Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider institutional innovations that could promote political equality. Finally, we describe the diverse ways that political scientists produce an impact on the world by sharing and applying their knowledge of the consequences of electoral rules and global trends in reform.

In the ongoing debate about how and whether biology can contribute to the discipline of political science and thus possibly enhance explanations of political behavior, the focus has been on the role of reductionism. In the Hibbing paper, for example, the question is framed as who is more reductionist—those wishing to incorporate biology or those ‘environmentalist determinists’ who reject biological research? Yet this framing misses one of the most fundamental aspects of scientific theorizing, namely, the vital distinction between reductionism and emergence. Shifting the lens to the emergent properties of behavior raises a different kind of concern: under what conditions do the competing perspectives on the various factors produce an explanation of an emergent outcome. Using Philip Anderson's example from particle physics, there are many phenomena and behaviors that can only emerge from an interaction of elements. Examining two inert chemicals kept apart cannot explain the complex interaction effect of an explosion when those chemicals come together. Now the question is no longer who is the most reductionist, but who is best positioned to explain “political explosions” that otherwise seem to come from nowhere when isolated political elements lay inert side-by-side.

Since the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008, authors and politicians have regularly reminded us of the duality of crisis and opportunity. For policymakers, administrations, and candidates, crises represent opportunities to implement long-desired reforms, seize the public stage, and reframe old arguments in the light of today's urgency. As the books under review here suggest, crises also represent opportunities for scholars. Arguments that failed to gain traction in the past may now deserve new attention as they help us understand the roots of crisis or how to recover from it. New audiences may be receptive to established arguments, now that other policies have caused us grief and are failing to promote recovery. The public and decision makers could be open to listening to these arguments and their implications, now that crisis has revealed deep vulnerabilities.

The three books that form the basis of this review essay represent trenchant critiques of neoliberal economic theory and policies, including such foundational policy assumptions as globalization, deregulation, and reliance on sophisticated financial tools. Their authors, three prominent economists, draw our attention to problems of market failure, such as rampant rent-seeking behavior and externalities. By focusing on entrenched dilemmas that include widening inequality and the compatibility of democracy and globalization, they remind us of the ways in which markets are embedded in social institutions, and how such institutions both respond to markets and shape market outcomes. All bring with them a deep commitment to understanding the functioning of society and how to maintain the benefits of global capitalism while reining in its most destructive implications.

After a long period waiting in the wings, the Fisc (the state treasury, or the larger system of public finance) has returned to center stage in comparative politics. During this time, fiscal sociologist Joseph Schumpeter was more likely to be cited for his “creative destruction” thesis, than for his “crisis of the tax state” analysis. While the “return to the state” dates back to the late 1970s, it still took another decade before taxation became a monograph headliner, with influential works by Margaret Levi (Of Rule and Revenue, 1988), Charles Tilly (Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990–1992, 1992) and Sven Steinmo (Taxation and Democracy: Swedish, British and American Approaches to Financing the Modern State, 1996). Since then, tax policy and extractive capacity have increasingly come to be recognized by comparativists as central to state-building projects, thus confirming Edmund Burke's old adage that “the revenue of the state is the state.” As part of this fiscal revival in comparative politics, Aaron Schneider has rightfully earned the status as leading expert on Central America with his new book, State-Building and Tax Regimes in Central America.

We are in an era of Big Books, books with a magisterial sweep of the history of the world. All share the desire to explain why some countries flourish, why some start and stall on the path to development, and why others seem never to find the path at all. In sociology, Big Books date back at least to Karl Marx and Max Weber. Their publication has been more or less regular ever since, and their authors tend to elaborate the sort of grand and general theories that have come under increasing attack in recent decades, given methodological advances that have transformed analytic tastes.

Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider institutional innovations that could promote political equality. Finally, we describe the diverse ways that political scientists produce an impact on the world by sharing and applying their knowledge of the consequences of electoral rules and global trends in reform.

