What is the impact of the possibility of political participation on the Internet on long-standing patterns of participatory inequality in American politics? An August 2008 representative survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project provides little evidence that there has been any change in the extent to which political participation is stratified by socio-economic status, but it suggests that the web has ameliorated the well-known participatory deficit among those who have just joined the electorate. Even when only that subset of the population with Internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline. The story is different for stratification by age where historically younger people have been less engaged than older people in most forms of political participation. Young adults are much more likely than their elders to be comfortable with electronic technologies and to use the Internet, but among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. How these trends play out in the future depends on what happens to the current Web-savvy younger generation and the cohorts that follow and on the rapidly developing political capacities of the Web. Stay logged on …

The article develops an approach to the study of modular political phenomena (action based in significant part on emulation of the prior successful example of others), focusing on the trade-offs between the influence of example, structural facilitation, and institutional constraints. The approach is illustrated through the example of the spread of democratic revolution in the post-communist region during the 2000–2006 period, with significant comparisons to the diffusion of separatist nationalism in the Soviet Union during the glasnost' era.Mark R. Beissinger is Professor of Politics, Princeton University ([email protected]). The author is grateful to the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the opportunity to pursue research for this essay. He would also like to thank Nancy Bermeo, Valerie Bunce, Atul Kohli, Jon Pevehouse, Grigore Pop-Eleches, Edward Schatz, Jack Snyder, Al Stepan, Joshua Tucker, and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier version of this article.

Non-democratic regimes have increasingly moved beyond merely suppressing online discourse, and are shifting toward proactively subverting and co-opting social media for their own purposes. Namely, social media is increasingly being used to undermine the opposition, to shape the contours of public discussion, and to cheaply gather information about falsified public preferences. Social media is thus becoming not merely an obstacle to autocratic rule but another potential tool of regime durability. I lay out four mechanisms that link social media co-optation to autocratic resilience: 1) counter-mobilization, 2) discourse framing, 3) preference divulgence, and 4) elite coordination. I then detail the recent use of these tactics in mixed and autocratic regimes, with a particular focus on Russia, China, and the Middle East. This rapid evolution of government social media strategies has critical consequences for the future of electoral democracy and state-society relations.

As scholarly interest in the concept of identity continues to grow, social identities are proving to be crucially important for understanding contemporary life. Despite—or perhaps because of—the sprawl of different treatments of identity in the social sciences, the concept has remained too analytically loose to be as useful a tool as the literature's early promise had suggested. We propose to solve this longstanding problem by developing the analytical rigor and methodological imagination that will make identity a more useful variable for the social sciences. This article offers more precision by defining collective identity as a social category that varies along two dimensions—content and contestation. Content describes the meaning of a collective identity. The content of social identities may take the form of four non-mutually-exclusive types: constitutive norms; social purposes; relational comparisons with other social categories; and cognitive models. Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a group over the content of the shared category. Our conceptualization thus enables collective identities to be compared according to the agreement and disagreement about their meanings by the members of the group. The final section of the article looks at the methodology of identity scholarship. Addressing the wide array of methodological options on identity—including discourse analysis, surveys, and content analysis, as well as promising newer methods like experiments, agent-based modeling, and cognitive mapping—we hope to provide the kind of brush clearing that will enable the field to move forward methodologically as well.Rawi Abdelal is Associate Professor, Harvard Business School ([email protected]). Yoshiko M. Herrera is Associate Professor, Government Department, Harvard University ([email protected]). Alastair Iain Johnston is Professor, Government Department, Harvard University ([email protected]). Rose McDermott is Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of California at Santa Barbara ([email protected]). Research for the paper was made possible by the generous support of the Weatherhead Initiative of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. We are grateful to those who commented on earlier versions of this paper: Peter Burke, Lars-Erik Cederman, Jeff Checkel,Michael Dawson, James Fearon, David Frank, Erin Jenne, Michael Jones-Correa, Cynthia Kaplan, Peter Katzenstein, Herb Kelman, Paul Kowert, David Laitin, Daniel Posner, Paul Sniderman, Werner Sollors, Jeff Strabone, Philip Stone, Ronald Suny, Charles Tilly, Mary Waters, and three anonymous reviewers. We would also like to thank participants of the 2004 Identity as a Variable conference, including Henry Brady, Kanchan Chandra, Jack Citrin, Neta Crawford, Jennifer Hochschild, Jacques Hymans, Ted Hopf, Cynthia Kaplan, Ulrich Krotz, Taeku Lee, Will Lowe, Jason Lyall, Kimberly Neuendorf, Roger Petersen, Kevin Quinn, David Rousseau, Rogers Smith, Donald Sylvan, Kim Williams, and Michael Young, for comments on this version.

