Welcome to the inaugural issue of Perspectives on Politics, the new journal sponsored by the American Political Science Association (APSA) for all political scientists and others interested in academic analyses of politics. The associate editors and I are thrilled, and a bit daunted, by the challenges of putting together a journal that reaches across and outside our discipline and seeks to draw all of its members, and others, into a conversation about politics, policy, power, and the study thereof.

“I think good thoughts, whilst others write good words” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 85). Such is the life of a journal editor, as well as that of a love-sick poetical genius. I can at least hope that the good words written by others and published in this issue of Perspectives on Politics will last—if not quite as long as Shakespeare's sonnets, then well into the future.

By now, most readers have a sense of the distinctive nature of Perspectives on Politics and have read the first issue—or at least so I hope. Perspectives aspires to be a general journal of political science that provides political insight on important problems, as it emerges from rigorous, broad-based research and integrative thought. We anticipate authors and readers primarily comprising political scientists, but also including journalists, policy analysts, public officials and their staff, and other social scientists—in short, we aim to “broaden out” without “dumbing down.”

By now, you have developed a routine in which you read Perspectives on Politics, cover to cover, within a short time after receiving it. You discuss its contents with your professional colleagues as well as with friends outside the discipline, you include its articles in your syllabi, and you use its insights in your research and writing. You have completed the review that we requested. Perhaps most important, you are putting the finishing touches on a broad, synthetic, innovative, politically relevant, elegantly written draft manuscript that you will submit to the journal very soon.

I discuss several conceptual problems raised by current understandings of political violence, especially as they pertain to actions, motivations, and identities in civil wars. Actions “on the ground” often turn out to be related to local and private conflicts rather than the war's driving (or “master”) cleavage. The disjunction between dynamics at the top and at the bottom undermines prevailing assumptions about civil wars, which are informed by two competing interpretive frames, most recently described as “greed and grievance.” Rather than posit a dichotomy between greed and grievance, I point to the interaction between political and private identities and actions. Civil wars are not binary conflicts, but complex and ambiguous processes that foster the “joint” action of local and supralocal actors, civilians, and armies, whose alliance results in violence that aggregates yet still reflects their diverse goals. It is the convergence of local motives and supralocal imperatives that endows civil wars with their particular and often puzzling character, straddling the divide between the political and the private, the collective and the individual.

This article addresses three sets of questions. First, the George W. Bush administration claims that its cause and conduct in counterterror war are just. Such a claim invites moral assessment. How do normative beliefs and ethical concerns affect U.S. conduct in the counterterror war? Is the war just in cause and conduct? Second, many observers argue that warfare is “transformed.” How so? And is it possible to fight a just counterterror war in this context? Third, the transformation of war raises new questions for just war theory itself. Is the framework still useful? I argue that it is extremely difficult to fight a just counterterror war given the nature of terrorism and the realities of contemporary warfare. Yet I show that the Bush administration has made an effort to engage in a just counterterror war by meeting the criterion of self-defense and seeking to avoid noncombatant harm. Even so, current U.S. policy and practice in the counterterror war are not just. But any government would have a problem fighting a just counterterror war in the current context; indeed, the utility of just war theory itself is challenged. I discuss 12 conceptual and practical problems that arise at the intersection of just war theory and counterterror war, including the limits of self-defense, preemption, last resort, and discrimination. Despite these problems, I argue that just war theory is a useful method of inquiry into the problems of contemporary war. Our nation's cause has always been larger than our nation's defense. We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace—a peace that favors human liberty …. Building this just peace is America's opportunity, and America's duty. —George W. BushBush 2002.The Americans who conduct those operations are a tough and proud bunch. Their cause is a just one. It's to stop terrorists from killing Americans and others.—Donald H. RumsfeldRumsfeld 2001e.This is not a linear war; this is not a sequential war …. This is a different kind of conflict. This is asymmetric warfare. We have to use all the instruments of national power.—General Richard MyersMyers 2001b.

I'm pleased to report that the health of the American Political Science Association (APSA), and of political science as a discipline, is excellent.

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What should count as knowledge in political science? We have tried here to show that subjectivity is valid and useful, that firstperson accounts of experience—‘telling what I know,” narratives of and by the self, partial and contingent truths, and self-asother ethnography—contribute to knowledge. The move to subjective knowledge does not require the abandonment of objectivity. Self-consciousness and reflexivity simply make it possible to render the familiar unfamiliar, to gain a certain detachment, to achieve “objective subjectivity.” Subjective knowledge helps to explain identity and category formation and the politics of recognition. Accessibility to the politics of those taken to be outside the public sphere, those whose behavior is not easily observed or counted by objective political science—colonized persons, subalterns, and marginalized minorities—depends on their ability to articulate their identities, purposes, and interests. Such forms of identity politics have become of increasing interest to political scientists concerned with subaltern agency, multiculturalism, and ethnic conflict and peace.

