Welcome to the first-ever February issue of the APSR, which, by no coincidence, is also our first book reviewless issue. As indicated in prior “Notes from the Editor,” beginning with the first issue of Volume 97, the APSR's cover dates now become February, May, August, and November, rather than the familiar March, June, September, and December. This change has been made to accommodate the APSA's new Perspectives on Politics, which will be published on a quarterly basis, with its inaugural issue appearing a month from now, in March 2003. Formerly bundled with the APSR, PS will now appear in your mailbox in January, April, July, and October; by now you should already have received the January 2003 issue. These changes have been necessitated by the complexities of publishing and distributing three quarterly journals rather than two.

Despite elevating Alexis de Tocqueville to iconic status in our national debate on civic engagement, we have frequently neglected the range and depth of his associational thought. In this essay, I trace the early manifestations and evolution from 1828 to 1840 of his understanding of the commune or township, a featured source of public participation and cohesion within his larger associational lexicon. I show how his reflections on local liberties, in general, and the New England township, in particular, inspired and helped to shape both volumes of his Democracy in America. I emphasize the degree to which Tocqueville saw the participatory vector originating in the township's political life as galvanizing an ardent civic spirit leading to cultural, intellectual, and economic achievements. I conclude by seeking to connect lessons gleaned from Tocqueville's township to contemporary strategies to strengthen citizen participation.For their early encouragement and advice, I thank Clark Gilpin and David Tracy, leaders of the Brauer Seminar at the University of Chicago Divinity School where I presented an initial version of this essay in spring 1994. I am grateful to the late François Furet, who also commented upon that early paper, and Ralph Lerner, who read and notated each of its successive formulations, for their generous and sage oversight of my ensuing Tocquevillian studies. I also thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal for their comments and constructive criticisms.

Although James Madison has been invoked by justices and judicial scholars for over 100 years, Madison's principle of religious liberty has never been fully grasped or adopted by the Supreme Court. Judges and scholars have failed to understand Madison's radical but simple teaching that religion is not part of the social compact and, therefore, that the state may not take religion within its cognizance. In this article I set forth Madison's principle of “noncognizance” in light of the social compact theory he articulates in the “Memorial and Remonstrance.” I then attempt to show how it consistently explains Madison's political actions and writings on religious liberty. I conclude by explaining how a “Madisonian” approach, properly understood, would adjudicate the First Amendment's religion clauses.The author would like to thank Mark Blitz, Charles R. Kesler, Nicholas May, Ralph A. Rossum, and Michael Uhlmann for their comments on drafts of this article.

W. E. B. Du Bois's observations about the links between Americans' unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of slavery and the shortcomings of formal equality in the post-Reconstruction era anticipate the obstacles to racial justice in the “post-civil rights” era. His study of the “splendid failure” of Reconstruction indicates how a kind of willful national amnesia prevented black citizens from enjoying in fact the freedom and equality they were guaranteed by law. Arguing that the story of racial injustice is still importantly a story about memory's suppression, I use Du Bois's writings to explore the case for reparations as one element of a larger effort to expose the presence of the slave past and to undermine the continuing effects of slavery and Jim Crow. Memory—of what has been, of acts of commission or omission, of a responsibility abdicated—affects the future conduct of power in any form. Failure to adopt some imaginative recognition of such a principle merely results in the enthronement of a political culture that appears to know no boundaries—the culture of impunity.

Wole Soyinka (1999)Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC, the 2001 meeting of the Collegium for African American Research in Sardinia, Italy, and the 2002 Riker Seminar and Frederick Douglass Institute Seminar at the University of Rochester. I am grateful for the comments of all of the participants at those sessions, as well as for careful readings by Joshua Dienstag, Roxanne Euben, Frederick Harris, George Klosko, James Johnson, Joel Olson, George Shulman, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Jeffrey Tucker, and Stephen White.

Minority–majority districts are highly controversial. To assess the degree to which black positions on this controversial matter were well-thought-out and fixed, questions based on Sniderman and Piazza's (1993) “counterargument” technique were included in the 1996 National Black Election Study. Black opinion instability on the issue of race and redistricting reveals the complexity of mass attitudes and the reasoning process and reflects the manner in which a set of clashing interests and core values is balanced and prioritized. Although a large majority of blacks voiced initial opposition to creating districts where blacks and Hispanics are the voting majority, most blacks changed their position in response to the counterargument. This asymmetry suggests that blacks more strongly favor the goal of increasing minority representation than the principle of color blindness in Congressional redistricting. Education and racial identification are key predictors of black opinion on racial redistricting. Less educated blacks and weak racial identifiers were less supportive of minority-majority districts and racial redistricting practices. These results support the revisionist perspective among public opinion scholars that rational, thinking individuals can hold wavering opinions upon questioning because they generally encapsulate a set of contradictory values and interests.The research reported in this paper was funded by grants to the author from the National Science Foundation POWRE Program (SBR-9743928) and from the National Science Foundation's Political Science Division (SBR-9796212). An earlier version was presented at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Wardman Park, August 31–September 3, 2000. The author thanks Luis Fraga at Stanford University for his comments as the panel's discussant, as well as the APSR Editor, Lee Sigelman, and reviewers for their contributions to this paper. I also thank Bruce Boyd at Computing Services at UCI and Gary King at Harvard University for their technical assistance.