Why do two cognate literatures—social movements and electoral studies—travel along parallel paths with little conversation between them? And what can be done to connect them in the future? Drawing on their work with the late Charles Tilly on Dynamics of Contention (2001), Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow examine two important studies that approach (but do not effect such a linkage), propose a mechanism-based set of linkages between elections and social movements, and apply their approach in a preliminary examination of the relations between the American anti-war movement after 9/11 and the Democratic Party.

Recent advances in the neurosciences offer a wealth of new information about how the brain works, and how the body and mind interact. These findings offer important and surprising implications for work in political science. Specifically, emotion exerts an impact on political decisions in decisive and significant ways. While its importance in political science has frequently been either dismissed or ignored in favor of theories that privilege rational reasoning, emotion can provide an alternate basis for explaining and predicting political choice and action. In this article, I posit a view of decision making that rests on an integrated notion of emotional rationality.Rose McDermott is the author of Risk Taking in International Relations (1998) and Political Psychology in International Relations (2004) and works largely in the areas of political psychology, experimentation, and American foreign policy. The author is grateful to Jennifer Hochschild, Robert Jervis, and Stephen Rosen for generous and constructive advice and encouragement; and to Gerald Clore, Jonathan Cowden, Thomas Kozachek, Jonathan Mercer, Joanne Miller, Philip Zimbardo, the members of the Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop at Harvard, and anonymous reviewers for useful guidance and suggestions.

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

—William Penn, Fruits of Solitude (1693)

We consider affective processing to be an evolutionary antecedent to more complex forms of information processing; but higher cognition requires the guidance provided by affective processing.

—Ralph Adolphs and Antonio Damasio, “The Interaction of Affect and Cognition” (2001)

This article defines, operationalizes, and illustrates the value of analytic eclecticism in the social sciences, with a focus on the fields of comparative politics and international relations. Analytic eclecticism is not an alternative model of research or a means to displace or subsume existing modes of scholarship. It is an intellectual stance that supports efforts to complement, engage, and selectively utilize theoretical constructs embedded in contending research traditions to build complex arguments that bear on substantive problems of interest to both scholars and practitioners. Eclectic scholarship is marked by three general features. First, it is consistent with an ethos of pragmatism in seeking engagement with the world of policy and practice, downplaying unresolvable metaphysical divides and presumptions of incommensurability and encouraging a conception of inquiry marked by practical engagement, inclusive dialogue, and a spirit of fallibilism. Second, it formulates problems that are wider in scope than the more narrowly delimited problems posed by adherents of research traditions; as such, eclectic inquiry takes on problems that more closely approximate the messiness and complexity of concrete dilemmas facing “real world” actors. Third, in exploring these problems, eclectic approaches offer complex causal stories that extricate, translate, and selectively recombine analytic components—most notably, causal mechanisms—from explanatory theories, models, and narratives embedded in competing research traditions. The article includes a brief sampling of studies that illustrate the combinatorial potential of analytic eclecticism as an intellectual exercise as well as its value in enhancing the possibilities of fruitful dialogue and pragmatic engagement within and beyond the academe.

This article questions the centrality of interest-based explanation in political science. Through an examination of the “turn to ideas” undertaken in the past decade by rationalist and nonrationalist scholars in both comparative politics and international relations, it seeks to make three points. First, interests are far from the unproblematic and ever-ready explanatory instruments we assume them to be. Second, the ideational turn of historical institutionalism and constructivist international relations theory marks a substantive theoretical shift in the field precisely because it problematizes notions of action that take interest as given. Third, such scholarship emerged from, and in reaction to, the inherent limits of rationalist treatments of interests and ideas. That it did so suggests that progress in the discipline may be more dialectic—rather than linear or paradigmatic—than we realize.

Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers. We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than non-blog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

The uprisings which swept across the Arab world beginning in December 2010 pose a serious challenge to many of the core findings of the political science literature focused on the durability of the authoritarian Middle Eastern state. The impact of social media on contentious politics represents one of the many areas which will require significant new thinking. The dramatic change in the information environment over the last decade has changed individual competencies, the ability to organize for collective action, and the transmission of information from the local to the international level. It has also strengthened some of the core competencies of authoritarian states even as it has undermined others. The long term evolution of a new kind of public sphere may matter more than immediate political outcomes, however. Rigorous testing of competing hypotheses about the impact of the new social media will require not only conceptual development but also the use of new kinds of data analysis not traditionally adopted in Middle East area studies.

Bargains, deals, and tacit understandings between states and insurgents are common in civil wars. This fascinating mix of conflict and cooperation shapes patterns of politics, governance, and violence. Building on recent findings about state formation, I offer a conceptual typology of political orders amidst civil war. Wartime political orders vary according to the distribution of territorial control and the level of cooperation between states and insurgents. Orders range from collusion and shared sovereignty to spheres of influence and tacit coexistence to clashing monopolies and guerrilla disorder. Examples from contemporary South Asian conflicts illustrate these concepts, which are scalable and portable across contexts. Scholars need to think more creatively about the political-military arrangements that emerge and evolve during war. A key policy implication is that there are many ways of forging stability without creating a counterinsurgent Leviathan.