The bargaining model of war envisions the initiation, prosecution, termination, and consequences of war as part of a single bargaining process. This article focuses on the most recent works on this topic, many of which employ formal techniques, and it applies the model to the different phases of war. It also discusses the state of empirical work on the bargaining model. Finally, the article considers how the bargaining model meshes with other theories of war and international relations, including cognitive psychology, organization theory, domestic politics, and constructivism.For comments, he thanks Risa Brooks, Hein Goemans, Ted Hopf, Robert Powell, Bruce Russett, Alastair Smith, Allan Stam, and Suzanne Werner. He would like to note that any remaining errors are exclusively his own.

Over recent decades, Islamism—the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life—has become a powerful force throughout much of the Muslim world. Through a discussion of the Egyptian case, this essay shows how the rise of Islamism can be illuminated by findings of the literatures on revolution and civil society, and vice versa. As many leading theories on revolutions would predict, the necessary precondition for Islamism's rise has been the declining efficacy and legitimacy of the state. Yet what has occurred in Egypt (and other parts of the Arab world) is not a successful revolution but a peculiar stalemate in which the existing regime retains political power while ceding substantial control over the societal and cultural spheres to the revolutionary challenger—an outcome that the literature does not envision. This stalemate, in turn, is largely a consequence of Islamists' ability to expand their presence in civil society. This expansion in Egypt and other Arab countries over recent decades is thus best understood as a sign not of benign liberalization, but rather of profound political failure, and as an incubator for illiberal radicalism.

In striking contrast to the legislatures in most modern democracies, Congress retains an important place in American politics and policy making. Especially in recent years, this has led many observers to question the importance of the presidency and bureaucracy to the real work of American governance and the extent to which political actors in the executive branch generally exercise power. This narrative of congressional dominance has been particularly bolstered by recent scholarly interest in principal-agent models of interbranch relations. The assumption of congressional centrality, however, obscures many important features of American politics. Over the course of American history, institutional development in particular has often been driven by either autonomous executive action or conflicts between Congress and the executive. We develop an approach for assessing executive power in institutional politics and illustrate the logic of executive influence with three cases: the rise of federal food-and-drug and forestry regulation, and the growth of the federal farm extension service in the early twentieth century; the rise of the national security state in the mid-twentieth century; and the evolution of budgeting and spending practices over the course of the twentieth century.

A comparative perspective on labor unions reveals that the best of all worlds for the workers is coordinated bargaining at thenational level and significant rank-and-file engagement at the local level. But the achievement of national and coordinated bargaining is an unrealistic goal in the foreseeable future in the United States. What American labor can do, however, is to become once again a social movement. In order for organized labor to play its critical role as a countervailing power within the American political system, there must be intensified organizing, internal democratization, increased electoral and lobbying clout, and social-movement unions willing to mobilize with others and, if necessary, on the streets.This paper was originally prepared for presentation at Theme Panel 7, “Politics of Labor,” at the 2002 meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Boston. The commentators at APSA—Glenn Adler, Ron Blackwell, Sakhela Buhlungu, and Linda Kaboolian —gave me generous and insightful feedback. So did Frances Fox Piven, Robby Stern, Victoria Murillo, Katrina Pflaumer, George Lovell, Jennifer Hochschild, Bernhard Ebbinghaus, Wolfgang Streeck, Fritz Scharpf, Bruce Ackerman, and four anonymous reviewers. I particularly want to thank my two most trusty critical readers: John Ahlquist, my research assistant, and David Olson, my long-term colleague and collaborator. I did not always take their advice but always appreciated it.Previous books include Of Rule and Revenue; Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism; and the co-authored Analytic Narratives

Is the self-esteem of individuals tied to their nation? If so, is that a good reason to strive for a world of safe, secure nations? Many liberal nationalists answer yes to these questions, but they do so without looking at the large social-psychology literature on groups and self-esteem. We examine the claims of liberal nationalists in light of this literature. The good news is that self-respectWe use the terms self-respect and self-esteem interchangeably. and group identity are strongly connected and can lead people to place collective interests above individual interests. The bad news is that the liberal-nationalist assumption that low-status groups have little self-respect and majority groups have it in abundance is mistaken. Perhaps most worrisome is the competitive nature of collective self-esteem: people feel better when their group does better than others. This competitiveness can lead to outright hostility when groups compete for resources and political power. Self-esteem is clearly an unstable foundation for a liberal nation. Although we do not think that problems caused by national identity and self-esteem can be fully solved, we do suggest ways in which they can be contained.

