One pleasure of editing a journal such as Perspectives on Politics is that sometimes a manuscript will answer a question that I had only vaguely formulated, but nevertheless knew was intriguing and important. Such is the case with many of the articles in this issue; I hope that others find the same sense of satisfaction in now having an answer to a question lurking somewhere in their professional consciousness.

Some 50 countries officially allocate access to political power by gender, ethnicity, or both. Yet in the world's electoral democracies, the policies used for women differ systematically from those used for ethnic groups. The former receive candidate quotas in parties; the latter, reserved seats in legislatures. Why? My explanation focuses on the varying ways that gender and ethnic identities intersect with partisan cleavages and on the distinct “work” performed by the different remedies for underrepresentation. Quotas, which make space within existing parties, are appropriate for groups whose boundaries crosscut partisan divisions. Reservations, which create incentives for the formation of group-specific parties and permit them direct representation, suit groups whose boundaries coincide with political cleavages. Since gender is crosscutting while ethnicity tends to be coinciding, women receive candidate quotas while ethnic groups get legislative reservations. Claims for inclusion via quotas pose less of a challenge to liberal institutions than claims to difference through legislative reservations. Case studies of representational politics in France, India, and Peru illustrate the argument.Mala Htun is author of Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance and advice of Kanchan Chandra, Jorge Domínguez, Jennifer Hochschild, Mark Jones, Courtney Jung, Jim Miller, Victoria Murillo, Jack Snyder, Donna Lee Van Cott, Myra Waterbury, participants in colloquia at the New School and Columbia University, and anonymous reviewers.

Modern political science has created a separation between political theory and empirical political research that impoverishes both sides and is becoming increasingly outdated. I suggest that the work of Michel Foucault is profitably understood in the context of American social and political science, including the empirical research of Harold Garfinkel, Erving Goffman, and Thomas Schelling, and that the social theorists' work is better appreciated within Foucault's rigorous philosophical framework. Foucault's use of an open “game” context converges with the positions of both Wittgenstein and Schelling to suggest a theory that provides insights into the nontyrannical theory Pitkin sought. It also opens prospects for a theoretically integrated agenda for empirical and normative political research.Ruth Lane thanks the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Perspectives for comments on the paper.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror,” which persists with no end in sight. In this paper, I focus on what these developments mean for social science. How should social scientists deal with the threats to civil liberties that always accompany the outbreak of war? Following the precepts of Max Weber, I argue that the flourishing of social science requires that social scientists take responsibility, individually and collectively, for promoting the liberal values that make our academic practices possible. That implies individual scholarly inquiry into the nature and consequences of the war, individual scholarly affiliation with associations that promote academic freedom, and perhaps intervention by professional associations and their affiliates on behalf of academic freedom and political liberties.Jeffrey C. Isaac's books include Democracy in Dark Times; Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion; Power and Marxist Theory; and The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline.

In “Social Science and Liberal Values in a Time of War,” Jeffrey Isaac urges us to discuss “the responsibilities of social scientists during wartime.” He focuses specifically on the ethics of responsibility appropriate to the university-based scholar when political authority attacks the values, both moral and non-moral, that we implicitly presuppose when we function as academics in general, and political scientists in particular. Isaac invokes the authority of Max Weber to elucidate the precise boundaries of these obligations as well as to find a notion of responsibility on which all political scientists, whatever their partisan commitments, can agree.Peter Breiner is the author of Max Weber and Democratic Politics and articles on Weber and other German theorists. He is working on a book on the role of examples in political theory. The author thanks Jeff Isaac for a most useful interchange that helped him focus this response.

Every close election leads to speculation about what might have happened if events had gone another way, if the candidates had performed differently, or if the voters had been presented with other arguments and appeals. But the presidential election of November 2000 raised an entirely new set of counterfactual possibilities that had escaped notice in the past: suppose voting systems worked better, suppose felons were allowed to vote in more states, suppose registration were easier, suppose absentee ballots were counted differently? Before November 2000, these questions about the details of American electoral machinery were mostly ignored, but they mattered a great deal in 2000. The articles in this symposium explore the implications of the basic rules and the performance of the machinery of American politics.In “Equal Protection for Votes” (in The Longest Night: Polemics and Perspectives on Election 2000) Brady argued that the enduring legacy of Bush v. Gore would be a concern with the poor performance of voting systems. In “Postpoing the California Recall to Protect Voting Rights” (2004), Brady recounted his experience with a California lawsuit that argued for postponing a gubernatorial recall until better voting systems could be put in place. Thanks to the authors of these symposium articles for their patience and hard work.

