As is now traditional we begin this issue of Perspectives on Politics with the presidential address, this year by Robert Axelrod who offers sound advice about how political scientists might alter what is commonly seen as a lopsided balance of trade with other disciplines. It is difficult to imagine a message more in keeping with my own vision for this journal.

This is the Presidential Address delivered at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, August 30 to September 2, 2007. The theme is that the discipline of political science has benefited from imports from many other fields, but it also has a lot to offer in the way of exports to other fields. A personal example is the export of cooperation theory to cancer research. The main recommendation is to cultivate your curiosity by: reading up in a variety of fields so your mind will be well prepared, teaming up with others who can help you, loading up on research related to your problem, and lightening up when you need to escape from the problem for a while. Promising opportunities exist for political science to export to public health, cognitive and neuropsychology, and the design of web-based institutions.Robert Axelrod is the Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan (axe@umich.edu). This text is a renamed, footnoted and slightly revised version of his presidential address at the 2007 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting. For help in preparing this address, he wishes to thank John Aldrich, David Axelrod, Vera Axelrod, Lily S. Axelrod, Michael Brintnall, Joshua Epstein, Rick Hall, Liz Gerber, Ross Hammond, Rob Hauck, Lisa Koch, Justin McCrary, Ken Pienta, Robert Putnam, Eric Rabkin, Amy Saldinger, Jasjeet Sekhon, and PhillipTetlock. For financial support he thanks the National Science Foundation.

Thomas Hobbes observed that the human mind seeks causality in order to propagate good fortune or avoid disaster. However, events occur that cannot be linked to direct causes, leading human beings to invent beliefs and other mechanisms to produce a system of order and probability that can be applied to the seemingly random universe. Examining the relationship between Hobbes and the Book of Job reveals the failure of religion to provide for perfectly comprehensible causality since Job is forced to accept that God works in ways that he cannot understand in delivering rewards and punishments. Hobbes offers secular political order as an alternative that will conform to the structure of human reason. The attempt to order the universe is always incomplete, yet it is this lack of control that helps us to understand the inspiration to create and recreate political order, even when it fails to create a predictable, comprehensible environment. While the need for security is often seen as a malevolent or irrational element in political life, this article explains how the desire for order can also be understood as a dynamic interaction between the structure of human reason and the uncontrollable aspects of human life.Keally McBride is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco (kdmcbride@usfca.edu). Work on this essay began in a seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. She would like to thank Kevin Bundy, Carl Cheeseman, Mary Dietz, Nancy Hirshmann, James Martel, Hanna Pitkin, and John Zarobell for their comments.

Despite their importance to one another, the current literatures on political parties and normative democratic theory continue to develop largely in mutual isolation. Empirical studies of contemporary political parties and party systems tend to have little to say about the meanings and possibilities of democracy, and therefore also about the varied potential roles of political parties within it. Meanwhile, contemporary democratic theorists quietly sidestep the issue of whether political parties perform a legitimate function in democracies. This lack of mutual engagement is regrettable, in particular given the pervasive erosion of popular support and legitimacy of political parties as representative institutions. In this article we explore the key reasons for democratic theorists and scholars of political parties so rarely taking on each others' core concerns, and we outline the key ways in which this mutual disengagement is mutually impoverishing. We will also suggest ways forward, by pinpointing and illustrating potentially productive areas of engagement which might serve to deepen our understanding of democracy's present and its possible futures.Ingrid van Biezen is Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK (i.c.vanbiezen@bham.ac.uk). Michael Saward is Professor of Politics at the Open University, UK (m.j.saward@open.ac.uk). The authors are grateful to Richard S. Katz and Jeremy Jennings and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. In developing our arguments, we also benefited from conversations with Robert Dahl, Russell Dalton, Ian Shapiro, workshop participants at the ECPR Joint Sessions, and graduate students at Yale University. Part of this research was supported by the British Academy (research grant SG 38612).

