School choice has attracted much attention from academic policy analysts. Their data analyses, however, have become entangled in the politics surrounding debates over market-driven reform rather than serving as foundations for utilitarian policy making. High-profile research programs generate an increasing number of empirical studies, which are often valued for how well they fit ideological preferences rather than how useful they may be in offering practical guidance on workable and politically feasible strategies. In this paper I assess what supportable policy message(s) can be extracted from the large research literature on choice and vouchers.Kevin Smith is an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (ksmith1@unl.edu). His most recent book is The Ideology of Education: The Market, the Commonwealth, and America's Schools.

I offer a critical view of the social capital thesis, which frequently argues that more is better (and less is worse), by examining the ethics of social capital, using Pierre Bourdieu's understanding of networks as defined by their limits. I argue that social capital only assumes conceptual coherence when distinguished from its complementary opposite. I illustrate these theoretical points with a discussion of political reform in Thailand and the 2001 general election. The election exemplifies the benefits of the circulation of social capital: voter turnout and party membership were up, and civil society was active. Yet democratic achievements in Thailand were intimately tied to political corruption. In Thailand, democracy and vote buying are intimately related as examples of the productive dynamic of social capital and corruption; the civil and the uncivil often produce each other. This essay thus expands social capital theory's focus on the relations of people by examining the relationality of concepts. One has to examine the quality of social capital and the ethics of each network's inside/outside distinction. Thus rather than being a political solution, social capital is a theoretical problem, warranting further comparative research that examines how civil social capital interacts with the uncivil social capital of corruption, ethnocentrism, and sectarianism.William A. Callahan is a professor of international politics at the University of Manchester, England. He worked in Thailand for five years as a journalist and a lecturer at Rangsit University (Bangkok). His most recent book is Contingent States: Greater China and Transnational Relations. For sharing information and commenting on this essay, the author thanks Gothom Arya, Michael Kelly Connors, Kevin Hewison, Laddawan Tantiwittayaphitak, Naruemon Thabchumpon, Duncan McCargo, Sukanya Bumroongsook, Sumalee Bumroongsook, Somchai Phatharathananunth, Frederic Schaffer, Teera Vorrakitpokatorn, Thavesilp Subwattana, Viengrat Netipho, and Stephen E. Welch. Special thanks to Jennifer L. Hochschild, the Perspectives reviewers, Frederic Schaffer, and Andreas Schedler for encouraging me to think about corruption and social capital in a new way.

When doing political science research, how do we know that one story is not just as good as the next? Every historical school of thought purports to provide a “true” account of its subject matter. But contradictory schools of thought can not all be given equal weight. While much has been written on the epistemological question of objectivity in history, remarkably little work has been done regarding the practical problem encountered by political scientists faced with multiple narratives and historical bias. This essay develops a pragmatic method, which aims to evaluate historical narratives according to their utility in solving analytic and political problems. I illustrate the approach through the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict, where multiple, conflicting accounts of the “story” are vivid and copious. I conclude that while historical objectivity is elusive, some narratives are better than others at adjudicating both political science debates and “real-world” political problems.Jonathan B. Isacoff is assistant professor of political science at Gonzaga University (isacoff@gonzaga.edu). The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild, Bob Vitalis, Ian Lustick, and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Europeanization has brought radical change to the governance practices of all European Union (EU) member states, and these practices have clashed with traditional ideas about democracy. The degree to which EU member states have been affected is largely a matter of institutional fit. The EU, as a compound supranational polity in which governing activity is highly diffused through multiple authorities, has been more disruptive to simple national polities such as Britain and France, in which governing has traditionally been channeled through a single authority, than to compound national polities such as Germany and Italy, in which it has traditionally also been diffused through multiple authorities.

