The international relations field has recently taken a communicative turn. Social constructivists, for instance, regularly examine frames, persuasion, and other discursive mechanisms by which actors reach intersubjective agreement. Critical theorists add an overtly normative dimension by embracing the transformative potential of public deliberation. In contrast, realists and neorealists claim that outcomes are determined by the distribution of material power—political communication and discursive ideals are virtually meaningless elements in international politics. Put simply, talk is cheap. Given this view, it is puzzling that many prominent realists participate actively in national foreign policy debates and in that context both implicitly and explicitly embrace views about political discourse that are remarkably consistent with those held by constructivists and critical theorists. In the recent Iraq debate, the realists reveal lies, political spin, and other distortions of the debate promulgated by government elites and their allies. They challenge the legitimacy of established policies and critique excessive secrecy. Most importantly, these neorealists seek to transform public and elite consciousness so as to produce social pressures for alternative outcomes. Realists have apparently rejected their own theoretical presuppositions about the meaning and role of political communication, which has important implications for both policy debate and IR theorizing.Rodger A. Payne is Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville and Director of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (r.payne@louisville.edu). He would like to thank Josh Busby, Peter Dombrowski, Peter Howard, Jacques Hymans, Piki Ish-Shalom, Avery Kolers, Doug Lemke, John Mearsheimer, Tom Mowle, Stan Scott, and the three anonymous reviewers for offering valuable comments and suggestions. Portions of this paper were previously delivered at the Annual Meetings of the International Studies Association, at Montréal in 2004 and at Honolulu in 2005. Financial and institutional support was provided by a President's Research Initiative Project Initiation Grant from the University of Louisville and by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard.

Due to the amplified importance of forging an intimate connection with the American public, modern presidents must adjust their political personalities and leadership. To combat allegations of elitism, recent Republican presidents have adopted anti-intellectualism as a conservative form of populism. Anti-intellectualism is defined as disparagement of the complexity associated with intellectual pursuits, and a rejection of the elitism and self-aware attitude of distinction that is commonly associated with intellectual life. This article focuses on the benefits and costs of anti-intellectualism as a strategic response to the plebiscitary demands of contemporary presidential politics.Colleen J. Shogan is a member of the Affiliate Research Faculty at George Mason University (cshogan@gmu.edu). She is a full-time employee of the United States Senate, and the author of The Moral Rhetoric of American Presidents (Texas A&M Press, 2006). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Miller Center of Public Affairs Colloquia Series on Politics and History and Notre Dame's Program in American Democracy Speaker Series. She would like to thank Sidney Milkis, Brian Balogh, Jennifer Hochschild, Peri Arnold, Bruce Miroff, Eileen Hunt-Botting, Christina Wolbrecht, David Adesnik, and several anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and institutional support.

In the past twenty years, intersectionality has emerged as a compelling response to arguments on behalf of identity-based politics across the discipline. It has done so by drawing attention to the simultaneous and interacting effects of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and national origin as categories of difference. Intersectional arguments and research findings have had varying levels of impact in feminist theory, social movements, international human rights, public policy, and electoral behavior research within political science and across the disciplines of sociology, critical legal studies, and history. Yet consideration of intersectionality as a research paradigm has yet to gain a wide foothold in political science. This article closely reads research on race and gender across subfields of political science to present a coherent set of empirical research standards for intersectionality.Ange-Marie Hancock is Assistant Professor of Political Science & African American Studies at Yale University (ange-marie.hancock@yale.edu). She is the author of The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the “Welfare Queen.” The author thanks Christian Davenport, Gary Goertz, Errol Henderson, Gerald Jaynes, Eric Juenke, Alondra Nelson, Valerie Purdie-Vaughn, Mark Sawyer, James Scott, Evelyn Simien, Lester Spence, Dara Strolovitch, and the anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics for their comments on previous versions of this paper, which substantially improved the manuscript. She is currently a visiting faculty fellow at the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University.