The recent explosion of popular protest in China, often framed as a demand for the fulfillment of “rights,” has captured widespread attention. Some observers interpret the protests as signs of a “moral vacuum.” Others see the unrest as signaling a powerful new “rights consciousness.” In either case, the protests are often regarded as a major challenge to the stability of the political system. In this article, an examination of Chinese conceptions of “rights,” as reflected in the ethical discourses of philosophers, political leaders, and protesters (and as contrasted with American understandings of rights), provides the basis for questioning prevailing assumptions about the fragility of the Chinese political order. For over two millennia, Chinese political thought, policy, and protest have assigned central priority to the attainment of socioeconomic security. As a result, the meaning of “rights” in Chinese political discourse differs significantly from the Anglo-American tradition. Viewed in historical context, China's contemporary “rights” protests seem less politically threatening. The Chinese polity appears neither as vacuous nor as vulnerable as it is sometimes assumed to be.Elizabeth J. Perry is Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and is the current President of the Association for Asian Studies (eperry@latte.harvard.edu). A preliminary draft of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the conference on Socioeconomic Rights and Justice in China held at Dickinson College in April 2004. The author is grateful to the conference organizer, Neil Diamant, for the invitation to consider these issues and to the other conference participants (especially David Strand and Jerome Cohen) for their challenging comments and questions. A substantially revised version was presented at the conference in memory of Benjamin Schwartz, held in Shanghai at East China Normal University in December 2006. Thanks are due to the conference organizers and participants (particularly Zhu Zhenghui, Xu Jilin, Zhang Jishun, Tong Shijun, and Roderick MacFarquhar) for their stimulating suggestions. Appreciation is also extended to Stephen Angle, Nara Dillon, Mary Gallagher, and Kevin O'Brien for their critical reading of an earlier draft.

For more than half a century, realist scholars of international relations have maintained that their world view is inimical to the American public. For a variety of reasons—inchoate attitudes, national history, American exceptionalism—realists assert that the U.S. government pursues realist policies in spite and not because of public opinion. Indeed, most IR scholars share this “anti-realist assumption.” To determine the empirical validity of the anti-realist assumption, this paper re-examines survey and experimental data on the mass public's attitudes towards foreign policy priorities and world views, the use of force, and foreign economic policy over the past three decades. The results suggest that, far from disliking realism, Americans are at least as comfortable with the logic of realpolitik as they are with liberal internationalism. The persistence of the anti-realist assumption might be due to an ironic fact: American elites are more predisposed towards liberal internationalism than the rest of the American public.Daniel W. Drezner is Associate Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University (daniel.drezner@tufts.edu). Previous versions of this paper were presented at the 2007 International Studies Association meeting in Chicago, IL, and at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He is grateful to Bethany Albertson, John Brehm, Joshua Busby, Jon Caverley, Richard Eichenberg, Benjamin Fordham, Nikolas Gvosdev, Don Green, Jacob Hacker, Lawrence Kaplan, Andrew Moravcsik, John Mearsheimer, Gideon Rose, Bruce Russett, Gregory Sanders, Stephen Teles, and John Schuessler for their comments and suggestions. Luisa Melo performed valuable research assistance, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States provided generous support during the drafting of this paper.

This project expands upon social construction studies by critically examining the discourse patterns of two very different groups as they discuss their problems with the child support enforcement system: fathers' rights members (mostly white, middle class fathers who are organizing for emotional support and to reform the child support system) and fathers with children on welfare (mostly poor, African-American fathers). We use standard, qualitative analytical methods on primary, in-depth interview data collected from fathers' rights members, and compare that with in-depth interview data drawn from fathers with children on welfare. In brief, we find three overlapping perceptions in this policy area: child support awards are economically hurtful to fathers, child support obligations are not adjusted for other types of support, and child support enforcement discourages parental cooperation. However, we also show that while there is broad overlap in terms of the general nature of these complaints, each group's members use very different language to describe their difficulties. Fathers' rights members are much more likely to remain connected to the system, and while challenging current policy, do not champion lawbreaking as a viable means of demonstrating their opposition. Fathers with children on welfare, on the other hand, speak in terms that reflect their disconnection from these policies, and frequently reveal their subsequent choice to engage in evasive and even illegal behavior as viable means of expressing their dissatisfaction. Finally, we conclude that these different ways of speaking about public policy problems can have important implications for policymaker responsiveness, and ultimately, each group's political inclusion in a democratic society.Jocelyn Elise Crowley is Associate Professor of Public Policy at The Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (jocelync@rci.rutgers.edu). Margaret Watson has her Master's Degree in Public Policy from The Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (mwatson@alumni.rutgers.edu). Maureen R. Waller is Assistant Professor of Policy Analysis & Management, Cornell University (mrw37@cornell.edu). The authors would like to thank Joe Soss, Sandy Schram, Anne Schneider, Helen Ingram, M.B. Crowley, the Columbia University School of Social Work Seminar Series participants, the University of Washington West Coast Poverty Center Seminar Series participants, the NICHD Transition to Fatherhood Project, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this manuscript.