The main problem for EU member states, however, is that national leaders have generally failed to develop new ideas and discourses to reflect Europeanized realities. But here too institutional differences matter. Simple polities are better positioned to address changes because their concentration of authority ensures them a more elaborate communicative discourse with the general public, in which they are able to speak with one voice, than are compound national polities, let alone the EU, given the number of potentially authoritative voices with differing messages.Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at Boston University (vschmidt@bu.edu). Her recent books include Policy Change and Discourse in Europe, coedited with C. Radaelli (2005), and The Futures of European Capitalism (2002). Her forthcoming book Democracy in Europe: The EU and National Polities (2006) explores the impact of the European integration on national democracies. This article is a revision of a paper prepared for presentation to the American Political Science Association National Meetings in Chicago, September 1–5, 2004.

What are the general costs associated with a U.S. shift toward unilateralism? According to the overwhelming majority of international relations (IR) scholars, the costs are very high. We evaluate the key arguments that underlie this assessment, namely that increased U.S. unilateralism will: (1) spur the formation of a coalition to check U.S. power; (2) reduce efficiency gains through lost opportunities for institutionalized cooperation; and (3) undermine the legitimacy of the American-led international order. We conclude that the theoretical arguments that IR scholars advance do not show that a shift toward unilateralism necessarily has high costs. Our analysis reveals the need to, first, distinguish clearly between criticisms of unilateral policies based on procedure and those based on substance and, second, to recognize the weakness of current procedural arguments.Stephen G. Brooks is assistant professor (Stephen.G.Brooks@Dartmouth.edu), and William C. Wohlforth is professor (William.C.Wohlforth@Dartmouth.edu) in the Department of Government at Dartmouth. They are currently writing a book entitled The Challenge of American Primacy. The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers forPerspectives on Politics and, especially, Erik Voeten for detailed critical comments. They are also grateful to Mlada Bukovansky, Ian Hurd, Martha Finnemore, Ben Valentino, Nina Tannenwald, Alex Wendt, and participants at seminars at the Dickey Center at Dartmouth College, the Olin Institute at Harvard University, the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Thanks also to Dartmouth's Rockefeller and Dickey Centers for supporting research on which this article draws.

Does the academic literature on U.S. immigration adequately capture the experiences of immigrants outside their traditional areas of concentration? This article reviews the three major fields of research in immigrant incorporation—economic, sociocultural, and political. It emphasizes the two most prominent conceptual frameworks in each: the human capital frame and the more recent sociological frame, which highlights “modes of incorporation” and “contexts of reception.” Although research in immigrants' political incorporation is less developed than its economic and sociological counterparts, I pay close attention to the ways in which structural and contextual factors shape participation. Immigrants' geographic dispersal complements this trend toward contextualism by providing greater variation in their places of destination; that variation can help advance the comparative research agenda.Helen B. Marrow is a doctoral candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University (marrow@wjh.harvard.edu). Preparation of this article was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT grant 98070661), a David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Summer Research Grant, a Center for American Political Studies Dissertation Fellowship in American Politics, and a partial Rural Poverty Research Institute Rural Poverty Dissertation Fellowship. Opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any of the supporting sources. Thanks to Mary Waters, Luisa Heredia, Jennifer Hochschild, Katherine Newman, William J. Wilson, and three anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on previous drafts.

Revising historical accounts when new evidence comes to light or when old evidence begs to be reconsidered is surely one of the major tasks of the scholarly historian. The practitioner should ideally possess the ability to unravel the past before our eyes in a clear and unbiased fashion, both at phenomenological and causal levels. Some would argue that a scholarly historian can not, any more than can a microbiologist investigating the minuscule parts of an organism, detach the circumstances of his or her act of observation from the object itself. In this view, historians' accounts of the past are subjective narratives by default if not by design. Narratives can, it might be argued, be disproved—but factuality cannot be proved. Yet even this is not as straightforward as it might seem: the best one can do is simply to accumulate narratives, not with a view to displacing older with newer ones, but to develop a larger or, pointedly in this context, more useful, picture of reality.Sari Nusseibeh is a visiting fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (snusseib@ radcliffe.edu), and professor of philosophy, al-Quds University, the Arab University of Jerusalem, of which he was appointed president in 1995.