When political scientists present empirical results, they are much more likely to use tables than graphs, despite the fact that graphs greatly increases the clarity of presentation and makes it easier for a reader to understand the data being used and to draw clear and correct inferences. Using a sample of leading journals, we document this tendency and suggest reasons why researchers prefer tables. We argue that the extra work required in producing graphs is rewarded by greatly enhanced presentation and communication of empirical results. We illustrate their benefits by turning several published tables into graphs, including tables that present descriptive data and regression results. We show that regression graphs emphasize point estimates and confidence intervals and that they can successfully present the results of regression models. A move away from tables towards graphs would improve the discipline's communicative output and make empirical findings more accessible to every type of audience.Jonathan P. Kastellec (jpk2004@columbia.edu) and Eduardo L. Leoni (eleoni@hmdc.harvard.edu) are Doctoral Candidates in Political Science at Columbia University. The authors' names appear in alphabetical order. They would like to thank Andrew Gelman, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Gary King, David Epstein, Jeff Gill, Piero Stanig, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Noah Kaplan, David Park, and Travis Ridout for generously making their data publicly available. Eduardo Leoni is grateful for support from the Harvard MIT Data Center, where he was a fellow while working on this project.We have created a web site, http://tables2graphs.com, that contains complete replication code for all the graphs that appear in this article, as well as additional graphs that we did not present due to space limitations.

The watershed Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education affected activist politics on issues that extend well beyond African-American civil rights or education. The apparent success of the Court decision in spurring social change encouraged activists in other social movements to emulate the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's litigation strategy, and to adapt organizational structures, political strategies, and rhetoric borrowed from the civil rights movement. We examine how a Supreme Court decision and its subsequent interpretation influenced the development of other social movements. Borrowing from work on social movements, we contend that the Court decision signaled judicial openness to stand up for minority points of view on questions of fundamental rights, and that the civil rights movement spilled over to affect other movements. Activists continued to respond to that signal decades after Brown, even when that signal of judicial responsiveness and openness did not reflect the real prospects for achieving influence through a litigation-based strategy.David S. Meyer is Professor of Sociology and Political Science (dmeyer@uci.edu) and Steven A. Boutcher is Doctoral Candidate (sboutche@uci.edu) in Sociology, University of California, Irvine. We are grateful for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper from Lisa Garcia Bedolla, Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Stephanie DiAlto, Sharon Lean, Sharon Oselin, and Su Yang.

In 1960, E.E. Schattschneider noted that every change in the scope of political conflict has a bias; political conflicts that are localized tend to be highly restrictive, while nationalizing conflicts can draw in previously excluded groups. In contrast to this conventional wisdom, this paper suggests that the question of which venues are open to which interests is an empirical one.Lisa L. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University (miller@polisci.rutgers.edu). The author would like to thank Frank Baumgartner, Regina Lawrence, Beth Leech, Michael McCann, and Marie Gottschalk, as well as the three anonymous reviewers, for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts.

In a recent issue of Perspectives on Politics, Larry Bartels examines the high levels of support for tax cuts signed into law by President Bush in 2001. In so doing, he characterizes the opinions of “ordinary people” as lacking “a moral basis” and as being based on “simple-minded and sometimes misguided considerations of self interest.” He concludes that “the strong plurality support for Bush's tax cut … is entirely attributable to simple ignorance.”

Our analysis of the same data reveals different results. We show that for a large and politically relevant class of respondents, conservatives and Republicans, rising information levels increase support for the tax cuts. In fact, Republican respondents rated “most informed” supported the tax cuts at extraordinarily high levels (over 96 percent). For these citizens, Bartels' claim that “better-informed respondents were much more likely to express negative views about the 2001 tax cut” is untrue. Bartels' results depend on the strong assumption that if more information about the tax cut makes liberals less likely to support it, then conservatives must follow suit. Our analysis allows groups to process information in different ways and can better help political entrepreneurs better reconcile critical social needs with citizens' desires.Arthur Lupia is the Hal R. Varian Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan (lupia@umich.edu). Adam Seth Levine is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan (adamseth@umich.edu). Jesse O. Menning received a Master's Degree in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2005. He is currently an information technology consultant (Jesse.Menning@gmail.com). Gisela Sin is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois (gsin@uiuc.edu). We thank Scott Althaus, John Bullock, Nancy E. Burns, James N. Druckman, Elisabeth R. Gerber, Orit Kedar, Kenneth W. Kollman, Arthur Lupia Sr., Jan Lupia, Diana C. Mutz, Samuel L. Popkin, Markus Prior, Paul M. Sniderman, and Kaare Ström for advice. We thank Larry Bartels for his generosity and assistance in our replication efforts. We thank David Howell and the NES Staff for assistance with the NES data set. This article uses data from the 2002 American National Election Studies, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (grant B7532), the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, the Russell Sage Foundation (grant 83-02-05), and the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President of Research, and Department of Political Science for funding the 2002 National Election Studies; Nancy E. Burns and Donald R. Kinder, Principal Investigators.