This article reports a test of a structural model of the antecedents of genocide and politicide (political mass murder). A case–control research design is used to test alternative specifications of a multivariate model that identifies preconditions of geno-/politicide. The universe of analysis consists of 126 instances of internal war and regime collapse that began between 1955 and 1997, as identified by the State Failure project. Geno-/politicides began during 35 of these episodes of state failure. The analytic question is which factors distinguish the 35 episodes that led to geno-/politicides from those that did not. The case–control method is used to estimate the effects of theoretically specified domestic and international risk factors measured one year prior to the onset of geno-/politicide. The optimal model includes six factors that jointly make it possible to distinguish with 74% accuracy between internal wars and regime collapses that do and those that do not lead to geno-/politicide. The conclusion uses the model to assess the risks of future episodes in 25 countries.This study was commissioned in 1998 by the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence in response to President Clinton's policy initiative on genocide early warning and prevention. It was designed by the author and carried out using her data with other data and analytic techniques developed by the State Failure Task Force. Statistical analyses reported here were done by Michael Lustik and Alan N. Unger of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), McLean, Virginia. The author is senior consultant to the Task Force, which was established in 1994 in response to a request from senior U.S. policymakers to design and carry out a data-driven study of the correlates of state failure, defined to include revolutionary and ethnic wars, adverse or disruptive regime transitions, and genocides and politicides (for the latest report on Task Force research see Goldstone et al. 2002). The author acknowledges the advice of other Task Force consultants and analysts throughout the research process. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the official views of the U.S. government, the U.S. intelligence community, or the Central Intelligence Agency.The author especially thanks Ted Robert Gurr for his critiquing early drafts and using the findings to construct the table that identifies high-risk countries and groups. His insistence about the importance of the study prompted me to revise the manuscript a number of times, despite my initial reluctance, given the years of work that had gone into its preparation. It was especially hard to condense this effort from its original 75 pages. The paper also benefited from a careful reading by Mark I. Lichbach of a previous report and from comments of anonymous reviewers for the American Political Science Review.

An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty—which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on earlier versions of this paper in a series of seminar presentations. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-9876477 and SES-9876530); support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences with funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; valuable research assistance from Ebru Erdem, Nikolay Marinov, Quinn Mecham, David Patel, and TQ Shang; sharing of data by Paul Collier.

The origins of fascism remain a major concern to social scientists. Because fascism emerged in societies seeking transitions to democracy, a better understanding of these failed attempts at democratic transitions improves our understanding of both democracy's possibilities and the strengths and weakness of democratic theory. Indeed, theoretical arguments employed to explain fascism have their analogues in theories of democracy. Three arguments have been advanced to explain both democracy and fascism: class, civil society, and rational choice. This research examines the rise of fascism in Italy, 1919–21. The evidence contradicts the class theory of fascism and offers mixed evidence for the civil society theory, while supporting the rational choice theory. Fascism will always be a minority movement. It cannot move beyond the cities.

Mussolini (1919)This paper is developed from research sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Grant SBR-94-2281. The Foundation's support is gratefully acknowledged. The Istituto Cattaneo of Bologna, the Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia of the University of Bologna, the Ministero dell'Intero, and the Istituto Nazionale di Statistica in Rome also provided invaluable assistance. Preliminary findings of this research were presented at the Organization and State Building Workshop, University of Chicago, May 11, 1998, and the Workshop on Political Processes and Spatial Analysis, Florida International University, March 5–6, 2001. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the European Consortium for Political Research Workshops in Torino, Italy, March 22–28, 2002. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the Istituto, the Dipartimento, or the Ministero. Particular thanks are extended to Professor William Brustein of the University of Pittsburgh for his comments on early drafts and for sharing his data. Additional gratitude is extended to Professors Paolo Pombeni and M. Serena Piretti of the Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia of the University of Bologna, to Professors John Grove and Rob Preuhs of the University of Denver, and to Gary King of Harvard University for comments on an early version.

Blame plays an important role in motivating many human activities, but rarely has the attribution of blame been analyzed for its effects on protest behavior. I argue that how people understand causal relationships and attribute blame for a grievance plays a crucial role in their decision to redress the grievance through protest. The greater the specificity of blame attribution, the greater the probability of protest. Among the less specific attributors of blame, political entrepreneurs have more opportunities to mobilize protest, especially if they can aid in blame specification. I test these hypotheses using evidence from an original nationwide survey of 2,026 adult Russians conducted in 1998 during the height of the Russian wage arrears crisis. Russians who attributed blame for the crisis to specific culprits or problem-solvers protested more than Russians who did not, and the mobilizing efforts of entrepreneurs had a greater impact on the less specific attributors.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. I would like to thank the Office of Research at the U.S. Information Agency (now State Department) for making the collection of these data possible and Vanessa Baird, Tami Buhr, Ray Duch, Steve Hanson, Will Moore, Cliff Morgan, Bob Stein, Randy Stevenson, Ric Stoll, and Andy Stock for their helpful advice. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not represent official positions of the State Department or the U.S. Government. The data and documentation necessary to replicate this analysis can be obtained from the National Archives.

