In this article, we provide a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems, and institutions, and how they affect economic performance. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions' emergence, their working properties, and their effect on economic and political outcomes should begin from an analysis of cognitive processes. We explore the nature of individual and collective learning, stressing that the issue is not whether agents are perfectly or boundedly rational, but rather how human beings actually reason and choose, individually and in collective settings. We then tie the processes of learning to institutional analysis, providing arguments in favor of what can be characterized as “cognitive institutionalism.” Besides, we show that a full treatment of the phenomenon of path dependence should start at the cognitive level, proceed at the institutional level, and culminate at the economic level.

“Two Paths to a Science of Politics” presents two strongly argued points of view about where we should be going in our discipline. The authors by and large agree on the nature of science and the variety of ways to do it, but they disagree on the most fruitful way to proceed at this moment. Granato and Scioli believe that we need to do more to test theories with data and to formulate theories that are based on data. We need, in their phrase, to consider the empirical implications of theoretical models (EITM). Rogers Smith thinks we need to take history, context, and meaning more seriously in order to understand phenomena such as political identity.Henry E. Brady's co-edited book with David Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, will be published this year from Rowman and Littlefield and Berkeley Public Policy Press. His thanks to David Collier, Gary King, Paul Sniderman, and the editorial staff of Perspectives on Politics for their helpful comments.

Does deepening economic inequality in the United States threaten our democracy? This is the fundamental question posed by the APSA task force report, and the answer is a resounding Yes. The critical synthesis of the literature on participation, governance, and policy is intellectually provocative, and the forceful presentation of recent trends in political inequality that support this conclusion underscores important practical implications for the nation's political economy.Linda Faye Williams' book The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America won the 2004 W. E. B. DuBois award for best book of the year (National Conference of Black Political Scientists); the Best Book of 2004 on Public Policy (APSA's Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics); and the 2004 Michael Harrington Award (APSA's Caucus for a New Political Science).

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.

To get a person in the majority party to vote against one of their own colleagues, you have to give them good government reasons to do it.

—Bill Reardon, Democratic state representative, Kansas

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.

One of the central tasks facing any discipline is deciding what topics, among a vast range of possibilities, to feature in its research agenda. Once a discipline's practitioners have settled on the agenda, they must then determine what methods can best illuminate those topics. This essay argues that political science today needs to give higher priority to studies of the processes, especially the political processes, through which conceptions of political membership, allegiance, and identity are formed and transformed. To do this, we need to identify, to a greater extent than most political scientists have, the historical contexts of the conflicts and political institutions that have contributed to political identities and commitments, and our approaches must provide empathetic interpretive understandings of human consciousnesses and values. We cannot rely solely, or even predominantly, on efforts to identify abstract, ahistorical, and enduring regularities in political behavior such as those that prevailed during the behavioralist era of modern American political science. Nor can we depend primarily on approaches, ascendant in our discipline's more recent “rational choice” phase, that enhance our formal grasp of instrumental rationality. Those sorts of work can certainly offer important contributions, but in general they are most effective as elements in projects that rest extensively on contextually and historically informed interpretive judgments.Rogers M. Smith is the author of Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (Yale University Press, 1997). For their feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, the author thanks discussants and audience respondents from the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in September 2002, and the Yale Conference on Problems and Methods in Political Science in December 2002. He also thanks the editorial staff and anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics for many helpful suggestions and corrections.

Recent advances in the neurosciences offer a wealth of new information about how the brain works, and how the body and mind interact. These findings offer important and surprising implications for work in political science. Specifically, emotion exerts an impact on political decisions in decisive and significant ways. While its importance in political science has frequently been either dismissed or ignored in favor of theories that privilege rational reasoning, emotion can provide an alternate basis for explaining and predicting political choice and action. In this article, I posit a view of decision making that rests on an integrated notion of emotional rationality.Rose McDermott is the author of Risk Taking in International Relations (1998) and Political Psychology in International Relations (2004) and works largely in the areas of political psychology, experimentation, and American foreign policy. The author is grateful to Jennifer Hochschild, Robert Jervis, and Stephen Rosen for generous and constructive advice and encouragement; and to Gerald Clore, Jonathan Cowden, Thomas Kozachek, Jonathan Mercer, Joanne Miller, Philip Zimbardo, the members of the Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop at Harvard, and anonymous reviewers for useful guidance and suggestions.

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

—William Penn, Fruits of Solitude (1693)

We consider affective processing to be an evolutionary antecedent to more complex forms of information processing; but higher cognition requires the guidance provided by affective processing.

