Two years ago, a research team comprising two political scientists, Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn, and two legal academics, Pauline Kim and Theodore Ruger, set out to forecast the votes cast and outcome reached in each case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court during its 2002–3 term. To generate the predictions, the researchers turned to approaches to decision making dominant in their respective fields. The political scientists devised a statistical model, which assumes, in line with the vast disciplinary literature on the subject, that judicial decisions are largely a function of politics and case facts. The legal academics went in a different direction. To tap a common belief in their field—that Court decisions reflect law and jurisprudential principles—they asked appellate lawyers and legal scholars (“experts” in particular areas of the law) to predict the outcome of each of the term's decisions. The researchers then posted all the forecasts on the Project's Web site (http://wusct.wustl.edu), along with the actual votes and outcomes as the Court handed down its decisions. As it turned out, the statistical model produced far more accurate predictions of case outcomes than the experts (75 percent versus 59.1 percent), while the experts did marginally better at forecasting the votes of individual justices (67.9 percent versus 66.7 percent).Lee Epstein thanks Jennifer L. Hochschild, Nancy Staudt, and the journal's reviewers for their comments on her essay, as well as for their help in shaping the symposium.

Over the past decade, interdisciplinary programs such as gender studies, global studies, and environmental studies have proliferated quickly across the American academy. One study showed that the number of environmental studies programs at four-year colleges and universities doubled between 1990 and 1995, and more are still being added. Political science departments frequently find themselves at the center of these new programs, and courses in environmental politics are often in high demand among students. The complexity and persistence of environmental problems is finally forcing the academy to recognize the importance of interdisciplinary research and teaching. Consider the case of global warming. It is impossible to discuss this issue intelligently from the perspective of any single discipline. Political scientists might illuminate certain facets of the debate, such as how national and international political structures create few incentives for policymakers to aggressively address the issue. But however important such insights might be, they are far too narrow to even begin to encompass the complexity of the climate change issue, which requires literacy in the discourses of other disciplines, including environmental economics, atmospheric research, and environmental ethics. After decades of suspicion in the academy about the intellectual rigor of interdisciplinary approaches, the persistence of complex environmental problems, and simply the rapidly growing cohort of scholars engaged in environmental research and teaching, is driving increasing acceptance of such approaches.Philip Brick received the APSA's Pi Sigma Alpha Award for Outstanding Teaching in Political Science in 2000, and in 2004 he was named Outstanding Environmental Educator by the Environmental Education Association of Washington. His environmental field program is described at www.whitman.edu/semester_west, and he can be contacted at [email protected]. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild at Perspectives on Politics and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. He also thanks the research assistants at Perspectives on Politics and Whitman College student Kalin Schmoldt for gathering syllabi for this review.

Although not widely known until much later, Al Gore received 202 more votes than George W. Bush on election day in Florida. George W. Bush is president because he overcame his election day deficit with overseas absentee ballots that arrived and were counted after election day. In the final official tally, Bush received 537 more votes than Gore. These numbers are taken from the official results released by the Florida Secretary of State's office and so do not reflect overvotes, undervotes, unsuccessful litigation, butterfly ballot problems, recounts that might have been allowed but were not, or any other hypothetical divergence between voter preferences and counted votes. After the election, the New York Times conducted a six-month investigation and found that 680 of the overseas absentee ballots were illegally counted, and almost no one has publicly disagreed with their assessment. In this article, we describe the statistical procedures we developed and implemented for the Times to ascertain whether disqualifying these 680 ballots would have changed the outcome of the election. These include adding formal Bayesian model averaging procedures to models of ecological inference. We present a variety of new empirical results that delineate the precise conditions under which Al Gore would have been elected president and offer new evidence of the striking effectiveness of the Republican effort to prevent local election officials from applying election law equally to all Florida citizens.The authors are deeply grateful to the many private citizens of every political stripe who sent us comments on this paper; also to Jim Alt, Barry Burden, James Honeker, Doug Rivers, and Jonathan Wand for helpful discussions; to Henry Brady for many suggestions; and to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Aging, and the World Health Organization for research support. Software to implement the methods in this article is available at http://gking.harvard.edu.

Political scientists and legal academics have long scrutinized the U.S. Supreme Court's work to understand what motivates the justices. Despite significant differences in methodology, both disciplines seek to explain the Court's decisions by focusing on examining past cases. This retrospective orientation is surprising. In other areas of government, for example, presidential elections and congressional decision making, political scientists engage in systematic efforts to predict outcomes, yet few have done this for court decisions. Legal academics, too, possess expertise that should enable them to forecast legal events with some accuracy. After all, the everyday practice of law requires lawyers to predict court decisions in order to advise clients or determine litigation strategies.The authors thank Michael Cherba, Nancy Cummings, David Dailey, Alison Garvey, Nick Hershman, and Robin Rimmer for their assistance. Their project is supported in part by National Science Foundation grants SES-0135855 and SES 0136679. The foundation bears no responsibility for the results or conclusions.

Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism.

A bunker is an odd place to reconsider a course syllabus, especially during a mortar attack in the middle of the night. Teaching the historical case study method in introductory courses in international relations, I often told students that we need history in IR, since our theories do not lend themselves to laboratory testing. In the future, I'll drop that comment. Since February 2003, I have been serving on active duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom, mostly in the Sunni Triangle. Wartime service has proved to be something of a laboratory for me and has caused me to reevaluate some of the received wisdom of international relations. War has validated some things we teach, but it has also rendered problematic some conclusions I held perhaps too comfortably. I have been trained by the military to see war with a soldier's eye; it has been a strange experience to see it instead through the eyes of a political scientist. Service in Iraq has provided me the opportunity to consider the academic study of politics and war in real time.The author wishes to thank Dan Caldwell, Deborah Larson, Alan Rozzi, James Q. Wilson, the editors of Perspectives on Politics, anonymous reviewers, and the men and women in uniform lost during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The authors of this fascinating study modestly disclaim its significance, yet suggest that the results prove their model a success. As a legal expert, I have a rather different perspective on the results. I look at the numbers holistically, not statistically. And what I see tells a different story—if it tells any story at all.Suzanna Sherry thanks Rebecca Brown, Paul Edelman, and Erin O'Hara for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Welfare and the Constitution.

Political scientist Russell A. Burgos has written an interesting and timely account of his intellectual journey from a “systemically inclined neorealist” to a “leaning constructivist” as a consequence of his active duty service with the U.S. Army in Iraq. In doing so, he offers some astute observations on several of the most important and enduring issues in American foreign and defense policy that are of interest to all international relations scholars. Rather than attempting to comment on the full range of his observations, this essay will focus on one of these—what Captain Burgos calls “the identity of the army in a ‘neo-imperial’ age”—with a view to assessing and bringing to bear some systematic evidence on his observations that the army has become staunchly Republican and conservative and that it sees itself as “separate from and superior to society at large.”Ole R. Holsti's latest book, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, revised edition, was published this year.

I read Captain Russell Burgos's essay with both delight and empathy. He is obviously a talented and thoughtful scholar who has served his country in a vital way in very interesting times. My empathy comes from the fact that for the last 25 years I have divided my life between academic institutions and the Pentagon, where I have been on the planning end of four conflicts. Like Mr. Burgos, I have lived in a world where the realities of war and peace should have been the laboratory for the theories of international relations that I have learned and taught. Like Mr. Burgos, however, I often find the reality of contemporary war to be confusing. The theories that I have studied are a rather incomplete guide to the problems—both tactical and strategic—that the global war on terrorism has brought us.Joseph J. Collins recently completed three years as deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. During that time he was charged with some of the early planning for post-conflict Iraq, though he did not have day-to-day responsibility for policy management in that area. A former career army officer, he holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University and has taught at Georgetown, Columbia, and West Point.

Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the Scientific Study of Politics.

One of my favorite political scientists (and mentors in graduate school) defined a great idea as one he would have liked to have had himself. The Supreme Court Forecasting Project is a great idea, one I wish I had hatched. It is such a good idea that it is a little surprising no one had attempted it earlier. I commend this team and urge them, as I shall say in more detail later, to continue, expand, and perhaps redirect this undertaking. That this team combines legal academics and political scientists is a happy sign of the more general recognition in both disciplines of the great things we have to offer each other.Gregory A. Caldeira was Jack N. Pritzker Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School when he wrote this commentary.

Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals.

Culture and Democracy: Media, Space, and Representation. By Clive Barnett. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2003. 288p. $79.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Clive Barnett's examination of democracy today is one that privileges its spatially mediated, communicative, and cultural structures as shaped by new telecommunication and information technologies. Democracy is primarily represented in the mediated spaces created by broadcasting technologies whose form and content are geared toward deploying cultural policies and practices. Thus, a communications-cultural analysis of this condition is required. Furthermore, a reckoning with neoliberal conceptions of autonomy and representation is essential in making sense of the current cultural geography of democracy.

Scrolling through the results of the Supreme Court Forecasting Project in July 2003, I regarded nearly every prediction as within the realm of plausibility until I reached the statistical model's forecast of the outcome in Lawrence v. Texas, the gay rights case. The model predicted that the Supreme Court would affirm by a 5–4 vote the judgment of the Texas Court of Appeals that the state's law criminalizing gay sex was constitutional. This was such a gaffe that it led me to question whether all the fancy modeling was worth the effort. (Two of the three experts correctly predicted a 6–3 reversal; the third made the same mistake as the model.)For her coverage of the Court, Linda Greenhouse was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1998. In 2002 the American Political Science Association presented her with its Carey McWilliams Award “for a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics.”