Because war is costly and risky, states have incentives to negotiate and avoid conflict. The common rationalist explanation is that war results from private information and incentives to misrepresent it. By modeling warfare as a costly bargaining process, I show that inefficient fighting can occur in equilibrium under complete information and very general assumptions favoring peace. Specifically, I assume that peace can be supported in equilibrium and that fighting brings no benefits to either state, only costs. Although there exist agreements that Pareto-dominate the final settlement, states may prefer to fight. The result turns on the ability of states to impose costs on their opponents and bear costs in return. The existence of a range of acceptable settlements and the threat to revert to particularly disadvantageous ones make inefficient equilibria possible. A diminished ability to hurt the enemy, not simply military victory, is a major reason to stop fighting.This article is a shorter version of the first chapter of my dissertation. I thank Randall Stone, Curt Signorino, John Duggan, and Robert Westbrooke for valuable comments. Previous versions were presented to the Peace Science Society, October 2001, and the Midwest Political Science Association, April 2002.

Richardson's finding that the severity of interstate wars is power law distributed belongs to the most striking empirical regularities in world politics. This is a regularity in search of a theory. Drawing on the principles of self-organized criticality, I propose an agent-based model of war and state formation that exhibits power-law regularities. The computational findings suggest that the scale-free behavior depends on a process of technological change that leads to contextually dependent, stochastic decisions to wage war.Early drafts of this paper were prepared for presentation at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Ohio State University, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University. I am grateful to the participants in those meetings and to Robert Axelrod, Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Fredrik Liljeros, and the editor and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for excellent comments. Laszlo Gulyas helped me reimplement the model in Java and Repast. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Nevertheless, I bear the full responsibility for any inaccuracies and omissions.

Political institutions translate inputs—in the form of changed preferences, new participants, new information, or sudden attention to previously available information—into policy outputs. In the process they impose costs on this translation, and these costs increase institutional friction. We argue that the “friction” in political institutions leads not to consistent “gridlock” but to long periods of stasis interspersed with dramatic policy punctuations. As political institutions add costs to the translation of inputs into outputs, institutional friction will increase, and outputs from the process will become increasingly punctuated overall. We use a stochastic process approach to compare the extent of punctuations among 15 data sets that assess change in U.S. government budgets, in a variety of aspects of the public policy process, in election results, and in stock market returns in the United States. We find that all of these distributions display positive kurtosis—tall central peaks (representing considerable stability) and heavy tails (reflecting the punctuations, both positive and negative). When we order institutions according to the costs they impose on collective action, those with higher decision and transaction costs generate more positive kurtosis. Direct parameter estimates indicate that all distributions except budget data were best fit by the double-exponential probability distribution; budgets are Paretian.This project was funded by the Political Science Program of the National Science Foundation, Award SES9904700. We appreciate the support of Frank Scioli, the program officer, and various political science program directors. We benefited from comments by Frank Baumgartner, John Brehm, Chris Mackie, Peter John, John Padgett, Bat Sparrow, Jim True and John Wilkerson.

Students of public organizations acknowledge that administrative agencies make decisions in an uncertain policy environment. Existing research on public bureaucracy either makes simplifying a priori assumptions about such behavior or completely ignores this fundamental issue. This study proposes a statistical test of agency risk-bearing behavior to shed light on bureaucratic decision making under conditions of uncertainty. An analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) agency budget requests for the 1949–97 period yields risk coefficients that are compatible with analytically derived results. The empirical findings indicate that the SEC exhibits relatively greater concern about organizational maintenance when the type of uncertainty that it experiences is external to the decision-making purview of the organization than when it is internal to the agency. However, mixed statistical evidence is obtained that the SEC places comparatively greater value on organizational maintenance, as reflected in its budgetary decisions, during an era of greater political instability induced by divided party government than under unified government.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the 1999 Public Choice Society, March 12–14, 1999, Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana. The author wishes to thank Janice Boucher Breuer, Charles Cameron, Brandice Canes–Wrone, Dan Carpenter, Jeffrey Cohen, Stephen Dilworth, Jim Douglas, David Epstein, Brad Gomez, Chris Kam, David Lewis, Ken Meier, Tom Romer, Andy Whitford, B. Dan Wood, LeeAnne Krause, and seminar participants at Columbia University and the University of South Carolina, and the anonymous APSR reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments at various stages of this project. I thank Tim Groseclose and Dan Ponder for providing some of the ADA voting score data used in this paper. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Sherry Ann Krause. Any errors that remain are my own.