The study of Middle Eastern politics shares the problems of area studies in general in political science. Area specialists emphasizing the language and culture of other peoples have been pressured by behavioralists to “objectify” their studies and place all peoples in the context of universals of human political behavior. The result is that the specialized knowledge of non-European peoples and regions especially have had an uneasy relationship with the political science discipline. Post-behavioral political science for a time in the 1970s recognized that the purported scientific universals of the discipline were really the ethnocentric ones of the value assumptions of European and American political science. In the 1980s and continuing to the present, these earlier “scientific” or explanatory universals of political science now arguably have been replaced by the no less ethnocentric ones of democratization and “marketization.” These concepts are examined in the following essays.

Middle Eastern political science has shared the preceding problems but has added to them two additional factors. The first is that the languages and culture of the Middle East are difficult and complex. As a result, the development of a social science consciousness in political research has occurred most importantly only since the 1970s. The second is that the study of Middle Eastern politics is embedded in the historical attitude of American and European culture toward Islam and Arabism. Historically, Islam expanded at the expense of Christian Europe in the eighth century. This adversarial relation continued when European Christians mounted forays into the Moslem Near East in the Crusades of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries; with the fall of Christian Constantinople to Moslem siege in the fifteenth century; and to the near defeat of Christian Vienna by Moslem attack in the seventeenth century.

The ideal electoral system in a representative democracy is one allowing all eligible citizens to cast an equally weighted vote, and for united groups of voters, except very small ones, to elect one or more of their candidates to a governing body. Approximate proportional representation on governing bodies would be a happenstance and not deliberate. Majority/plurality electoral systems, however, favor the dominant group and often leave women and minority groups with no direct representation.

Designers of electoral systems historically have employed various devices to reduce the influence of opposition political parties or groups and to make it difficult for them to elect their candidates to a governing body. Growing concern that numerous black citizens were prevented from voting in southern states resulted in the U.S. Congress using the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution to enact the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (79 Stat. 437, 42 U.S.C. § 1973), a statute applying to a state or local government meeting two criteria. The Congress in 1975 employed the Fourteenth Amendment to extend the Act's (89 Stat. 438, 42 U.S.C. § 1973) protection to language minorities defined as “persons who are American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Natives, or of Spanish heritage.”

The Act has eliminated invidious discrimination against protected groups, yet many law-making bodies are still unrepresentative of their respective constituencies.

Over the past decade the paradigm of “democratization” has dominated analysis of political change, reflecting the dramatic transitions from authoritarian rule in Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. While the new literature on democratization has pointedly excluded the Arab world, a growing number of area specialists have sought to identify local developments that signal the early phases of, or at least potential for, a democratic transformation of state and society in the Middle East (Hudson 1991; Ibrahim 1993; Al-Sayyid Marsot 1990; Norton 1994). It is difficult to generalize about political change in the Arab world, as several distinct patterns have emerged, reflecting differences in institutional settings as well as in the strategies of regime and opposition elites.

The design of a health care reform program requires contributions from many disciplines. While we know that all disciplines are equal, we are also aware that some are more equal than others. I believe the record would show that, at this time and in this nation, economics is one of the fields of study that is “more equal” than others. Why are economists so important? What impact does the presence of these economists have on the development of health reform legislation? What price—if any—do all of us pay for the under-representation of various other disciplines? Some of the answers to these and other questions can be found in the accompanying essays by persons whose knowledge and experience lies in the field of political science. I propose to try to address these matters from the vantage of the discipline in which I was educated—political economy, as it was known at Johns Hopkins when I studied there.

It is not difficult to list some of the various factors that have propelled economists to the center of America's health care debate. Certainly it is the case that many of the issues raised by the health crisis and by proposals for health reform impinge on the economist's domain. Even without taking account of the imperialistic tendency of economists to view all of human behavior as that of rational economic actors and thus to lay claim to the study of virtually all human interactions, numerous matters do legitimately fall within the scope of economics and are of long-standing concern to economists.

Although we often plead with our colleagues and students to be more “systematic,” we may not always be clear about what we mean. In biology, systematics is the “scientific study of the kinds and diversity of organisms and of any and all relationships among them” (Simpson 1961), the most important aspect of which is taxonomy, “the theory and practice of classifying organisms into groups on the basis of their relationships” (Mayr 1969). In political science, our organisms are political institutions. This article is a call for research in political systematics with suggestions for how the taxonomy of electoral systems might be developed.