I use the case of the transportation network company Uber as a lens to explore the comparative politics of the platform economy in Europe and the United States. Within the advanced capitalist world, different countries have responded in very different ways to this new service, from welcome embrace and accommodating regulatory adjustments to complete rejection and legal bans. I analyze Uber’s arrival and reception in the United States, Germany, and Sweden, documenting three very different responses to this disruptive new actor. I show that conflicts over Uber centered on different issues in the three countries. These differences were consequential because the specific regulatory “flashpoints”that Uber provoked mobilized different actors, inspired the formation of different coalitions, and shaped the terms on which conflicts over Uber were framed and fought.

Rational choice theory tends to view political institutions as structures of voluntary cooperation that resolve collective action problems and benefit all concerned. Yet the political process often gives rise to institutions that are good for some people and bad for others, depending on who has the power to impose their will. Political institutions may be structures of cooperation, but they may also be structures of power—and the theory does not tell us much about this. As a result, it gives us a one-sided and overly benign view of what political institutions are and do. This problem is not well understood, and indeed is not typically seen as a problem at all. For there is a widespread sense in the rational choice literature that, because power is frequently discussed, it is an integral part of the theory and just as fundamental as cooperation. Confusion on this score has undermined efforts to right the imbalance. My purpose here is to clarify the analytic roles that power and cooperation actually play in this literature, and to argue that a more balanced theory—one that brings power from its periphery to its very core—is both necessary and entirely possible.Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution ([email protected]). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Yale Conference on Crafting and Operating Institutions, April 11–13, 2003. The author would like to thank Sven Feldmann, Lloyd Gruber, James Fearon, Peter Hall, Jennifer Hochschild, Stephen Krasner, Chris Mantzavinos, Gary Miller, Paul Pierson, Theda Skocpol, Barry Weingast, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

In the aftermath of a potentially demoralizing 2008 electoral defeat, when the Republican Party seemed widely discredited, the emergence of the Tea Party provided conservative activists with a new identity funded by Republican business elites and reinforced by a network of conservative media sources. Untethered from recent GOP baggage and policy specifics, the Tea Party energized disgruntled white middle-class conservatives and garnered widespread attention, despite stagnant or declining favorability ratings among the general public. As participant observation and interviews with Massachusetts activists reveal, Tea Partiers are not monolithically hostile toward government; they distinguish between programs perceived as going to hard-working contributors to US society like themselves and “handouts” perceived as going to unworthy or freeloading people. During 2010, Tea Party activism reshaped many GOP primaries and enhanced voter turnout, but achieved a mixed record in the November general election. Activism may well continue to influence dynamics in Congress and GOP presidential primaries. Even if the Tea Party eventually subsides, it has undercut Obama's presidency, revitalized conservatism, and pulled the national Republican Party toward the far right.

This essay proposes a framework to analyze cross-national variation in women's legal rights. To explore the distinct logics of policy change, we disaggregate sex equality policies on two dimensions: 1) whether they improve the status of women as a group or alleviate gender-based class inequalities, and 2) whether or not they challenge the doctrine of organized religion and the codified tradition of major cultural groups. We show that policies promoting gender equality seek fundamental social change and therefore challenge historical patterns of state-society interaction concerning relations between the state and the market; the respective authority of the state, religion, and cultural groups; and the contours of citizenship. Different issues, however, challenge different aspects of these relations. What's more, the priorities, strategies, and effectiveness of advocates and opponents of change (including women's movements, left parties, international NGOs, and organized religion) are shaped by state capacity, policy legacies, international vulnerability, and the degree of democracy.

The bargaining model of war envisions the initiation, prosecution, termination, and consequences of war as part of a single bargaining process. This article focuses on the most recent works on this topic, many of which employ formal techniques, and it applies the model to the different phases of war. It also discusses the state of empirical work on the bargaining model. Finally, the article considers how the bargaining model meshes with other theories of war and international relations, including cognitive psychology, organization theory, domestic politics, and constructivism.For comments, he thanks Risa Brooks, Hein Goemans, Ted Hopf, Robert Powell, Bruce Russett, Alastair Smith, Allan Stam, and Suzanne Werner. He would like to note that any remaining errors are exclusively his own.