As levels of criminal punishment have risen in the United States, more and more citizens have been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. This paper provides an overview and analysis of the unique practice of felon disenfranchisement in the United States today. We focus in particular on the political impact of disenfranchising large numbers of nonincarcerated felons—those who have served their entire sentences and those living in their home communities while completing a term of probation or parole. Our discussion is organized around three key issues relating to felon disenfranchisement: (1) the historical and legal origins of this practice; (2) its practical political impact on recent elections; and, (3) the racial dynamics that color both the history and contemporary effects of felon disenfranchisement in the United States. We discuss how felon disenfranchisement laws in many states appear to be out of step with both international practices and public opinion in the United States and consider contemporary policy proposals.Jeff Manza is the coauthor, with Clem Brooks, of Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and U.S. Party Coalitions. With Jeff Manza, Christopher Uggen is coauthor of the forthcoming Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. Research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (No. 9819015) and from the Individual Project Fellowship Program of the Open Society Institute. The authors are indebted to the editors and anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments and suggestions and to Angela Behrens and Sara Wakefield for research assistance.

In a democracy, voting is the most fundamental act of political participation and therefore holds a central location in the study of political behavior. One significant research tradition focuses on the relationship between registration and turnout and raises important and related questions. How do registration laws influence turnout levels? What types of people are most affected by them? What are the partisan implications of registration requirements? Spanning the late nineteenth through early twenty-first centuries, this essay places these questions in the appropriate theoretical context and then answers them.Previously Benjamin Highton was an APSA Congressional Fellow and worked for Senator Paul Wellstone on health and welfare policy. He appreciates the advice and criticism from Henry Brady, Jennifer Hochschild, Randolph Siverson, Raymond Wolfinger, and the anonymous referees for Perspectives on Politics.

Votomatic-style punch card voting systems produce higher rates of residual voting than other technologies, but the effect of punch card voting systems is not uniform. Minority voters are less likely to have their votes properly recorded with punch card systems than are nonminorities. This racial gap occurs, for the most part, because punch card systems lead to higher rates of “undervoting” by minorities. When election administrators switch to other systems, such as optical scan systems, the racial gap is significantly reduced. Punch card voting systems, then, constitute a disproportionate obstacle to minority voting. This effectively gives less weight to votes cast by minorities than to votes cast by nonminorities, and arguably violates constitutional requirements for equal voting rights. The mechanism is similar to the literacy tests that were abandoned after the 1970 amendments to the Voting Rights Act.The authors are grateful to UC Berkeley's Survey Research Center for research support and are deeply indebted to Henry E. Brady. Our thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and to the editorial staff at Perspectives on Politics for their helpful suggestions and hard work on our behalf.

Using ballot-level data from the NORC Florida ballots project and ballot-image files, I argue that overvoted ballots in the 2000 presidential election in Florida included more than 50,000 votes that were intended to go to either Bush or Gore but instead were discarded. This was primarily due to defective election administration in the state, especially the failure to use a system to warn each voter when too many marks were on a ballot and allow the voter to make corrections. If the best type of vote tabulation system used in Florida in 2000—precinct-tabulated optical scan ballots—had been used everywhere in the state, Gore would have won by more than 30,000 votes. Florida's election experience points to the need to gather ballot-level data to evaluate the success of election reform efforts now underway in much of the United States.Walter R. Mebane Jr. has published numerous articles concerning topics in American politics, especially elections, and political methodology. An early version of this work was presented at a seminar at the University of Minnesota in April 2003. The author thanks Jason Conn, Anthony Keeney, and Mike Rosenberg for assistance, and Jasjeet Sekhon for helpful discussion.

