More or less by accident, some issues of Perspectives on Politics have revolved around a dominant theme. Articles in an early issue focused on conflict, from civil war to labor union strikes; a more recent set considered connections between politics and change over time, from how individuals and polities learn to why a legislature passes a law in the afternoon that it had rejected in the morning. This issue of Perspectives turns out to address mainly issues of methodology in political science—how we do our work, why we should do it differently, and how methodological choices entwine with substantive interests and political commitments.

The Rehnquist Court's federalism decisions have sparked contentious debate about the role of the Court in the American political system. This article examines the reasons behind the Court's revival of federalism and the controversy it has produced. The first part reviews the normative jurisprudential debate over the Court's role as it has been cast in the legal academy. In the second part, we turn to an historical-empirical, or “political regimes,” framework for understanding the role of the Supreme Court. Although this framework provides a better explanation of the Rehnquist Court's foray into federalism, the connections between this approach and normative jurisprudential debates remain important, and we explore them in the final section. The Court's recent jurisprudence on federalism reflects both consensus and division within the current political regime—consensus that federalism is an important value, but division over how best to protect that value. We argue that competing jurisprudential theories over the role of the Court illustrate these political divisions. Thus, this article highlights the special insights political scientists bring to the subject, but also demonstrates how the two approaches can be usefully combined to provide a more robust understanding of the Court's role in the American political system.The authors thank Richard Brisbin, John Dinan, Mark Graber, Ashley Grosse, Jennifer Hochschild, Tom Keck, David O'Brien, Bob Turner, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions along the way.

The essay advances a proposal that is addressed primarily to theorists, but with implications for the entire profession: the proposal to replace or supplement the rehearsal of routinized canons with a turn to global, cross-cultural (or “comparative”) political theorizing. I offer geopolitical and general intellectual reasons why the turn seems appropriate today, and I discuss a variety of theoretical or philosophical inspirations undergirding the turn. After highlighting some recent examples of comparative political theorizing, I conclude by responding to critical queries as well as indicating broader implications of the move “beyond monologue.”Fred Dallmayr's most recent publication is Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices.

This article draws on a comparative case study design to refine formal-quantitative models of civil war, expanding them to highlight political processes that lead to civil war. It uses 21 case studies of civil war onset and avoidance to show the shortcomings in prominent rationalist models of civil war that rely heavily on economic variables. These shortcomings include measurement error, unit heterogeneity, model misspecification, and lack of clarity about causal mechanisms. Additionally, the greed/grievance distinction that underlies the economic models is misguided. This article analyzes civil war not as a discrete phenomenon, but rather as one phase in a cycle of violence. Economic models of civil war, however, rely on theories that cannot distinguish effectively between civil war and other forms of political violence. To explain civil war, we must explain why various and often conflicting micro-level motives combine to produce political violence with the characteristics that we attribute to civil war. If we cannot understand why we get civil war instead of other forms of organized political violence, then we do not understand civil war.Nicholas Sambanis thanks Keith Darden, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Jennifer Hochschild, Stathis Kalyvas, Bruce Russett, Jack Snyder, Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, and seminar participants at New York University and the University of Chicago for very useful comments, as well as Annalisa Zinn and Steve Shewfelt for excellent research assistance. He also gratefully acknowledges financial support from the World Bank's Post-Conflict Fund and from the Russell Sage Foundation, where he was fortunate to spend a year of academic leave working on this and related projects. This research is part of the Political Economy of Civil War, a collaborative project between Yale University's U.N. Studies Program and the World Bank's Conflict and Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit.

In contrast to statistical methods, a number of case study methods—collectively referred to as Mill's methods, used by generations of social science researchers—only consider deterministic relationships. They do so to their detriment because heeding the basic lessons of statistical inference can prevent serious inferential errors. Of particular importance is the use of conditional probabilities to compare relevant counterfactuals. A prominent example of work using Mill's methods is Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions. Barbara Geddes's widely assigned critique of Skocpol's claim of a causal relationship between foreign threat and social revolution is valid if this relationship is considered to be deterministic. If, however, we interpret Skocpol's hypothesized causal relationship to be probabilistic, Geddes's data support Skocpol's hypothesis. But Skocpol, unlike Geddes, failed to provide the data necessary to compare conditional probabilities. Also problematic for Skocpol is the fact that when one makes causal inferences, conditional probabilities are of interest only insofar as they provide information about relevant counterfactuals.Jasjeet S. Sekhon thanks Walter R. Mebane Jr., Henry Brady, Bear Braumoeller, Shigeo Hirano, Gary King, John Londregan, Bruce Rusk, Theda Skocpol, Suzanne M. Smith, Jonathan N. Wand, the editors of Perspectives on Politics, and three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and advice.

