Political scientists have been caught by surprise by some of the world’s most dramatic political transformations. To assess how the discipline fared in explaining two of the most large-scale and unexpected developments of the past decades, we compare scholarship around the time of popular mobilization in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Arab world in 2011. We argue that while scholars cannot be expected to predict utterly extraordinary events such as revolutions and mass mobilization, in these two cases disciplinary trends left scholars ill-prepared to explain them. Political scientists used similar paradigms to study both regions, emphasizing their failure to develop politically and economically along the lines of Western Europe and the United States. Sovietologists tended to study the communist bloc as either anomalously totalitarian or modernizing towards “convergence” with the West. Likewise, political scientists studying the Arab world focused disproportionately on the prospects for democratization or the barriers to it, and they now risk treating the 2011 protest movements essentially as non-events if they are not clearly tied to institutional democratic reform. By broadening their research agendas beyond a focus on regime type, political scientists will be better prepared to understand future changes in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Drawing on the pioneering work of Anthony Downs, political scientists have tended to characterize American politics as a game among undifferentiated competitors, played out largely through elections, with outcomes reflecting how formal rules translate election results into legislative votes. In this perspective, voters, campaigns, elections, and the ideological distribution of legislators merit extensive scrutiny. Other features of the political environment—most notably, the policies these legislators help create and the interest groups that struggle over these policies—are deemed largely peripheral. However, contemporary politics often looks very different than the world described by Downs. Instead, it more closely resembles the world depicted by E. E. Schattschneider—a world in which policy and groups loom large, the influence of voters is highly conditional, and the key struggle is not over gaining office but over reshaping governance. Over the last twenty years, a growing body of scholarship has emerged that advances this corrective vision—an approach we call “policy-focused political science.” In this framework, politics is centrally about the exercise of government authority for particular substantive purposes. Such exercises of authority create the “terrain” for political struggle, profoundly shaping both individual and group political behavior. More important, because policies can be so consequential, they also serve as the “prize” for many of the most enduring political players, especially organized interest groups. The payoffs of a policy-focused perspective include a more accurate portrayal of the institutional environment of modern politics, an appreciation for the fundamental importance of organized groups, a better understanding of the dynamics of policy change, and a more accurate mapping of interests, strategies, and influence. These benefits are illustrated through brief examinations of two of the biggest changes in American politics over the last generation: asymmetric partisan polarization and the growing concentration of income at the top.

In recent years, there has been renewed public discussion regarding the relationship between women’s equality and their traditional responsibility for carework. In this essay, we analyze the structures of choice and constraint that continue to produce the gender division of family labor and thus women's unequal participation in the public sphere. We conceptualize this as a problem of democratic freedom, one that requires building institutional pathways to sustain women's participation. Drawing on Nancy Hirschmann's arguments about processes of social construction and their relation to freedom, we argue that gender inequality in the public sphere means that women are unfree, in the sense that they are not participating as peers in the material and discursive processes of social construction that then help to shape their own desires and decisions. We use that framework to analyze the current landscape in which different subgroups of women make decisions about paid labor and care work. Our goal is to bring into view the way the social construction of desire interacts with the material context to underwrite inequality between women and men and across different groups of women. Gender equality and the project of democracy require participatory parity between women and men in the public sphere. We therefore turn in our last section to an effort to imagine how public policies could construct pathways that can help interrupt and undo the gender division of labor, and thus better support democratic freedom.

New digital video technologies are transforming how people everywhere document, publish, and consume information. As knowledge production becomes increasingly oriented towards digital/visual modes of expression, scholars will need new approaches for conducting and publishing research. The purpose of this article is to advance a systematic approach to scholarship called analytic filmmaking. I argue that when filming and editing are guided by rigorous social scientific standards, digital video can be a compelling medium for illustrating causal processes, communicating theory-driven explanations, and presenting new empirical findings. I furthermore argue that analytic films offer policymakers and the public an effective way to glean insights from and engage with scholarly research. Throughout the article I draw on examples from my work to demonstrate the principles of analytic filmmaking in practice and to point out how analytic films complement written scholarship.

Surprise is an intrinsic fact of political life and its elimination, especially with regard to extraordinary moments of protest and revolution, is a vain endeavor. Prediction and explanation are fundamentally different enterprises. While scholars may be well-positioned to trace, retrospectively, the motivation, networks, leadership, and other contextual factors that fueled the events of 2011 and 1989, such analysis will never bestow the sort of predictive power that will eliminate the surprise of mass uprisings. Verstehen-esque studies of mobilization, while crucially enlightening, have limited capacity to augment our powers of foresight due to the fundamental gulf between agency and intention as well as the causal disconnect between precedent and prediction.