China's national power is growing rapidly, but what China will do with its newfound capabilities remains an issue of contentious debate among scholars and policymakers. At the heart of the problem is the difficulty of divining future intentions. Two arguments have dominated the debate. One focuses on power and likely Chinese revisionism. The other highlights China's growing interdependence and likely future satisfaction. Both are problematic in terms of logic and evidence. They offer linear projections that ignore the way that China's future is likely to be contingent—especially on the interaction of foreign policy ideas and events. Relative power and interdependence are important but their impact is mediated through the doctrines leaders use to justify action and establish authority: those ideas are prone to change in regular ways—and with them China's intentions. If this argument is right, policy prescriptions that advocate containing, engaging, or some mix of the two (i.e., hedging) in relations with China need to be reconfigured.Jeffrey W. Legro is Professor and Chair in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics and Co-Director of the Governing America in a Global Age Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia (legro@virginia.edu). The author thanks Robert Ross, Tang Shiping, Brantly Womack, and Zhu Feng for helpful comments and Daniel Aaron Weir for excellent research assistance.

Political science is a prolific profession. So much so that it is impossible for us to assign for review all the interesting books being written and published by our colleagues. The long-standing American Political Science Association convention for organizing the book reviews is by subfield. We have done nothing to interfere with this convention, which no doubt serves important functions. However, there are surely other ways to order or connect books, ways that perhaps have more intellectual warrant than the standard categories, which lack any real thematic content. So, prodded by my persistent assistants, we inaugurated an Editor's Comment to highlight some interesting themes among the books currently under review.

In countries where citizens have strong grievances against the regime, attempts to address these grievances in the course of daily life are likely to entail high costs coupled with very low chances of success in any meaningful sense; consequently, most citizens will choose not to challenge the regime, thus reflecting the now well-known collective action problem. When a regime commits electoral fraud, however, an individual's calculus regarding whether to participate in a protest against the regime can be changed significantly. This argument yields important implications for how we interpret the wave of “colored revolutions” that swept through Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan in the first half of this decade. Applying the collective action framework to the colored revolutions also yields a parsimonious contribution to the political science literature on social protest: electoral fraud can be a remarkably useful tool for solving the collective action problems faced by citizens in countries where governments are not, to use Barry Weingast's language, appropriately restrained by the populace. While modest, such an observation actually can speak to a wide-ranging number of questions in the literature, including why people choose to protest when they do, how protests at one place and time can affect the likelihood for future protests, and new aspects of the relationship between elections and protest.Joshua A. Tucker is Associate Professor of Politics at New York University (joshua.tucker@nyu.edu). He would like to thank participants in the First and Second Danyliw Research Seminars in Contemporary Ukrainian Studies hosted by the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa and the Kennan Institute Workshop on Ukrainian Civil Society for many helpful comments and suggestions on developing the arguments contained in this article. He would also like to thank Dominique Arel, Jessica Allina-Pisano, Mark Beissinger, Valerie Bunce, Paul D'Anieri, Jerry Hough, Jason Lyall, Grigore Pop-Eleches, Lucan Way, and William Zimmerman for their time in commenting on earlier drafts of the paper, as well as the anonymous reviewers at Perspective on Politics. Marc Berenson and Matthew Berner provided excellent research assistance.