Is there gender discrimination in academia? Analysis of interviews with 80 female faculty at a large Research One university—the most comprehensive qualitative data set generated to date—suggests both individual and institutional discrimination persists. Overt discrimination has largely given way to less obvious but still deeply entrenched inequities. Despite apparent increases in women in positions of authority, discrimination continues to manifest itself through gender devaluation, a process whereby the status and power of an authoritative position is downplayed when that position is held by a woman, and through penalties for those agitating for political change. Female faculty find legal mechanisms and direct political action of limited utility, and increasingly turn to more subtle forms of incremental collective action, revealing an adaptive response to discrimination and a keen sense of the power dynamics within the university. Women attributed the persistence of gender inequality not to biology but to a professional environment in which university administrators care more about the appearance than the reality of gender equality and a professional culture based on a traditional, linear male model. Respondents described heart-wrenching choices between career and family responsibilities, with tensions especially intractable in the bench sciences. They advocated alternative models of professional life but also offered very specific interim suggestions for institutions genuinely interested in alleviating gender inequality and discrimination.

The scale, scope, and significance of humanitarian action have expanded significantly since the late 1980s. This article reflects on two ways in which humanitarianism has been transformed. First, its purpose has been politicized. Whereas once humanitarian actors attempted to insulate themselves from the world of politics, they now work closely with states and attempt to eliminate the root causes of conflict that place individuals at risk. Second, a field of humanitarianism has become institutionalized; during the 1990s the field and its agencies became more professionalized and rationalized. Drawing on various strands of organizational theory, I examine the forces that have contributed to these transformations. I then explore how these transformations have changed the nature of what humanitarian organizations are and what they do. In the conclusion I consider how the transformation of humanitarianism links to the relationship between international nongovernmental organizations and world order, including the purpose of humanitarian action and its distinctive function in global politics.Michael Barnett is Harold Stassen Chair of International Relations at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and professor of political science at the University of Minnesota ([email protected]). In 2004–5 he was a visiting associate at the Center on International Cooperation at the Center on International Cooperation. The author thanks Bud Duvall, Kevin Hartigan, Martha Finnemore, Abby Stoddard, Ron Kassimir, Craig Calhoun, Jack Snyder, Adele Harmer, the participants of the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium, and three anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics for their comments and corrections. Special thanks to the Social Sciences Research Council and the participants in its series on “The Transformation of Humanitarian Action.”

Ethnic divisions, according to empirical democratic theory, and commonsense understandings of politics, threaten the survival of democratic institutions. One of the principal mechanisms linking the politicization of ethnic divisions with the destabilization of democracy is the so-called outbidding effect. According to theories of ethnic outbidding, the politicization of ethnic divisions inevitably gives rise to one or more ethnic parties. The emergence of even a single ethnic party, in turn, “infects” the political system, leading to a spiral of extreme bids that destroys competitive politics altogether. In contrast, I make the (counterintuitive) claim that ethnic parties can sustain a democratic system if they are institutionally encouraged: outbidding can be reversed by replacing the unidimensional ethnic identities assumed by the outbidding models with multidimensional ones. My argument is based on the anomalous case of ethnic party behavior in India. It implies that the threat to democratic stability, where it exists, comes not from the intrinsic nature of ethnic divisions, but from the institutional context within which ethnic politics takes place. Institutions that artificially restrict ethnic politics to a single dimension destabilize democracy, whereas institutions that foster multiple dimensions of ethnic identity can sustain it.Kanchan Chandra is associate professor of political science at MIT ([email protected]) and author of Why Ethnic Parties Succeed (2004). For useful discussions and written comments, the author thanks the anonymous reviewers and the editorial board of Perspectives on Politics, Steve Ansolabehere, Paul Brass, Eric Dickson, Cynthia Enloe, James Fearon, Rachel Gisselquist, J. P. Gownder, Henry Hale, Jennifer Hochschild, Mala Htun, Samuel Huntington, Stathis Kalyvas, Nelson Kasfir, Herbert Kitschelt, David Laitin, Gerard Padro-i-Miquel, Lloyd Rudolph, Susanne Rudolph, Jody Shapiro, Kenneth Shepsle, James Snyder, Ashutosh Varshney, Santhanagopalan Vasudev, Barry Weingast, Myron Weiner, Chris Wendt, Steven Wilkinson, Adam Ziegfeld, and participants of the fall 2003 meeting of the Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LICEP) at UCLA.

The proliferation of international rules, laws, and institutional forms raises important questions for regime theory. Looking at the theoretical and empirical arguments presented by all the contributors, however, it seems clear that that complexity's effects on actor strategies—particularly powerful actors—remain open to debate. Some of the posited effects of international regime complexity have contradictory or cross-cutting effects. Further effects of regime complexity—cross-institutional strategizing, the asymmetrical distribution of legal and technical expertise, and the fragmentation of reputation—can erode the significance of institutions in complex environments. This contribution considers the effect that regime complexity has on how powerful actors approach world politics—in part by connecting the current debate with past discussions about the significance of international regimes in world politics.