This article questions the centrality of interest-based explanation in political science. Through an examination of the “turn to ideas” undertaken in the past decade by rationalist and nonrationalist scholars in both comparative politics and international relations, it seeks to make three points. First, interests are far from the unproblematic and ever-ready explanatory instruments we assume them to be. Second, the ideational turn of historical institutionalism and constructivist international relations theory marks a substantive theoretical shift in the field precisely because it problematizes notions of action that take interest as given. Third, such scholarship emerged from, and in reaction to, the inherent limits of rationalist treatments of interests and ideas. That it did so suggests that progress in the discipline may be more dialectic—rather than linear or paradigmatic—than we realize.

What do peasants in eighteenth-century England, African Americans in Reconstruction-era Virginia, mothers in Nicaragua and Argentina, and contemporary transnational activists have to do with one another? They all illustrate instances where marginalized groups challenge a lack of democracy or the limitations of existing democracy. Democracy is both a process and a product of struggles against power. Both the social capital literature and literature that focuses on democracy as a product of institutions can undervalue the actions of regular people who imagine a democratic world beyond anything that actually exists. The four cases examined in this article demonstrate that marginalized groups use a variety of performative and subversive methods to uproot the public sphere from its exclusionary history as they imagine, on their own terms, democratic possibilities that did not previously exist. In so doing, they plant the seeds of a more egalitarian public politics in new times and places. This process is “contentious pluralism,” and we ask political scientists in all subfields to look to popular movements and changing political structures as they explore the promise of democracy and to rethink the gap between democracy as an ideal and the ways in which people actually experience it. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.

—Frederick DouglassQuotation from Dawson 2001, 259.

Is American state regulation a quaint anachronism from the nineteenth century, hanging on like a faded Victorian mansion in a twenty-first-century neighborhood increasingly subsumed by modern, international regulatory architectures? Or is it a booming area of devolved powers in our federalist system, creating more innovation and efficient small-scale bargaining than out-of-touch regulators in Washington do? Surprisingly, state regulation is becoming more important in shaping American firms operating in global markets. I present a revised interpretation of American regulatory federalism, including the “gap filling” or “re-enforcement” efforts by some state legislatures or attorneys general as federal regulators relax enforcement efforts. I summarize the results of 10 new quantitative studies of major regulated industries across the 50 states and over time. Overall, capture or rent-seeking models do not explain most regulatory areas, which show considerable interest-group contestation and provide room for institutional actors to wield autonomous, influential power. The heightened salience of state regulation is reflected by increased gubernatorial effort in many states, parallel to recent presidential efforts to centralize regulatory policy-making.

American foreign policy appears to have taken a sharp unilateral turn. A half century of U.S. leadership in constructing an international order organized around multilateral institutions, rule-based agreements, and alliance partnerships seems to be giving way to an assertive unilateralism. But how deeply rooted is this unilateral turn? Is it an inevitable feature of America's rising global power position? This article argues that the United States is not doomed to shed its multilateral orientation. Unipolar power provides new opportunities for the United States to act unilaterally, but the incentives are actually quite complex and cross-cutting; and these incentives arguably make multilateralism more rather than less desirable for Washington in many policy areas.

The 2002 enactment of the first major reform of U.S. federal campaign-finance law in a quarter century featured a more substantial engagement of political scientists—through research, public advocacy, and expert testimony—than had been the case in the past. This essay reviews the evolution of research on campaign finance from the early twentieth century to the present, the intellectual tensions between the scholarly and reform communities, the conditions in the 1990s that promoted collaborationamong these groups, and the continuing disagreements over how best to manage the problems associated with money and politics—in the United States and in democracies around the world.He gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Emily Bailard, a Brookings summer intern from Yale University, and Larissa Davis. Bruce Cain, Anthony Corrado, and Trevor Potter provided valuable commentary as discussants when a version of this paper was presented at the 2002 meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston. Special thanks to Sarah Binder, Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Charles O. Jones, Sheilah Mann, Norman Ornstein, this journal's editors, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The author would like to note that he alone is responsible for whatever errors of fact and judgment remain.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. By Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. 381 pages.