To many, mayors are the most familiar elected officials. Unlike federal representatives, mayors often directly coordinate community services like trash removal, policing, and in some cases oversight of public schools. Despite the seeming transparency of mayoral duties, bottom-line judgments about mayors' performance are political, and, unlike profit margins in business, essentially aesthetic. The public does not evaluate mayoral performance in accordance with “objective” or “rational” criteria; rather, its judgment has more do with values than “facts.” In addition, mayors' performances, including their credibility and ability to implement agendas, has as much (if not more) to do with local politics as with their political orientation. I will address these two points in turn.J. Phillip Thompson is associate professor in the Department of Urban Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (jt71@mit.edu). He is author of a forthcoming book on black mayors (Oxford University Press). He was director of Mayor's Office of Housing Coordination and deputy general manager of the New York Housing Authority in the administration of Mayor David Dinkins (1990–93).

In the wake of the Bush administration's use of executive power since 9/11, Abraham Lincoln's executive actions during the Civil War have received more attention than usual. Typically associated with the idea that constitutions should recede in favor of the rule of one during crisis situations, Lincoln's actions have been used on one side as the implicit and even explicit basis of presidential claims to increased power and on the other side as the example par excellence of what presidents should not do. Taking issue with this conventional interpretation and continuing the more recent scholarly recovery of Lincoln's profound concern for constitutionalism, I explicate the principles that guided Lincoln's use of executive power during the Civil War. By drawing out the importance of political necessity as the basis for “prerogative” over and against both popular approval and unlimited constitutional powers, I show how this principle also provides an alternative perspective and even an antidote to the current scholarly debate concerning whether constitutions are better preserved by “Jeffersonian” or “Hamiltonian” prerogative. Lincoln's example also shows us that we should not legalize, regularize, or institutionalize those powers that may be necessary to avert a crisis. Perhaps most importantly, Lincoln's statesmanship teaches us that constitutions can moderate and limit discretionary executive power only if the people learn an attachment to their Constitution that does not come naturally to them.Benjamin A. Kleinerman is assistant professor in the Department of International Studies at the Virginia Military Institute (kleinermanba@vmi.edu). His current research focuses on the relationship between executive power and constitutionalism. The author thanks Bernard J. Dobski, Steven Kautz, and M. Richard Zinman for commenting on earlier versions of this manuscript, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Several months ago, the editors of Perspectives on Politics invited the 12 most recent presidents of the APSA, the current president, and the president-elect to answer the following questions:

What one or two things has the discipline of political science taught us of really lasting political import over roughly the past two decades? What do we now know that we didn't know before, say, 1980 that really matters, whether for scholarship, political action, or policy improvement? Alternatively, what one or two really important questions or issues has political science failed to address or failed to address well? What new knowledge from political science might make a material difference in how we understand the world or how we act in it?

Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America was the dominant interpretative text in American political thought for a generation. In the late 1960s the Hartzian hegemony came under severe attack, and by the 1990s his interpretive framework had been declared obsolete. Critiques allege two basic, related flaws: (1) Hartz's interpretation ignored the diversity in American political thought, particularly, though not exclusively, on questions of race, and (2) his analysis exaggerated the extent of the consensus in American political culture. These critiques are based almost exclusively on Hartz's analysis of selected periods of early American political development. I argue that Hartz's basic concepts are powerful analytical tools that continue to provide the most compelling analysis of recent American political development. I test the Hartz thesis by constructing a plausible interpretation of the 1960s based on the concepts employed in The Liberal Tradition.Philip Abbott is Distinguished Graduate Professor at Wayne State University (aa2393@wayne.edu). His recent books include Exceptional America: Newness and National Identity (1999) and Political Thought in America: Conversations and Debates (2004). The author is grateful to Jennifer Hochschild for her encouragement and to the anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics. Christopher Duncan and Max Skidmore also provided very helpful advice.

