The demand for democracy is a pervasive feature of contemporary political discourse. It is a compelling demand, for citizens and elites who rally beneath the banner of “democracy” and for political scientists who study the ways citizens and elites rally beneath banners in order to mobilize, seek, and contest political power. The force of this demand was captured by the cover of our June 2011 issue, which featured a wall in Egypt's Tahrir Square covered with graffiti stating that “Mubarak must go” and calling for “freedom” and “democracy.”

We explore the sources of durability of party-based authoritarian regimes in the face of crisis. Recent scholarship on authoritarianism suggests that ruling parties enhance elite cohesion—and consequently, regime durability—by providing institutionalized access the spoils of power. We argue, by contrast, that while elite access to power and spoils may ensure elite cooperation during normal times, it often fails to do so during crises. Instead, the identities, norms, and organizational structures forged during periods of sustained, violent, and ideologically-driven conflict are a critical source of cohesion—and durability—in party-based authoritarian regimes. Origins in violent conflict raise the cost of defection and provide leaders with additional (non-material) resources that can be critical to maintaining unity and discipline, even when a crisis threatens the party's hold on power. Hence, where ruling parties combine mechanisms of patronage distribution with the strong identities, solidarity ties, and discipline generated by violent origins, regimes should be most durable.

We apply this argument to four party-based competitive authoritarian regimes in post-Cold War Africa: Kenya, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In each of these cases, an established single- or dominant-party regime faced heightened international pressure, economic crisis, and a strong opposition challenge after 1990. Yet whereas ruling parties in Kenya and Zambia were organized almost exclusively around patronage, those in Mozambique and Zimbabwe were liberation parties that came to power via violent struggle. This difference is critical to explaining diverging post-Cold War regime outcomes: whereas ruling parties in Zambia and Kenya imploded and eventually lost power in these face of crises, those in Mozambique and Zimbabwe remained intact and regimes survived.

Reflecting a chiefly economic approach to understanding political outcomes, a burgeoning literature on post-Soviet political economy finds a strong link between privatization and political pluralism in the region. To test whether the political promise of economic liberalization and the logic of modernization that underlies it hold true, I draw on existing and original data on privatization, pluralism, and opposition movements throughout the region from early independence to the present. The data reveal a fundamentally different formulation of the relationship between economics and politics than that found in the standard causal account. Contrary to approaches that stress the “the primacy of economics” in determining political outcomes, numerous cases of post-Soviet capitalist defection to the political opposition clearly point to “the primacy of politics”: the tangible ways that formal and informal institutions structure economic opportunities and ultimately impinge on individual calculations to comply with, oppose, or seek refuge from the regime.

Prominent scholars have highlighted important similarities between the Arab Spring of 2011 and the “revolutions” of 1848: Both waves of contention swept with dramatic speed across whole regions, but ended up yielding rather limited advances toward political liberalism and democracy. I seek to uncover the causal mechanisms that help account for these striking parallels. Drawing on my recent analysis of 1848, I argue that contention spread so quickly because many people in a wide range of countries drew rash inferences from the downfall of Tunisia's dictator. Applying cognitive heuristics that psychologists have documented, they overrated the significance of the Tunisian success, overestimated the similarities with the political situation in their own country, and jumped to the conclusion that they could successfully challenge their own autocrats. This precipitation prompted protests in many settings that actually were much less propitious; therefore problems abounded. Cognitive shortcuts held such sway because Arab societies were weakly organized and repressed and thus lacked leaders from whom common people could take authoritative cues. The decision whether to engage in emulative contention fell to ordinary citizens, who—due to limited information access and scarce experience—were especially susceptible to the simple inferences suggested by cognitive heuristics.

While acknowledging the many forms and contributions of multi-method research (MMR), we examine the costs of treating it as best practice on the grounds that it reduces method-specific weaknesses and increases external validity for findings. Focusing on MMR that combines some type of qualitative analysis with statistical or formal approaches, we demonstrate that error-reduction and cross-validation are not feasible where methods are not sufficiently similar in their basic ontologies and their conceptions of causality. In such cases, MMR may still yield important benefits—such as uncovering related insights or improving the coding of variables—but these can be readily obtained through collaboration among scholars specializing in single-method research (SMR). Such scholars often set the standards for the application of particular methods and produce distinctive insights that can elude researchers concerned about competently deploying different methods and producing coherent findings. Thus, the unchecked proliferation of multi-method skill sets risks forefeiting the benefits of SMR and marginalizing idiographically-oriented qualitative research that fits less well with formal or quantitative approaches. This would effectively subvert the pluralism that once gave impetus to MMR unless disciplinary expectations and professional rewards are predicated on a more balanced and nuanced understanding of what various forms of SMR and MMR bring to the table.

The study of Latin American politics has always generated great new research questions, and within Latin America, no country's experience has generated more interesting questions than Venezuela since the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. Contemporary Venezuela raises fascinating questions about the collapse of a highly institutionalized party system and the erosion or breakdown of what had been the third-oldest democracy outside of the advanced industrial democracies. What accounts for these stunning developments? What can we learn from them? These issues go to the core of important developments in Latin American politics, and they are major issues for comparative political scientists beyond Latin America.

Judging from some of the titles of recent books on Russia—for example, Richard Sakwa's The Crisis of Russian Democracy, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova's Political Consequences of Crony Capitalism inside Russia, and Tom Remington's The Politics of Inequality in Russia—all is not well 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Corruption abounds, and state institutions are weak where they should be strong or strong where they should be weak. Under Vladimir Putin, democracy has deteriorated since the heady early days of the 1990s, and the negative externalities of Russia's rocky economic transition—especially privatization—have made it so that social inequality permeates postcommunist society.

Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. By Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 368p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

It is more than 15 years since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was passed in 1996, famously described by then-President Bill Clinton as “the end of welfare as we know it.” In Disciplining the Poor, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram analyze recent changes in US welfare policy as reflections of broader transformations of the “governance” of poverty, arguing that these transformations represent a new form of “neoliberal paternalism” in which race continues to be an important element. In this symposium, a diverse group of political scientists working on welfare issues have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on the importance of the “governance of poverty” to the future of American politics.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. By Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 368p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

It is more than 15 years since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was passed in 1996, famously described by then-President Bill Clinton as “the end of welfare as we know it.” In Disciplining the Poor, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram analyze recent changes in US welfare policy as reflections of broader transformations of the “governance” of poverty, arguing that these transformations represent a new form of “neoliberal paternalism” in which race continues to be an important element. In this symposium, a diverse group of political scientists working on welfare issues have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on the importance of the “governance of poverty” to the future of American politics.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. By Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 368p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

It is more than 15 years since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was passed in 1996, famously described by then-President Bill Clinton as “the end of welfare as we know it.” In Disciplining the Poor, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram analyze recent changes in US welfare policy as reflections of broader transformations of the “governance” of poverty, arguing that these transformations represent a new form of “neoliberal paternalism” in which race continues to be an important element. In this symposium, a diverse group of political scientists working on welfare issues have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on the importance of the “governance of poverty” to the future of American politics.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. By Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 368p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

It is more than 15 years since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was passed in 1996, famously described by then-President Bill Clinton as “the end of welfare as we know it.” In Disciplining the Poor, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram analyze recent changes in US welfare policy as reflections of broader transformations of the “governance” of poverty, arguing that these transformations represent a new form of “neoliberal paternalism” in which race continues to be an important element. In this symposium, a diverse group of political scientists working on welfare issues have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on the importance of the “governance of poverty” to the future of American politics.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. By Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 368p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

It is more than 15 years since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was passed in 1996, famously described by then-President Bill Clinton as “the end of welfare as we know it.” In Disciplining the Poor, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram analyze recent changes in US welfare policy as reflections of broader transformations of the “governance” of poverty, arguing that these transformations represent a new form of “neoliberal paternalism” in which race continues to be an important element. In this symposium, a diverse group of political scientists working on welfare issues have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on the importance of the “governance of poverty” to the future of American politics.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Violence, Nonviolence, and the Palestinian National Movement. By Wendy Pearlman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 304p. $99.00.

In recent years, social scientific research on nonviolent resistance has burgeoned. Yet many studies focus on the factors associated with nonviolent movements' success or failure. In her book, Wendy Pearlman poses different questions. Instead of asking when and how nonviolence works, she asks why some activists choose nonviolent tactics while others choose violent ones. Additionally, she asks why movements may, over time, shift between armed and unarmed strategies.

Sharon Erickson Nepstad's thoughtful review makes important points. I am gratified by what she describes as my contributions, and no less appreciative of her discussion of areas in which a stronger contribution might have been made. Many of these are questions that my book raises and that I hope future research will investigate.

Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century. By Sharon Erickson Nepstad. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 200p. $99.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

We live in nonviolent revolutionary times. From Egypt to Moscow, New York to Manama, 2011 saw millions of peaceful protestors take to the streets to demand change. Under what conditions do civilian-based struggles achieve their goals without resort to violence?

The study of nonviolent civil resistance is now in vogue. The American Political Science Association gave its best book award this year to Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, authors of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Additionally, in the last few years, there have been an unprecedented number of academic books, edited volumes, and journal special issues published on this topic, largely due to interest generated by the Arab Spring uprisings and the “color revolutions” in post-communist regions.

The Speaker of the House: A Study of Leadership. By Matthew N. Green. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 292p. $30.00.

In his book, Matthew N. Green investigates Speakers' purposive goals, tactical options, and legislative influence. The overriding thesis: Speakers' actions do not simply reflect “the majority of the majority's” interests and preferences, but rather emerge from a more diverse set of goals. As Green argues: “Speakers may exercise legislative leadership on behalf of the preferences of others besides the majority party in Congress [including] representing his or her own district … achieving his or her own preferred policy outcome … helping the party's president, the institutional presidency, or the House as a whole” (p. 17).

Matthew Beckmann offers a penetrating, insightful, and eminently fair review of my book. Although I agree with most of his critiques, I offer my thoughts with respect to three questions that Beckmann says are not fully addressed by my study.

Pushing the Agenda: Presidential Leadership in U.S. Lawmaking, 1953–2004. By Matthew N. Beckmann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 194p. $99.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

The American president is many things. He serves as the head of state, chief of his political party, manager of the national bureaucracy, commander of the armed forces, and even (to some at least) a moral leader of the country. But one of the most important roles of the president is legislative leader: setting the nation's policy agenda, proposing new bills, and steering key initiatives through Congress. The central nature of that role is evidenced by our tendency to think of past presidents in terms of their trademark policy proposals, be it Harry “Fair Deal” Truman or Ronald Reagan's “Reaganomics.”

In Pushing the Agenda, I sought to revisit the basic tenets of presidential coalition building on Capitol Hill. My hope was that tracing the White House's lobbying strategies would not only reveal how they are intended to work but also offer a better blueprint for assessing if they do. To those ends, I theorized that the White House has two basic lobbying strategies—an early game (agenda-centered) strategy aimed at shaping the legislative alternatives considered and an endgame (vote-centered) strategy aimed at determining which prevailed. Tests with a diverse assortment of original data—on the practice of lobbying, the results of key roll-call votes, and the passage of new laws—all corroborated a key point: presidential coalition building operates differently than scholars have thought, with effects greater than previously realized.