Although not widely known until much later, Al Gore received 202 more votes than George W. Bush on election day in Florida. George W. Bush is president because he overcame his election day deficit with overseas absentee ballots that arrived and were counted after election day. In the final official tally, Bush received 537 more votes than Gore. These numbers are taken from the official results released by the Florida Secretary of State's office and so do not reflect overvotes, undervotes, unsuccessful litigation, butterfly ballot problems, recounts that might have been allowed but were not, or any other hypothetical divergence between voter preferences and counted votes. After the election, the New York Times conducted a six-month investigation and found that 680 of the overseas absentee ballots were illegally counted, and almost no one has publicly disagreed with their assessment. In this article, we describe the statistical procedures we developed and implemented for the Times to ascertain whether disqualifying these 680 ballots would have changed the outcome of the election. These include adding formal Bayesian model averaging procedures to models of ecological inference. We present a variety of new empirical results that delineate the precise conditions under which Al Gore would have been elected president and offer new evidence of the striking effectiveness of the Republican effort to prevent local election officials from applying election law equally to all Florida citizens.The authors are deeply grateful to the many private citizens of every political stripe who sent us comments on this paper; also to Jim Alt, Barry Burden, James Honeker, Doug Rivers, and Jonathan Wand for helpful discussions; to Henry Brady for many suggestions; and to the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Aging, and the World Health Organization for research support. Software to implement the methods in this article is available at http://gking.harvard.edu.

A bunker is an odd place to reconsider a course syllabus, especially during a mortar attack in the middle of the night. Teaching the historical case study method in introductory courses in international relations, I often told students that we need history in IR, since our theories do not lend themselves to laboratory testing. In the future, I'll drop that comment. Since February 2003, I have been serving on active duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom, mostly in the Sunni Triangle. Wartime service has proved to be something of a laboratory for me and has caused me to reevaluate some of the received wisdom of international relations. War has validated some things we teach, but it has also rendered problematic some conclusions I held perhaps too comfortably. I have been trained by the military to see war with a soldier's eye; it has been a strange experience to see it instead through the eyes of a political scientist. Service in Iraq has provided me the opportunity to consider the academic study of politics and war in real time.The author wishes to thank Dan Caldwell, Deborah Larson, Alan Rozzi, James Q. Wilson, the editors of Perspectives on Politics, anonymous reviewers, and the men and women in uniform lost during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Political scientist Russell A. Burgos has written an interesting and timely account of his intellectual journey from a “systemically inclined neorealist” to a “leaning constructivist” as a consequence of his active duty service with the U.S. Army in Iraq. In doing so, he offers some astute observations on several of the most important and enduring issues in American foreign and defense policy that are of interest to all international relations scholars. Rather than attempting to comment on the full range of his observations, this essay will focus on one of these—what Captain Burgos calls “the identity of the army in a ‘neo-imperial’ age”—with a view to assessing and bringing to bear some systematic evidence on his observations that the army has become staunchly Republican and conservative and that it sees itself as “separate from and superior to society at large.”Ole R. Holsti's latest book, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, revised edition, was published this year.

I read Captain Russell Burgos's essay with both delight and empathy. He is obviously a talented and thoughtful scholar who has served his country in a vital way in very interesting times. My empathy comes from the fact that for the last 25 years I have divided my life between academic institutions and the Pentagon, where I have been on the planning end of four conflicts. Like Mr. Burgos, I have lived in a world where the realities of war and peace should have been the laboratory for the theories of international relations that I have learned and taught. Like Mr. Burgos, however, I often find the reality of contemporary war to be confusing. The theories that I have studied are a rather incomplete guide to the problems—both tactical and strategic—that the global war on terrorism has brought us.Joseph J. Collins recently completed three years as deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. During that time he was charged with some of the early planning for post-conflict Iraq, though he did not have day-to-day responsibility for policy management in that area. A former career army officer, he holds a PhD in political science from Columbia University and has taught at Georgetown, Columbia, and West Point.