—Ralph Adolphs and Antonio Damasio, “The Interaction of Affect and Cognition” (2001)

What has changed since William Riker's statement was written? No doubt Political Science has made considerable headway in going beyond traditional methods. For example, social choice theory, formal models of party systems, and statistical methods for analyzing electoral and roll-call data have made it possible to make scientific progress in the study of democratic institutions and party systems.The authors thank Chris Achen, John Aldrich, Bill Bernhard, Norman Bradburn, Brian Humes, Mark Jones, Richard Lempert, Phil Shively, Joan Sieber, Duncan Snidal, and Paul Wahlbeck for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. They also thank Henry Brady and Jennifer Hochschild for their comments and assistance through this process. We dedicate this paper to the memory and scientific accomplishments of EITM Workshop participant Richard McKelvey.

In this article we propose that evolutionary biology can supply political science with a theory of the ultimate causes of human preferences and behaviors that it otherwise lacks. For the most part, political scientists are either unfamiliar with the social side of evolutionary theory or misidentify its key features. Far from being genetically deterministic or leading exclusively to predictions that all human behavior will be selfish, modern evolutionary theories stress that adaptive behavior is frequently characterized by a guarded sort of cooperation. We describe modern biological theory, offer our own version of it, discuss new and potentially useful interpretations of political attitudes and public policies, and present scientific evidence, drawn from research on autistic individuals and monozygotic and dizygotic twins, of the startlingly important role genetics plays in shaping politically relevant attitudes and behaviors.The authors are grateful to Chris Larimer, Levente Littvay, David Rapkin, Kevin Smith, Jeff Spinner-Halev, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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.

Mainstream comparative research on political institutions focuses primarily on formal rules. Yet in many contexts, informal institutions, ranging from bureaucratic and legislative norms to clientelism and patrimonialism, shape even more strongly political behavior and outcomes. Scholars who fail to consider these informal rules of the game risk missing many of the most important incentives and constraints that underlie political behavior. In this article we develop a framework for studying informal institutions and integrating them into comparative institutional analysis. The framework is based on a typology of four patterns of formal-informal institutional interaction: complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive. We then explore two issues largely ignored in the literature on this subject: the reasons and mechanisms behind the emergence of informal institutions, and the nature of their stability and change. Finally, we consider challenges in research on informal institutions, including issues of identification, measurement, and comparison.Gretchen Helmke's book Courts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina, will be published by Cambridge University Press. Steven Levitsky is the author of Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective and is currently writing a book on competitive authoritarian regimes in the post–Cold War era. The authors thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame for generously sponsoring conferences on informal institutions. The authors also gratefully acknowledge comments from Jorge Domínguez, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Dennis Galvan, Goran Hyden, Jack Knight, Lisa Martin, Hillel Soifer, Benjamin Smith, Susan Stokes, María Victoria Murillo, and Kurt Weyland, as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editors of 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.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, presented liberal societies with grave practical challenges. Yet, they also exposed the single most profound theoretical challenge since liberalism's origins: the challenge of illiberal revealed theology. Today's challenge is, in fact, a variety of liberal theory's original antagonist. The radical renewal of this old challenge, in a form markedly different from that which the early liberal theorists faced, requires fresh consideration from liberal theorists today.J. Judd Owen is the author of Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism and is working on a book entitled Religious Apathy and the Democratic Citizen. He thanks Peter Ahrensdorf, Robert Bartlett, Jennifer Hochschild, John Owen IV, Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticisms.

In this article, I consider the claims made by those who advocate greater inclusion of religiously based organizations in the public realm. I examine two ostensibly “religion-blind” models—pluralist-accommodationist and noncognizant—used to justify inclusion, along with current jurisprudence, in the context of President Bush's faith-based initiative. I contend that corporate freedom of conscience in its state-sponsored applications often unfairly affects those who do not subscribe to the beliefs of religious organizations. I thus reject public funding of religiously based organizations, or those in which religious faith is a central organizing element, unless the recipients are required to adhere to the rules that govern secularly based organizations.Emily R. Gill has taught at Bradley University for 32 years. She has published a number of articles and book chapters. Her Becoming Free: Autonomy and Diversity in the Liberal Polity was published in 2001. The author thanks Jennifer Hochschild, the associate editors, and anonymous reviewers for many constructive comments and suggestions.

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.

On July 28, 2003, Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) held a press conference to call attention to a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) project that would allow investors to bet on future political events in the Middle East—including terrorist attacks—through a commodity-market style trading system. On July 29, newspapers responded by denouncing this “unbelievably stupid” and “grotesque” market. Later that day, the program was officially cancelled.The authors thank Ellie Powell and Tatyana Karaman for their excellent research assistance, and Gary Bass, Tom Romer, the editor of Perspectives on Politics, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.