This valuable review of my book identifies core points and three potential areas of deepening: newly emerging elites, additional cases, and the challenge of fiscal sociology research in Central America. I address each in turn. As noted, contemporary elites share many characteristics with traditional elites, who are accurately described as incestuous, exclusive, and self-perpetuating. Some of the newly emerging elites are indeed drawn from the very families and networks that produced prior generations of elites. This evolution has been usefully described in ethnographic work by Central Americans such as Marta Casaús Arzú and North Americans such as Jeffrey Paige. They note that despite continuities, there are important differences in contemporary elites, perhaps because of the democratic regimes in which they operate, and especially because of their location atop transnationally integrated production processes. Still, while this structural position produces both conflicts and coincidences of interest with traditional elite actors, the precise pattern of intraelite relations is the outcome of contingent social processes captured by the dimensions of cohesion and dominance. Different combinations of cohesion and dominance in intraelite relations serve as a useful beginning to the analysis of tax-regime outcomes.

John Hibbing's essay is a persuasive defense of biopolitical research. I argue, however, that Hibbing does not go far enough in recognizing the broad vision of biopolitical science as a science of political animals. We need to see this as a science that moves through three levels of deep history: the natural history of the political species, the cultural history of a political community, and the biographical history of political actors in a community. I illustrate this by discussing Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation at these three levels of biopolitical science.

Taxation in postcommunist states is at least doubly peculiar: States must learn to tax wealth in private hands that barely existed previously, and societies must learn to relate to tax institutions that barely existed previously. Gerald Easter has provided a comprehensively researched and grippingly written account of how these twin tests were met in Poland and Russia. To summarize the argument of this book, Polish state actors encountered a private sector of petty capitalists and workers, and their interaction struck a consensual bargain over tax powers, citizen obligations, and the nature of public benefits in a “contractual state.” By contrast, the Russian economy was dominated by large-scale extractive industries available only through elite bargains imposed with coercive authority in a “predatory state.” The contrast serves to demonstrate the gradual accretion of political struggles and institutional forms, diverse varieties of tax regimes, and the contribution to our understanding of state—society relations made by the postcommunist experience, where “the flow of power ran from state to society, rather than in the opposite direction” (p. 187).

Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider institutional innovations that could promote political equality. Finally, we describe the diverse ways that political scientists produce an impact on the world by sharing and applying their knowledge of the consequences of electoral rules and global trends in reform.

The early years of the twenty-first century have not been good for global capitalism. An international credit crisis and a widespread recession, with all of their attendant anxieties and miseries, have unsurprisingly shaken public support for free-market processes—especially within many of capitalism's traditional strongholds. As a colorful token of this lost faith, The Socialist Economic Bulletin, published by London's leftist former mayor Ken Livingstone, reported in 2010 a “tenfold increase” in sales of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in Germany from the year prior. Meanwhile, from the other end of the ideological spectrum, in 2011 The Economist reported that public support for free-market economics actually fared relatively well in Marx's native Germany, where it drew the highest level of support among the 25 national populations surveyed (just edging out nominally communist China). Indeed, support in both Germany and China was strong compared to capitalism's depressed standing in the United States. The percentage of American respondents willing to give at least qualified assent (i.e., to choose “somewhat agree” or better) to the claim that it is the “best” economic system fell from a leading 80% early in the millennium to just 59% by 2010.

John Hibbing's “Ten Misconceptions Concerning Neurobiology and Politics” is a plea for greater understanding of an approach he considers marginalized in political science. This is ironic given the lack of serious attention that his neurobiological approach gives to questions of power and marginality in politics. While Hibbing presents neurobiology as a new and exciting paradigm, his piece reads more like yet another rhapsody about the scientific benefits of new techniques than it does like a novel approach to understanding fundamental questions of politics.