We suggest that the 2003 war in Iraq received high levels of public support because the Bush administration successfully framed the conflict as an extension of the war on terror, which was a response to the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Our analysis of Bush's speeches reveals that the administration consistently connected Iraq with 9/11. New York Times coverage of the president's speeches featured almost no debate over the framing of the Iraq conflict as part of the war on terror. This assertion had tremendous influence on public attitudes, as indicated by polling data from several sources.Amy Gershkoff (agershko@princeton.edu) and Shana Kushner (skushner@princeton.edu) are graduate students in the Department of Politics, Princeton University. The authors thank Larry Bartels, Gary Jacobson, Douglas Foyle, seminar participants at Princeton University, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Authors' names listed in alphabetical order.

Explanations of the unique character of American political development—i.e., its exceptionalism—must consider and explain a wide range of phenomena. Why has the United States been relatively immune to the kinds of social movements and political parties commonly found in other industrialized democracies? Why is there no American Left? Why are American unions as politically weak and numerically insignificant as they are? Beyond parties and movements, we must also seek to understand the absence in the United States of the public goods that are commonly associated with the emergence of social democratic parties in other countries: comprehensive and redistributive policies in the areas of welfare, housing, education, and health care. Understanding these absences requires, in my view, that serious attention be paid to the ways in which race and certain ascriptive practices have shaped the development of the American nation.Richard Iton is associate professor of African American Studies and political science at Northwestern University (r-iton@northwestern.edu). He is the author of Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left, and In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era (forthcoming). The author thanks Joseph Carens and Barnor Hesse for their comments on earlier drafts of this response.

American Political Development (APD) is among the fastest-growing areas in political science. Barely two decades ago, the “field” consisted of a handful of works by a few scholars. Since then political scientists have been joined under the APD banner by researchers from other disciplines in issuing dozens of books and hundreds of articles, organizing a biennial APD conference, and teaching numerous graduate and undergraduate courses. The flagship APD journal, Studies in American Political Development, in print since 1986, is ranked among the top political science journals; also well regarded is the Journal of Policy History, begun three years later. The Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association, likewise founded recently, has the eighth largest membership of the discipline's 35 subgroupings. Newly minted PhDs list APD as a specific research and teaching interest, and political science departments are matching that surging interest with job postings. And overviews of recent scholarship on the American polity separately highlight APD approaches. Perhaps inevitably, however, the rapid emergence of APD as a full-fledged disciplinary concentration has been accompanied by developmental problems.Rogan Kersh is associate professor of political science and public administration at Syracuse University's Maxwell School (rtkersh@maxwell.syr.edu). He is the author of Dreams of a More Perfect Union, as well as articles on APD in numerous journals. For helpful advice and commentary, the author thanks Brian Balogh, Dan Galvin, Jennifer Hochschild, Shelley Hurt, David Mayhew, Suzanne Mettler, Sid Milkis, Jim Morone, three anonymous Perspectives reviewers, and audience members at the APD workshop at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

George W. Bush elevated the value of definition in presidential leadership and made it central to his political stance. This was as much a strategic calculation of political advantage in the moment at hand as it was a reflection of the man's innate character. Accounting for Bush's leadership posture in this way helps to situate it on a larger historical canvas as a particular rendition of a familiar type; reference to general characteristics of the type facilitates, in turn, an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Bush's performance over the course of his first term. Conclusions consider deviations from the patterned political effects of leadership of this sort and weigh their possible significance.Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University (stephen.skowronek@yale.edu). He is author of The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton and more recently with Karen Orren, The Search for American Political Development. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at CIDE in Mexico City, at the University of Texas, and the University of Tulsa. It was also featured as the Abbott Memorial Lecture at the Sondermann Symposium on the Presidency at Colorado College, Colorado Springs (December 2004). The version printed here was completed on May 10, 2005.