Institutional taxonomy can play many roles in comparative politics. It can provide an appreciation of the existing and theoretical diversity of political institutions, provide the information necessary to construct a theory of institutional development, systematize the variables that affect and constrain political interactions, and provide the starting point for informed discussions of institutional reform. Current attempts to develop large standardized data sets in comparative politics (Rosenstone 1994), for instance, require institutional taxonomy if the effort is to be effective. Of course, this discussion would be moot if institutional taxonomy were already well established (with or without the term).

Does the Middle East's presumed “exceptionalism” imply the disutility of “civil society” as a tool for political analysis? Although the term has gained wide usage in other areas of the world, the Middle East specialists have shown some reluctance to employ it in their own region. This reluctance stems in part from the perception that the term is ambiguous and politically loaded. Historically, “civil society” has signified everything from the peaceable society human beings enjoy under the protection of a Leviathan state (Hobbes), to the stratum of private associations that schools citizens in civic virtue (Tocqueville, Montesquieu), to the constellation of cultural institutions that guarantee the ideological hegemony of the ruling class (Gramsci). In contemporary political debate, the term has become a normative football, representing a bulwark of freedom and anti-totalitarianism to the survivors of communism's fall in Eastern Europe while signifying the spearhead of Western imperialism to those suspicious of efforts to “export democracy” to the developing world.

But reluctance to use the term in the analysis of Middle Eastern politics goes beyond the problematic nature of the term itself and derives from a vision of the Middle East as somehow inhospitable to “civil society.” The Middle East is seen as riven by primordial cleavage, dominated by rent-swollen, power-mon-gering states, unpracticed in reverence for individual freedom and civil liberties. Sociology, economics, politics, and culture conspire to sabotage the development of civil society in the region and so, the reasoning goes, the term is best renounced to check premature expectations of its realization.

If only two important features may be singled out to characterize the “New World Order,” they are the collapse of communism and the globalization of the demand for democracy. We have thus reached “the end of history.” Western democracy can travel across the globe without any entry visa and is welcome wherever it lands.

Contrary to this “endism,” the view adopted in this short paper assumes that the democratization process in the Arab countries will be both long and costly. The contagion effect might transform governments' piecemeal concessions into substantive democracy, but this is less probable than a situation of democratic breakdowns and incumbent governments presenting formal pluralism and controlled multipar-tism as the real thing. The literature's overoptimism reflects the nascent state of research on Arab democratization. In fact, multiple published volumes bringing together worldwide and sophisticated research on democratization (Diamund, et al. 1988, 1989; O'Donnel & Schmitter 1986) do not analyze a single Arab case, or explain such absence.

The term gerrymandering always evokes spirited partisan debate and political controversy. Yet, when we begin to scratch at the surface, we see that there is more to gerrymandering than debates about cartographical aesthetics. The issue goes directly to the heart of theories of democracy and representation and is replete with controversy, irony, and inconsistency.

My key point is that resolving the gerrymandering issue is distinct from, and therefore may not result in, improving representation. This point is due to the fact that neither jurists nor scholars have been able to set forth a clear and consistent definition of representation.

Terminology:

The term gerrymander must be distinguished from redistricting. The latter is the process by which congressional and legislative district lines are redrawn in order to balance their populations in the wake of the decennial census. The former uses redistricting for partisan ends by dividing concentrations of voters to prevent their coalescing into a majority in a district, or by concentrating so many group members into a district that their electoral strength is diluted because the extra votes could have been used to help elect a sympathetic candidate elsewhere. It is this notion—the dilution of voting power as a result of partisan cartography—that has made the term gerrymander so controversial.

There is a remarkable consensus that American medical care—particularly its financing and insurance coverage—needs a major overhaul. The critical unanimity on this point—what Paul Starr has rightly termed a “negative consensus”—bridges almost all the usual cleavages in American politics—between old and young, Democrats and Republicans, management and labor, the well paid and the low paid. We spend more on and feel worse about medical care than our economic competitors, with nine out of ten Americans (including Fortune 500 executives) telling pollsters that our health system requires substantial change. That is the good news for medical reformers in the Clinton administration, the Congress, and the polity at large.

The bad news for these reformers is that, for a variety of ideological and institutional reasons, American politics makes it very difficult to coalesce around a solution that reasonably satisfies the requirements for a stable and workable system of financing and delivering modern medical care. We have no assurance that the rare agreement on the seriousness of the nation's medical ills will generate the legislative support required for a substantively adequate and administratively workable program of reform.