Culture and Democracy: Media, Space, and Representation. By Clive Barnett. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2003. 288p. $79.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Clive Barnett's examination of democracy today is one that privileges its spatially mediated, communicative, and cultural structures as shaped by new telecommunication and information technologies. Democracy is primarily represented in the mediated spaces created by broadcasting technologies whose form and content are geared toward deploying cultural policies and practices. Thus, a communications-cultural analysis of this condition is required. Furthermore, a reckoning with neoliberal conceptions of autonomy and representation is essential in making sense of the current cultural geography of democracy.

Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. By Randy E. Barnett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 360p. $32.50.

Libertarianism Without Inequality. By Michael Otsuka. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 168p. $39.95.

According to Randy Barnett in Restoring the Lost Constitution, “the original meaning of the entire Constitution … is much more libertarian than the one selectively enforced by the Supreme Court” (p. 356). This is because, Barnett argues, the way that the Constitution has been interpreted by the Court over the past seventy years, that is, from the beginning of the New Deal on, has eviscerated a number of clauses and amendments that were expressly designed to limit the power of both federal and state government to interfere with the basic liberties or “natural rights” retained by the people. His ambitious goal is to restore these amendments and clauses to their original meaning through an exhaustive exploration of that meaning.

Toleration and Identity: Foundations in Early Modern Thought. By Ingrid Creppell. New York: Routledge, 2003. 212p. $75.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Sensual Philosophy: Toleration, Skepticism, and Montaigne's Politics of Self. By Alan Levine. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001. 336p. $80.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

Toleration has once again become a central focus of liberal theories of justice. In recent years, many liberal theorists have put aside foundational arguments about autonomy and equality in order to explore directly how individuals with diverse identities and beliefs can live together peacefully. Early modern proponents of liberalism were similarly animated by concerns about identity and difference, originally developing the modern concept of toleration amidst the conflicts of the European wars of religion. In the works under review here, Ingrid Creppell and Alan Levine admirably plumb the insights of these authors in order to propose more fruitful ways for conceptualizing toleration in our own times.

Trauma and the Memory of Politics. By Jenny Edkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 265p. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

This is an important and innovative book. In it, Jenny Edkins explores the relationship between violence, the traumatic effects of violence, and the foundation and perpetuation of sovereign power. Using historical and field research, Edkins examines sites and practices that commemorate famines, wars, genocides, and terrorist attacks. She describes the evolution of the Cenotaph in Great Britain and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC; Dachau and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the place of the “camp” (concentration camps at midcentury; refugee camps at the millennium) in political discourse. While many of these sites seek to contain and appropriate traumatic experience for the purposes of reproducing sovereign power, she contends, the testimony made possible in part through them has radical potential for helping us to contest nationalism and to rethink our relationship to the state.

Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy. By Cynthia Estlund. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 240p. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Writing from New York in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville described “a society formed of all the nations of the world”—peoples of different languages, beliefs, and opinions forming a society without roots, memory, common ideas, or, indeed, a national character. What held such a polity together? “Interest. That is the secret” (Alexis de Tocqueville, “To Ernest de Chabrol 9 June 1831” in Roger Boesche, Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, 1985. p. 38). Such observations and their author's subsequent hypotheses linking self-interest to the Americans' “science of association” figure centrally in recent studies of “social capital” and “strong democracy.” Cynthia Estlund contributes to the literature on communal ties, civic life, and self-government by considering the broad political effects of relationships formed in the not-so-voluntary arena of the American workplace. “Interest” that can initially amount to little more than a shared requirement to “get the job done,” the “working together” thesis maintains, may develop into shared understandings when activities undertaken in common cultivate and enlarge participants' common ground.

Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism. By Benjamin Gregg. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 210p. $54.50 cloth, $17.95 paper.

Arguing in the tradition of pragmatists, such as John Dewey and Charles Peirce, Benjamin Gregg proposes that sociotheoretic critique, legal judgment, and public policy should find “criteria of critical judgment this side of universal validity” (p. 8). By this he means that while norms are always relative to particular interpretative traditions, which, in turn, are necessarily open-textured and indeterminate, normative indeterminacy does not preclude the possibility of singular norms that adjudicate between different local traditions (p. 86). Contra postmodernists (and certain adherents of Critical Legal Studies), Gregg rejects the claim that the indeterminacy of norms correlates with the loss of autonomy, on the one hand, and universality, on the other (pp. 78–82).