It has always been true that foreign policy debates tend to proceed on a weak evidentiary base, with clever quips or stirring oratory regularly trumping sound analysis. According to Thucydides, for example, the Athenian assembly that endorsed the Sicilian expedition during the second Peloponnesian War had only the haziest conception of the adversaries' capabilities. Contemporary politics is distinctive not in the sloganeering quality of political discourse, but in the divergence between the quality of information available to society as a whole and the quality of information used in making decisions. For example, it was clear to any open-minded observer by the time of the Congressional vote in 2002 that implications of collaboration between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda lacked any basis in reliable evidence. By the time the Bush Administration initiated war in 2003, claims about Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons capabilities were also partially debunked and increasingly dubious. Still, the war went forward, and many Americans continued to believe the Bush Administration's false claims even after the Administration itself had abandoned them.Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is Associate Professor of International Relations in the School of International Service at the American University in Washington, DC (ptjack@ american.edu). Stuart J. Kaufman is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware (skaufman@udel.edu). For helpful comments and feedback on this article, we would like to thank Monica Duffy Toft, Neta Crawford, Daniel Nexon, and three anonymous reviewers.

Lupia, Levine, Menning, and Sin show that well-informed Republicans and conservatives were highly supportive of the 2001 Bush tax cut. They mistakenly infer that this fact invalidates my claim in “Homer Gets a Tax Cut” that “the strong plurality support” for the tax cut was “entirely attributable to simple ignorance.” Their analysis, like mine, implies that a fully-informed public would have been lukewarm, at best, toward the tax cut. They have little to say about why this is the case, beyond insisting that “citizens have reasons for the opinions they have.” I suggest that citizens' “reasons” are sometimes misleading, misinformed, or substantively irrational, and that social science should not be limited to “attempts to better fit our analyses into their rationales.”Larry M. Bartels is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (bartels@princeton.edu).

Race and the Making of American Liberalism. By Carol A. Horton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 312 p. $39.95.

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. By Ira Katznelson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. 256 p. $25.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

What a Might Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality. By Theda Skocpol, Ariane Liazos, and Marshall Ganz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 310 p. $27.95.

The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. By Richard M. Valelly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 348 p. $58.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. By Aristide R. Zolberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 672 p. $39.95.

The political science discipline is so very broad and diverse. The Program of the APSA meetings is one sign of this. The range of books reviewed in any given issue of Perspectives is another. In general we run reviews as we receive them. There is no long-range thematic plan beyond the review essays. And yet it is striking how certain patterns emerge in each issue. Perhaps the patterns I observe when I write these editorial introductions are subconsciously imposed in the editorial process. Perhaps they are simply artifacts of the way I retrospectively read the reviews. Obviously each reader can discern their own patterns, and we hope that they will. My own discernments are intended only as a guide and a prompt. They are motivated by the fact that, for perhaps good reasons including efficiency, most of us tend to read only the reviews in “our” subfields. One of my goals is to draw connections that can move people to look beyond the familiar (more on this below).

Studies of women in legislatures indicate that achieving a “critical mass” of women may have the effect of changing the legislative priorities of women, increasing the number of legislative initiatives dealing with women and the passage rate of such initiatives, and altering the legislative priorities of men. In the absence of a critical mass, “token” women may be so constrained by their minority status as to be unable to respond proactively to their environment. Popular wisdom suggests that a critical mass may be necessary for women to make a difference as women in a legislature.

Yet, critical mass is both problematic and under-theorized in political science research. The critical mass threshold is debated, the mechanism of effect is unspecified, possible negative consequences are overlooked, and the potential for small numbers of elected women to effect political change on behalf of women is neglected. Beyond sheer numbers, what are the conditions that govern the ability of women legislators to make a difference? We argue that two major contextual factors beyond the sheer numbers are likely to govern the extent to which female legislators serve to represent women. Relying on the secondary literature, this article maps parliamentary and civil society contexts to sheer numbers of women to locate conditions in which female legislators are most likely to have policy successes.Karen Beckwith is the Flora Stone Mather Professor of Political Science at Case Western Research University and Editor, with Lisa Baldez, of Politics & Gender (karen.beckwith@case.edu). Her published work includes Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State (Cambridge 2003, with Lee Ann Banaszak and Dieter Rucht), Political Women and American Democracy (forthcoming, with Christina Wolbrecht and Lisa Baldez), and articles on gender and politics in the European Journal of Political Research, Politics & Society, and Signs, among others. Kimberly Cowell-Meyers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at American University (kcowell@american.edu). She is author of Religion and Politics: The Party Faithful in Ireland and Germany (Greenwood, 2002) and articles published in Women & Politics, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, and Irish Political Studies among others. She has worked in the British Parliament and the United States Institute of Peace.