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court drew attention to and made considerable efforts toward eliminating intrastate malapportionment among U.S. House districts with the one-person, one-vote rule. Today, this rule is significantly, and more severely, violated by a rarely discussed or analyzed form of malapportionment, interstate malapportionment. We identify and discuss its causes and consequences, as well as possible remedies. We argue that changing the fixed size of the U.S. House membership is the only solution that meets normative, constitutional, and practical standards. We demonstrate that the current fixed size of the chamber unreasonably corrupts the popular basis of the U.S. House, which is necessary for the proper functioning of American representative democracy.Jeffrey Ladewig is an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Political Science (jeffrey.ladewig@uconn.edu). Mathew Jasinski is an attorney at Robinson & Cole in Hartford, Connecticut (mathew.jasinski@gmail.com). We would like to thank Oksan Bayulgen, Larry Bowman, Robert Darcy, Virginia Hettinger, David Jones, and Howard Reiter for their suggestions and assistance. We also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their extraordinarily in-depth and helpful reviews. Any remaining errors are our own.

This comment addresses the growing controversy over the effects of implicit racial messages in politics. Many scholars find evidence that these implicit messages work and that they have racializing effects. However, the biggest study to date finds that racial messages—implicit or explicit—have no effects. In this paper I conduct a thorough review of several relevant literatures in order to adjudicate between these competing claims. I find that the large study's null findings conflict with 17 public opinion experiments involving over 5,000 subjects, 2 aggregate studies, and a large social psychology literature. Using different methods, samples, and settings, these studies show that racial cues do in fact racialize opinion. I explain the large study's null results by noting that its participants perceived only small differences across messages, that racial predispositions were measured just before exposure to the ad, thereby neutralizing the effect of the ad's racial cue, and that WebTV studies such as this one have failed to provide many subjects with their assigned ad. Thus, the weight of the evidence heavily favors the racial effect of racial cues and messages. I offer several directions for future research on racial communication and politics.Tali Mendelberg is Associate Professor of Politics at Princeton University (talim@princeton.edu). She is the author of The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton University Press, 2001). She wishes to thank Oleg Bespalov and Dan Cassino for research assistance, Adam Berinsky, Claudine Gay, Martin Gilens, Vince Hutchings, Jon Krosnick, Shawn Rosenberg, and Nick Valentino for helpful feedback, and the Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for research support.

The Implicit-Explicit (IE) model of racial priming posits that implicitly racial messages will be more effective than explicitly racial ones in priming racial predispositions in opinion formation. Is the Implicit-Explicit model supported by existing data? In “Racial Priming Revived,” Mendelberg responds to our analysis of a pair of experiments in which we found that “that implicit appeals are no more effective than explicit ones in priming racial resentment in opinion formation.” In this note we demonstrate that the concerns raised about our experiments are unfounded. Further, we show that the existing work supporting the IE model suffers from serious limitations of experimental design and implementation. Cumulatively, we find that the evidence questioning the IE model is far stronger than the evidence that supports it.Gregory A. Huber is Associate Professor of Political Science and resident fellow, Institute for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University (gregory.huber@yale.edu). John S. Lapinski is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania (lapins@sas.upenn.edu). They thank the numerous colleagues who provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, including Alan Gerber, Don Green, Diana Mutz, Rogers Smith, Paul Sniderman and Lynn Vavreck.

In a critique of Huber and Lapinski (in this volume) I argued that their 2006 study failed to find evidence of racial priming and that this failure stands out in the recent accumulation of studies that do find racial priming. I argued further that this failure to replicate is the result of deficiencies in Huber and Lapinski's research. Huber and Lapinski (in this volume) respond by claiming that they did find evidence of racial priming among a subgroup, that their research is sound, that my research is flawed, and that the relevant literature does not comment on the differences between implicit and explicit messages . I show that 1) Huber and Lapinski's results demonstrate that their study produced null findings, 2) these null findings are caused by flaws in their study, 3) my research withstands their criticism, and 4) the relevant literature is in fact relevant and highlights the extent to which their null results are anomalous. There are, however, several points of agreement: 1) racial predispositions shape policy views, 2) these predispositions can be primed by cues and messages, and 3) these predispositions are primed by implicit racial messages. What remains at issue is the impact of explicit racial messages.

This issue of Perspectives contains reviews of a wide range of books across the conventional subfields. One theme that links many of the books under review, and thus the reviews themselves, is the theme of trust. In short, to what extent is effective and enduring political governance reliant on the development of forms of credibility, or “credible commitment,” among citizens and between citizens and political institutions? The problem of trust has been central to political inquiry at least as far back as Hobbes and arguably Aristotle, for whom civic “friendship” was an indispensable condition of politics. And it has recently assumed particular prominence in political science, as evidenced in the reviews below.

Complying with Europe: EU Harmonisation and Soft Law in the Member States. Gerda Falkner, Oliver Treib, Miriam Hartlapp, and Simone Leiber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 418p. $85.00 cloth, $37.99 paper.

NATO in the “New Europe”: The Politics of International Socialization After the Cold War. Alexandra I. Gheciu. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 368p. $60.00.

Europeanization and Regionalization in the EU's Enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe: The Myth of Conditionality. James Hughes, Gwendolyn Sasse, and Claire Gordon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 248p. $79.95.