John S. Alquist and Margaret Levi’s In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social Activism develops a new theory of organizations through a comparative analysis of two activist labor unions (the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the United States and the Waterside Workers Federation in Australia) and two unions that focus only on pursuing member benefits (the Teamsters and the International Longshoremen’s Association in the United States). Integrating the study of labor politics, social movements, social capital, and the political economy of group organization and mobilization, the book addresses a wide range of political science concerns. We have thus invited a range of political scientists to comment on the book as an account of labor politics and as a broader account of the logic of collective action.— Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

The Democratic and Republican Parties both make strong claims that their policies benefit racial and ethnic minorities. These claims have, however, received little systematic empirical assessment. This is an important omission, because democracy rests on the ability of the electorate to evaluate the responsiveness of those who govern. We assess Democrats’ and Republicans’ claims by compiling census data on annual changes in income, poverty, and unemployment over the last half century for each of America’s racial and ethnic groups. Judged by the empirical record, it is clear which party truly benefits America’s communities of color. When the nation is governed by Democrats, racial and ethnic minority well-being improves dramatically. By contrast, under Republican administrations, blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans generally suffer losses.

This response points to three critical problems in Explaining the Unexpected. First, the authors' contention that scholars ignored “everyday contestation,” including changing citizen-state relations, emerging venues of political participation, and the potential for mobilization, is based on a selective reading of the literature on politics in the Arab world before 2011. Second, their assertion that existing paradigms hindered scholars' ability to understand change mischaracterizes the literature on enduring authoritarianism. Scholars did not argue that regime breakdown was impossible before 2011 but rather sought to understand why authoritarian regimes were sustained. Long before the uprisings, they recognized the factors that could make breakdown possible. Third, Howard and Walters' conclusion that Middle East scholars' fundamental paradigms and their focus on regime type will lead them to treat “utterly remarkable waves of mass mobilization as politically inconsequential” is misplaced. The literature has and continues to explore a wide range of issues that extend far beyond democratization, and recent scholarship has examined varied aspects of the diverse political processes and outcomes witnessed since 2011. Explaining the Unexpected misses the mark on many points, but it does provide a useful platform for scholars to reflect on problems facing comparative politics. These include the blinders resulting from the normative biases underpinning the discipline and the need for a nuanced discussion about how, and to what extent, scholars facing rapid, regional transformations can learn from the study of similar experiences in other regions.

While there is much to appreciate in Roy Germano's essay, I argue that the analytic filmmaking project as currently presented has flaws that need to be addressed before we can proceed with this approach. First, Germano underemphasizes many of the similarities among visual, audio, and textual data collection and analysis while at the same time failing to note important ways in which the two differ. Second, the discussion of documentary filmmaking focuses on a particular style of documentary and neglects to consider documentaries that are similar in their construction to the type of analytic filmmaking he argues for in the article. This emphasis on the differences creates needless and potentially problematic schisms between two groups of empirical researchers who have a great deal in common, in terms of interests and methods. Finally, the theoretical framework and the connection between theory and data need to be presented much more explicitly so that the viewer can follow the argument of the film.

I examine the role of US land policy in strategically controlling and moving populations around the continent with the goal of expanding borders and securing and incorporating new territory on the frontier. The government effectively used land policies and population control to enable an otherwise constrained American state to assert authority over the direction of expansion, to engineer settlement patterns in a manner to secure the territory without a large military, and to maintain an official fidelity to constitutional principles while engineering a dominant racial vision. I examine both the success and failures of these policies over the nineteenth century, with material drawn from government documents and primary sources. I discuss the consequences of this land policy for how we understand the American state in the context of comparative state and racial formation.

No observational method is “point and shoot.” Even bracketing interpretive methodologies and their attendant philosophies, a researcher—including an experimentalist—always frames observation in terms of the topic of interest. I cannot ever be “just a camera lens,” not as researcher and not as photographer. Framing research “shots,” an observer always includes some features of the research question terrain while excluding others—of necessity, given human limitations and the partiality, always, of what we can know and the knowledge we can claim. With “shutters” open, we are never passive, always thinking, always world-making. While attention to videography and other visual research methods is welcome, researchers doing “visual politics” need to ask “political” questions: who has created the image being analyzed, for what purpose(s), what imagined viewer(s), and what unintended viewer(s), as well as consider the ethical issues that these methods entail.

Political scientists did fail to predict the precise timing and nature of the outbreak of the Arab uprisings. They, however, did not miss the realities of rising social discontent, institutional degradation, economic struggles, and political stalemates. The literature generally concluded that authoritarian Arab regimes had proven their ability to survive such challenges, and retained sufficient capabilities and strategies to overcome their potential challengers. The survival of most Arab regimes in the face of protests and the resurgence of the old regime in Egypt suggest the continuing relevance of attention to the power of these authoritarian structures. There are a wide range of vital new research questions currently being explored, such as the intensity and rapid diffusion of protest across borders, the variation in the political choices by militaries, the distinctive resilience of monarchies, and the post-uprising struggles to consolidate new institutional orders. Overall, however, the response of Middle East specialists in political science should be viewed as a success story rather than a failure.

This article engages Germano’s film and essay. The author lauds the fundamental thrust of the essay towards achieving scholarly recognition for film projects based on scholarly research. At the same time, the author questions Germano’s sharp opposition between analytic and documentary films. He appraises The Other Side of Immigration very favorably, while pointing out that the aesthetic choices and the power of the testimonies do not fall neatly within the categories established by Germano. The author then discusses his own experiences in conjoining historical research and documentary filmmaking.