Where does one locate the subfield of international political economy (IPE) with its study of North-South relations and developing countries? Attempts to map the field usually work on at least two levels. In the first instance, an intra-political science conceptualization conventionally invokes the fields of international relations and comparative politics and then uses words like “intersection,” “inform,” and “complement.” Indeed, if comparative politics is traditionally viewed as the study of politics within countries (often with attention to a specific region of the globe) and international relations is preoccupied with the relationships between countries in the international arena, efforts to understand the politics of developing countries obliges IPE scholars to engage both fields. How can one understand the development experience of a country (or region) without situating it in a broader international context? Undeniably, a country's experience with its colonial legacy, the evolution of state institutions, economic growth, poverty, corruption, globalization, and natural resource exploitation can only be understood in the dynamic context of the international arena.Gregory White is Associate Professor of Government at Smith College, Northampton, MA (gwhite@email.smith.edu). He is the author of On the Outside of Europe Looking In: A Political Economy of Tunisia and Morocco (2001) and articles and book chapters on Moroccan politics and labor migration.

Why, more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after repeated elections at both the regional and national levels, has post-Soviet Russia slid back into authoritarianism? Given the increasingly tense relations between the Kremlin and the West, this is a question of growing geopolitical importance. Analyzing it also turns out to be immensely fruitful for sharpening our theoretical understanding of the sources of democracy and autocracy more generally. While the decade and a half since the Soviet collapse has been a time of massive upheaval and hardship for the hundreds of millions of people living in the region, it has also been something of a golden era for the study of comparative politics—as anyone who reads the works reviewed here will readily attest.Stephen E. Hanson is Boeing International Professor at the University of Washington and the Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies. He is the author of Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions, winner of the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He is also a co-editor of Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule, a co-author of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, and the author of numerous journal articles examining post-communist politics in comparative perspective.

With this issue, we are pleased to initiate the practice of a Review Editor Introduction. As I noted in my initial Editorial Statement a few issues ago, the job of review editor is a weighty one, involving some complex judgments. The choices regarding review assignments, pairings, and such that I make—with the advice of my terrific team of assistants—impact individual authors and the profession as a whole. Given our desire to use the review section to create interesting dialogues and new conversations, we have decided that an editor's introduction could be useful, in identifying certain inter and intra subfield connections and in introducing special features or symposia.

Despite widespread disagreement about democratic deficits in the European Union (EU), most critics begin by conceiving democracy as a problem for the EU. Seeing the EU as undemocratic or insufficiently democratic, they devise institutional innovations to democratize it. These innovations seem to require breaking the traditional link between democracy and the nation-state, which in this context appears outmoded or inappropriate. This article challenges that approach, arguing that it gets the relationship between democracy and the sovereign state wrong—or at least, incomplete—by stressing modern democratic theory's empirical ties to the state while underestimating their normative significance. The complex interdependence of normative and empirical assumptions informing modern democratic theory means that detaching democracy from the state is much less straightforward than critics often imagine. The essay argues instead for conceiving the EU as a problem for democratic theory. Doing so reveals that democratic theory is ill-equipped to address recent changes in the configuration of rule and new structures of governance associated with Europeanization, European integration, and globalization more broadly. This change in perspective highlights important limits in recent democratic theorizing about the EU and clarifies the role of European debates in reinterpreting and reconstructing democracy in the age of globalization.Michael Goodhart is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds a secondary appointment in Women's Studies (goodhart@pitt.edu). He is grateful to Chris Bonneau, Mark Hallerberg, Andrew Lotz, John Markoff, Guy Peters, Alberta Sbragia, Dan Thomas, and to anonymous reviewers of this essay for their kind help and advice. He is also grateful to the European Union Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh for the chance to present an earlier version of this essay and appreciates the suggestions he received at that time.

Fair reviews of this work will highlight its seminal contributions to the study of judicial behavior. In remarkably accessible prose, Lawrence Baum demonstrates that existing models of judicial behavior fail to account for the human factor in judging. Judges, Baum points out, are as interested in being liked and maintaining their self-esteem as other human beings. Judges and their Audiences then details the numerous ways in which judicial needs for approval from various audiences may influence judicial practice. While modest in tone, the work sets out a research agenda likely to inspire the next generation of judicial behaviorists.