In the winter of 2005 I invited an array of scholars to respond to a variant of the same question: What do you predict about some important political phenomenon or process over the next decade, and why? What leverage do political scientists' theories, evidence, or concepts give us in understanding a given situation, such that you have grounds for prediction beyond those of an informed journalist or political actor? I urged authors to “really go out on a limb and make a clear prediction that can be analyzed, argued with, and supported (or falsified!) after a decade.” I then wrote a specific query to each of the people invited, beginning “Ten years from now …”

Ten years from now, what will be the dominant terms of public discourse in politics? At a dinner party in March (2005), I offered a spur-of-the-moment prediction: that the U.S. would have troops in Iraq, all told, for twenty years, by which point we (I spoke as a citizen) would have forgotten why we were there in the first place. Until then, we would stay in Iraq, I continued, in order to keep a Shiite Iraq from growing too close to a Shiite Iran. Another guest countered that the language and cultural barriers between Iraq and Iran would trump shared religious doctrine and practice. On one level, my comment was a watered-down Platonicism—an eyebrow raised at democratic fickleness: democrats, to paraphrase Plato, are people who don't stay the course. On another level, however, our exchange made note of the fact that much of world politics these days is about the interaction not between states but between ethnoi and states.Danielle Allen (dsallen@uchicago.edu) is dean of the humanities and professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

Phillip Abbott is too modest. His essay seeks to defend, against its many critics, Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, which was published half a century ago. Abbott bases his defense mainly on his discovery that certain concepts of Hartz's—“the liberal enlightenment,” “the American democrat”—remain valid and helpful in explaining the politics of the 1960s and after. Yet the merits of Abbott's interpretation of that phase in our political history rise or fall on his own thinking, not Hartz's—his use of Hartz's book, and not Hartz's book itself. If Hartz's work gets him where he wants to go better than Judith Shklar's or Rogers Smith's does, that's fine. Gratitude is a worthy sentiment, too often forgotten in our narcissistic academic culture. But by now, Hartz is mainly a figure of historical interest. I'm less interested in whether Louis Hartz was right than in whether Phillip Abbott is right—not about Louis Hartz but about the events of 1960s and their legacies.Sean Wilentz is Dayton-Stockon Professor of History and director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University (swilentz@Princeton.edu).

No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents. By Anne L. Alstott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 272p. $27.50 cloth.

By any account, the United States lags far behind other industrialized nations in providing positive support for child rearing. Politicians utter maudlin paeans to the sanctity of the American family while shredding income-support programs for poor mothers and children, while on the popular front, advocates of “childfree” living bemoan the “culture of parental privilege” (Elinor Burkett, The Baby Boon, 2000). Anne Alstott makes the case for state support of families by examining the well-being of caretakers rather than dependents. She argues that society imposes a “No Exit” obligation on caretakers, and it is the increased vulnerability of caretakers flowing from that obligation that provides the foundation for the analysis.

At the conclusion of World War II, several international institutions were created to manage the world economy and prevent another Great Depression. These institutions include the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now called the World Bank), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was expanded and institutionalized into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. These institutions have not only persisted for over five decades, but they have also expanded their mandates, changed their missions, and increased their membership. They have, however, become highly contested. As Stiglitz notes, “International bureaucrats—the faceless symbols of the world economic order—are under attack everywhere…. Virtually every major meeting of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization is now the scene of conflict and turmoil.”Helen V. Milner is the B. C. Forbes Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School (hmilner@Princeton.edu). She has written extensively on issues related to international trade, the connections between domestic politics and foreign policy, globalization and regionalism, and the relationship between democracy and trade policy. Her writings include Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (1997), Internationalization and Domestic Politics (co-edited with Robert O. Keohane, 1996), “Why the Move to Free Trade? Democracy and Trade Policy in the Developing Countries” (International Organization 2005), “The Optimal Design of International Trade Institutions: Uncertainty and Escape” (coauthored with B. Peter Rosendorff, International Organization, 2001). The author thanks David Baldwin, Chuck Beitz, Robert O. Keohane, Erica Gould, Steve Macedo, Lisa Martin, Thomas Pogge, Tom Romer, and Jim Vreeland for invaluable comments. She also received much useful advice from seminars at Princeton University and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center.