement strategy, implementation issues, spillover/contamination, and flaws in theoretical priors. We illustrate the template’s utility with two experimental studies focused on the naturalization of immigrants in the United States and attitudes toward Syrian refugees in Jordan.

Both papers in this volume on which I was asked to comment (James E. Monogan III, “A Case for Registering Studies of Political Outcomes: An Application in the 2010 House Elections” and Macartan Humphreys, Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, and Peter van der Windt, “Fishing, Commitment, and Communication: A Proposal for Comprehensive Nonbinding Research Registration”) advocate registration regimes for our discipline. The recommendations in both are incremental [promoting, as Lindblom (1965) might have said it, the “intelligence of research” and cognizant of the costs in scientific learning from such a regime if rigidly enforced. Moreover, both papers cite studies by Gerber and various co-authors (e.g., Gerber, Green, and Nickerson 2001) demonstrating publication bias in political science, incentivizing researchers to manipulate their regression models until they can show a z-statistic ≥ 1.96, and thereby reaching standard levels of significance. I fully accept that Gerber et al.'s papers have detected a serious flaw in our scientific practices; there is a problem to be solved. The Monogan and Humphreys et al. proposals are therefore worthy of consideration.

Striving better to uncover causal effects, political science is amid a revolution in micro-empirical research designs and experimental methods. This methodological development—although quite promising in delivering new findings and discovering the mechanisms that underlie previously known associations—raises new and unnerving ethical issues that have yet to be confronted by our profession. We believe that addressing these issues proactively by generating strong, internal norms of disciplinary regulation is preferable to reactive measures, which often come in the wake of public exposés and can lead to externally imposed regulations or centrally imposed internal policing.

This article explores how language policy affects the socioeconomic development of nation states through two channels: the individual’s exposure to and (in reference to an individual’s mother tongue) linguistic distance from the official language. In a cross-country framework the article first establishes a robust and sizeable negative relationship between an official language that is distant from the local indigenous languages and proxies for human capital and health. To establish this relationship as causal, we instrument language choice with a measure of geographic distance from the origins of writing. Next, using individual level data from India and a set of 11 African countries, we provide microempirical support on the two channels—distance from and exposure to the official language—and their implications for educational, health, occupational and wealth outcomes. Finally, we suggest policy implications based on our findings.

Micro factors that induce violent confrontations amidst national revival movements are identified. These factors include the nature of local social structures, tipping phenomena, and fortuitous events that set off action/reaction cycles. They are shown to he better explanations than reigning macro theories to account for the peaceful nationalist revival in Catalonia in contrast to the violent one in the Basque Country. A robustness test for the micro factors succeeds in differentiating levels of violence in the politics of separation from the Soviet Union in the Ukraine and Georgia.

Data from 1991 surveys, from elections, and from elite discourse in Estonia and Bashkortostan are presented. Despite significant historical and demographic differences in these two post-Soviet republics, the Russian population in both places had similar reactions in regard to the collapse of the Union. In both republics, Russians were wary of assimilation, yet they neither planned to exit in large numbers nor to organise politically as Russians. Furthermore, in both republics, elite discourse was framing a new identity, which can be called the ‘Russian-speaking nationality’. This nationality is likely to be secular, Soviet, and includes all non-titulars whose primary language is Russian. While it is unlikely that this emergent nationality will be the same in all post-Soviet republics, in large part because incentives from the titulars will be markedly different, the data show in the early period after the Soviet collapse, in two ‘most different cases’, the dynamics of Russian identity re-formation have been quite similar.

Based on the ‘Minorities at risk’ data set, which codes the status and conflicts of 268 politically active groups in 148 different countries, this paper finds: 1) the greater the language difference between the language of the minority and that of the dominant group, the lower the probability of minority rebellion against the state; 2) language grievances held by the minority are weakly but negatively related to rebellion; 3) language grievances are strongly associated with increased levels of political protest, suggesting that the remedy for these grievances is more likely to be sought in the political realm rather than in guerrilla action; 4) language grievances when compounded by religious grievances (which are a reasonable predictor of rebellion) strongly and significantly reduce the magnitude of rebellion. The mechanisms supporting these results are elucidated in a formalized official language game. The equilibrium path of this game is illustrated in case studies of India and Sri Lanka.

The role of language in the processes of state formation and challenges to state authority is insufficiently understood. What interests do rulers have in unifying their realms linguistically? Under what conditions do subjects from upper and lower strata in linguistically distinct regions of a state change their language repertoires in accordance with the dictates of rulers? To what extent is language change a response to political, as opposed to economic or demographic, factors? Under what conditions do languages that face extinction become the object of revival movements?

Peter Katzenstein is a prodigiously productive scholar. As a comparativist, a student of international relations, an historian, and one who has successfully bridged the qualitative and quantitative divide in our discipline, he has made signal contributions to general international relations, political economy, security studies, European and German studies, Asian and Japanese studies, and political science in general. In this brief résumé, seven of his friends and collaborators highlight his major contributions.

Partly hidden beneath the complexities of N* and an attack on the supposedly individualist presumptions of ethnic fractionalization measures, a simple and valuable question lies implicit in Cederman and Girardin's (2007) article (henceforth, CG). Are countries at greater risk of civil war when the state is controlled by an ethnic minority?