“Two Paths to a Science of Politics” presents two strongly argued points of view about where we should be going in our discipline. The authors by and large agree on the nature of science and the variety of ways to do it, but they disagree on the most fruitful way to proceed at this moment. Granato and Scioli believe that we need to do more to test theories with data and to formulate theories that are based on data. We need, in their phrase, to consider the empirical implications of theoretical models (EITM). Rogers Smith thinks we need to take history, context, and meaning more seriously in order to understand phenomena such as political identity.Henry E. Brady's co-edited book with David Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, will be published this year from Rowman and Littlefield and Berkeley Public Policy Press. His thanks to David Collier, Gary King, Paul Sniderman, and the editorial staff of Perspectives on Politics for their helpful comments.

One of the central tasks facing any discipline is deciding what topics, among a vast range of possibilities, to feature in its research agenda. Once a discipline's practitioners have settled on the agenda, they must then determine what methods can best illuminate those topics. This essay argues that political science today needs to give higher priority to studies of the processes, especially the political processes, through which conceptions of political membership, allegiance, and identity are formed and transformed. To do this, we need to identify, to a greater extent than most political scientists have, the historical contexts of the conflicts and political institutions that have contributed to political identities and commitments, and our approaches must provide empathetic interpretive understandings of human consciousnesses and values. We cannot rely solely, or even predominantly, on efforts to identify abstract, ahistorical, and enduring regularities in political behavior such as those that prevailed during the behavioralist era of modern American political science. Nor can we depend primarily on approaches, ascendant in our discipline's more recent “rational choice” phase, that enhance our formal grasp of instrumental rationality. Those sorts of work can certainly offer important contributions, but in general they are most effective as elements in projects that rest extensively on contextually and historically informed interpretive judgments.Rogers M. Smith is the author of Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (Yale University Press, 1997). For their feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, the author thanks discussants and audience respondents from the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in September 2002, and the Yale Conference on Problems and Methods in Political Science in December 2002. He also thanks the editorial staff and anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics for many helpful suggestions and corrections.

What has changed since William Riker's statement was written? No doubt Political Science has made considerable headway in going beyond traditional methods. For example, social choice theory, formal models of party systems, and statistical methods for analyzing electoral and roll-call data have made it possible to make scientific progress in the study of democratic institutions and party systems.The authors thank Chris Achen, John Aldrich, Bill Bernhard, Norman Bradburn, Brian Humes, Mark Jones, Richard Lempert, Phil Shively, Joan Sieber, Duncan Snidal, and Paul Wahlbeck for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. They also thank Henry Brady and Jennifer Hochschild for their comments and assistance through this process. We dedicate this paper to the memory and scientific accomplishments of EITM Workshop participant Richard McKelvey.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, presented liberal societies with grave practical challenges. Yet, they also exposed the single most profound theoretical challenge since liberalism's origins: the challenge of illiberal revealed theology. Today's challenge is, in fact, a variety of liberal theory's original antagonist. The radical renewal of this old challenge, in a form markedly different from that which the early liberal theorists faced, requires fresh consideration from liberal theorists today.J. Judd Owen is the author of Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism and is working on a book entitled Religious Apathy and the Democratic Citizen. He thanks Peter Ahrensdorf, Robert Bartlett, Jennifer Hochschild, John Owen IV, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticisms.

On July 28, 2003, Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) held a press conference to call attention to a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) project that would allow investors to bet on future political events in the Middle East—including terrorist attacks—through a commodity-market style trading system. On July 29, newspapers responded by denouncing this “unbelievably stupid” and “grotesque” market. Later that day, the program was officially cancelled.The authors thank Ellie Powell and Tatyana Karaman for their excellent research assistance, and Gary Bass, Tom Romer, the editor of Perspectives on Politics, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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 brick@whitman.edu. 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.

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

Welfare and the Constitution.

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

Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals.

Untimely Politics.

Liberalism Under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires.

Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality.

Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism.

Platonic Noise.