The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration. Glyn Morgan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 204p. $45.00.

Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration after Communism. Milada Anna Vachudova. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 352p. $99.00 cloth, $37.95 paper.

Law and Governance in Postnational Europe: Compliance beyond the Nation-State. Edited by Michael Zürn and Christian Joerges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 312p. $75.00.Beate Sissenich is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. She wishes to thank Jeffrey Isaac for insightful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this essay.

Citizenship Under Fire: Democratic Education in Times of Conflict. By Sigal R. Ben-Porath. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 174p. $32.95.

In this volume, Sigal R. Ben-Porath brings several important and useful perspectives to bear on civic education. Her observations are prompted by the special situation created by the U.S. war on terrorism, as well as the unique perspective she is able to offer due to her Israeli background. Both the American and Middle East conflicts are open-ended and often muddled, so that, as Ben-Porath credibly notes, her unique experience with both situations lends her an advantage as she draws lessons for education for citizenship in the modern age. Citizenship Under Fire, then, offers a fresh approach to the all-important question of education for democracy.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. By Bryan Caplan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 280p. $29.95.

Bryan Caplan's book could only have been written by an economist. This has a good side and a bad side. On the good side, Caplan makes an important contribution to the public-opinion literature by analyzing the American people's economic views—an area overlooked by most previous researchers. And he asks a crucial question: Are the public's economic views wrong?

Cooperation Without Trust? By Karen S. Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005. 256p. $32.50.

Rationality and the Ideology of Disconnection. By Michael Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 238p. $75.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

The two books under review differ sharply on the fruitfulness of rational choice theory. Karen Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi posit that even trust is best understood as a product of rational, materialist calculations. On their “encapsulated interest” view, trust “exists when one party to [a] relation believes the other party has incentive to act in his or her interest or to take his or her interests to heart” (p. 2). But can incentives truly whisper to the heart? Michael Taylor decries the baleful consequences, both intellectual and practical, that stem from assimilating all reasoned decision making to the numerical weighing of material incentives and ignoring the role of heartfelt personal and moral commitments.

Punishment and Political Order. By Keally McBride. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 194p. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

What part does punishment play in the constitution of political order, and under what circumstances does punishment reinforce or undermine that order? In recent decades, suggests Keally McBride, this question has too often been ceded by students of political science to sociologists, legal scholars, and criminologists. In this discerning collection of essays, McBride seeks to reclaim this turf by asking, first, how certain pathbreaking texts have responded to the dilemmas generated when political orders, real or imagined, inflict suffering in response to misdeeds and, second, how we might make, specifically, political sense of controversies engendered by contemporary practices of punishment, especially but not exclusively in the United States.

Constitutional Democracy: Creating and Maintaining a Just Political Order. By Walter F. Murphy. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006. 568p. $55.00.

This fine book brings to bear Walter Murphy's manifold gifts: breadth of knowledge about political systems around the world and throughout history, keen critical learning about ancient and modern political thought, deep understanding of constitutional law, and a clear and clever style. It is thus a perfect place for relative novices to get an overview of the search for the best possible political system for sustaining Murphy's highest value, “respect for the great and equal dignity of all human beings” (p. 341). “Constitutional democracy” is for him this best possible system. At the same time, graduate students preparing for field exams in political or constitutional theory can find in Murphy's references and footnotes an excellent bibliography for their studies.

Multiculturalism Without Culture. By Anne Phillips. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 216p. $29.95.

Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism. By Sarah Song. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 212p. $85.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

These latest contributions to the multiculturalism literature have much to recommend them, and—in light of their many affinities—they are particularly rewarding to read as a pair. Both Sarah Song and Anne Phillips start with the same preoccupation, namely, the apparent tension between the importance of respecting cultural diversity on the one hand, and the feminist project of achieving gender equality, on the other. Both are absolutely committed to the latter, of course, but both are also concerned that the feminist backlash against multiculturalism—posed most forcefully and famously by Susan Moller Okin—might have been carried too far. Accordingly, both aim to recover and reconstruct what is worthwhile from the multiculturalism program in a manner that can be reconciled with a commitment to gender equality.

The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France Since the Revolution. By Pierre Rosanvallon. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 368p. $35.00.

Pierre Rosanvallon thinks about democracy in historical terms, and his investigations of French political experience since the revolution of 1789 hold lessons for democratic thought and practice outside his native country. His latest book to be translated into English adds to a growing reception of his rewarding thought. Though a jazzed-up retitling of the more homely original (literally translated as The French Political Model), this work describes both the strictures placed upon democracy by the French tradition of political centralization and the demands made upon the French state in the name of the free, solidaristic, and mediatory field of civil society.