This dialogue might strike some readers as more amicable than critical, as the two books concur on core assumptions about the comparative politics of taxation and state building. They both prefer a macrosocial analytical framework to explain political institutional outcomes, focus on elite motives and actions as the main causal factor, and provide a historically grounded analysis. Also, both books advance recent scholarship on a neofiscal sociology in comparative state-building theory. Aaron Schneider's review, however, does note two underdeveloped themes in my study of postcommunist tax states, which rightly deserve response.

I share the view that biocultural connections should become more central to political inquiry. And I appreciate some of the themes Hibbing develops. The approach considered in this response is one in which variable degrees of agency are pushed deeply into simple organisms, into processes of embryological unfolding, and into subliminal elements of cultural relations. Such an approach appreciates the creative element in evolution as well as in subliminal processes in play within and between us. Several practitioners of complexity theory in biology have been exploring such routes. They may contribute to a more layered set of interfaces between biology and cultural interpretation that are even less reductionist in character. And they may carry import for explorations of how the media work on the visceral register of intersubjectivity, still to be developed.

Mark S. Anner opens Solidarity Transformed by referencing two wrenching changes that have transformed the world for workers: neoliberalism—the scaling back of welfare states, industrial policies, and labor protections—and globalization. He questions how these shifts have affected workers and how worker organizations in diverse settings have responded.

Thanks to research conducted in the past few years, our understanding has been significantly expanded concerning democracy and authoritarian regimes, as well as the means of both destroying and rebuilding democratic institutions. While there is a clear link between a developed economy and democracy, the relationship is not self-evident in all cases. Also, economic growth is not conducive to the development of democracy under all circumstances, especially when the distribution of wealth is not considered fair by all citizens. In and of itself an election, even a competitive one—long considered a democratic minimum—does not guarantee the survival of a democracy, as strongmen have learned how to run an authoritarian system behind an electoral veil. The majority of autocratic leaders use the concept of democracy as a screen for building a political regime antithetical to the spirit and practice of a real democracy. Autocrats adopt a number of democratic institutions only to subvert their original purposes. While they pose as democrats, instead of a liberal democracy they initially organize a majoritarian democracy, followed by an illiberal democracy that ignores human rights. This is but one step away from an autocratic turning point, the rejection of all democratic principles. “Potemkin democracies” may even hold (limited) open elections organized so that the outcome will not threaten the foundations of the existing regime.

Commentary on contemporary American national politics is almost universally critical. Gridlock reigns: Politics is polarized, government is dysfunctional, and public policy is stalemated. Elected officials barely avoid one cliff only to find themselves on the brink of another. Credit downgrades, debt crises, national bankruptcy, climate catastrophe, and other forms of Armageddon loom. The system is broken.

In the United States, the borderline obsessive academic focus with judicial independence as a political science concept would lead one to believe that judicial independence as an empirical political reality is persistently endangered. And yet, periodic partisan apoplexy about controversial Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding, it is anything but: Even with judicial potency in polities as disparate as Israel, India, and Germany, the American judiciary remains perhaps the most powerful and most stable in the world. But with all due respect to John Locke, all the world is emphatically not America. Elsewhere, of course, there are locales where the climate surrounding law and courts is rather different, where judicial independence is inconsistent, threatened, or downright fictitious. It is in the study of these nations that judicial independence deserves the central place in public law scholarship it already occupies in America. And with the publication of Maria Popova's Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies, students of at least two sets of those nations—post-Soviet states specifically and emerging democracies more generally—have both a clarion call for what they could be studying and a first-rate example of how they could be studying it.

My response to John Hibbing raises questions about the nature of judgment implied in the biology and politics agenda that he would have us adopt. Although rightly critical of overly rationalist and cognitivist models, the neurobiological turn casts action and judgment as the mere effects of already primed dispositions, for which the giving of reasons is little more than window-dressing on what was going to happen in any case. Furthermore, the reductively biological picture of human beings that emerges in Hibbing's account is hard to square with democratic conceptions of politics that emphasize the capacity for freedom and association with others. Finally, I worry that Hibbing's unapologetic embrace of scientism remains entangled in the fraught history of deterministic explanatory models and American social science.