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A Conversation withRobert A. DahlRobert A. Dahl1 and Margaret Levi21Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520;email: robert.dahl@yale.edu2Department of Political Science, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195;email: mlevi@u.washington.edu

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2009. 12:1–9

The Annual Review of Political Science is online atpolisci.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.040108.115702

Copyright c© 2009 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

1094-2939/09/0615-0001$20.00

Editor’s Note

Robert A. Dahl, the foremost living theorist of democracy, is the emer-itus Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, wherehe received his Ph.D. in 1940 and where he spent virtually his entireacademic career. After five years working for the government—as amanagement analyst at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, then as aneconomist in the Office of Price Administration and the War Produc-tion Board, and finally as a member of the Army—he returned to Yalein 1946. With colleagues Charles Lindblom, Robert Lane, and others,he helped build the first modern department of political science, a de-partment that asked major substantive questions while using the bestsocial science techniques available at the time.

In the interview that follows, which I conducted on March 30, 2008,Dahl grounds his motivation for studying democracy not only in hisacademic encounters but also in his experiences growing up in Alaska,attending public schools there, and working with longshore workersas a boy. He does not want to replicate the utopian visions of classicalphilosophers. His commitment is to the development of an empiricalmodel of democracy that guides scholars in their efforts to determine theextent of democratization throughout the world as well as in the UnitedStates. Normatively, he is committed to a democracy that recognizes therights and voice of all who have a legitimate claim to citizenship.

Although he is known for his arguments about the proceduresdemocracy requires, some of his most important work deals with thedistribution of power. He engaged in debate with elitist theorists suchas C. Wright Mills and Floyd Hunter, who argued that a small elitedetermined virtually all important policy decisions. Dahl’s book WhoGoverns?, winner of the 1962 Woodrow Wilson Prize of the AmericanPolitical Science Association, makes a very different set of claims. ThereDahl analyzes decision making in several policy arenas and finds differ-ent key actors influencing the outcomes. The debate did not stop there,

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FurtherANNUALREVIEWS

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of course, but Dahl transformed the style of argument by investigating howdecisions were made and who made them.

Dahl continued to study and contemplate democracy, winning a secondWoodrow Wilson Prize in 1990 for Democracy and Its Critics. By hisadmission, he concluded his writing career with a second edition of HowDemocratic is the American Constitution? in 2003 and On Political Equalityin 2006.

Robert Dahl has received numerous honors. He was a Guggenheimfellow in 1950 and 1978, a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study inBehavioral Sciences in 1955–1956 and 1967, and an elected member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society,National Academy of Sciences, and British Academy (as a correspondingfellow). He served as President of the American Political ScienceAssociation in 1966–1967. He was the 1995 recipient of the Johan SkyttePrize in Political Science. He holds numerous honorary doctorates inaddition to other major awards in recognition of his remarkable standingin the profession. The editorial committee of the Annual Review ofPolitical Science was unanimous in its selection of Robert Dahl as the authorof this first prefatory article by a distinguished living scholar to bepublished in our pages.

Margaret Levi

A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT A. DAHL

Margaret Levi: Bob, maybe you could tell usa little bit about your history and how you gotinto political science, and some of the thingsthat you did before you became a politicalscientist.

Robert Dahl: Certainly. I don’t know howmuch of that you want me to narrate; I can goon endlessly, as my children and grandchildrenhave learned. I grew up in this little townin southeastern Alaska. I worked summers,partly to help pay my way through college andthen later graduate school, where I came intocontact with of course the local people whomI already knew, but also on the docks, peoplewhom I didn’t know, working people, and thatexposed me to an aspect of life which I’ve neverforgotten.

ML: So you were involved with the Interna-tional Longshore and Warehouse Union beforeit became that.

RD: . . . before it became that, and, partly be-cause I was a Norman Thomas socialist and a

radical and an advocate of unions and so on, Ifelt that they needed to be organized. And thenin due time, they did indeed get organized, andone of the first things that they did, quite prop-erly, was to turn it into a year-round job, and[laughing] I was no longer able to work on thedocks.

ML: And you were quite a young man whenyou were doing that—twelve or. . .

RD: Yeah, I started out at the age of twelve,which of course is totally illegal now. But I wasbig and strong, so it wasn’t really a problem. Itwas an important part of my life.

ML: And it informed your work later, I take it.

RD: It did. That and my military service, andgrowing up in a small town, just gave me avery deep and lasting respect for—what is oftensaid, “ordinary people.” I don’t like that term.But just plain ordinary human beings. I respectthem for, among other things, they’ve got de-grees of common sense which are not always so

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obviously present in our colleagues and otherintellectuals.

ML: Did that experience have an influence onthe way in which you thought about democ-racy? That’s been, of course, one of your majorcontributions is democratic theory.

RD: I think it gave me—without I think everromanticizing (because these were people youromanticize as somehow super people), it gaveme a very deep and lasting respect for the com-mon sense and the abilities of human beings,adults. At the same time, it increased my aware-ness of the importance of information and thechallenge that that posed, therefore the chal-lenge of education. And the great gap betweenwhat people need to know in order to protecttheir own self-interest and what they do know,which of course in some Platonic and other the-ories is filled in by those who believe that theyknow best, a view which as you know I’ve alwaysgreatly distrusted.

ML: Maybe you could tell us a little bit why itwas that you began to develop the kind of theoryof democracy and polyarchy that you did.

RD: I had this sense that ideas about democ-racy, theories of democracy which I had learnedabout of course from graduate school on, fromAristotle and Plato onward, that they were in-adequate. I don’t want to diminish them; I havealways retained a great respect for classical andmedieval and eighteenth-century theory, butmeanwhile a whole new kind of political systememerged to which the term democracy becameattached, and for which democracy remainedan ideal, even though classical democracy as anideal was so far removed from reality. The gapbetween that ideal and the actual political insti-tutions that had developed, particularly fromabout the sixteenth, seventeenth century on,was just enormous. And what we didn’t haveenough of, had very little of, was an adequatedescription of what the actual institutions ofso-called democracy, modern democracy, rep-resentative democracy, were. As I’ve alreadysaid, they were radically different from histor-ical democracy, and our descriptions of them

Margaret Levi’s interview with Robert Dahl can befound in video format at http://www.annualreviews.org/go/RADahl interview.

and how they related to the ideals, I felt, at thattime, were lacking.

ML: When you proceeded to develop a theory,your approach to it was also somewhat differentfrom the classical theoretical approach to it. Imean, one of the things that I’ve noted in yourwork is that even though you’re not known asa political economist per se, in fact you werevery influenced by economic thinking and yourwork with Ed Lindblom and others.

RD: I was, yes. Ed was—is! I don’t see himvery often—a very close friend and colleague.I had been interested in economic theory andideas even as an undergraduate, and had cometo the conclusion that we in political sciencedidn’t pay enough attention to the importanceof economics to politics and political science,so I spent a lot of my time trying to bring thattogether, including, as I’ve said, collaboratingwith Ed Lindblom—

ML: Ed Lindblom, who is known as CharlesLindblom as a published author.

RD: Yes, I’m sorry, yes, Charles Lindblom.

ML: But did that economic thinking alsoinfluence the way in which you thoughtabout democracy, or were those really separateprojects?

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RD: Yes, it influenced it in the sense that thatkind of abstract thinking and models, while Ifelt they often bore too little relation to thereality and the complexity of economic life,they provided a degree of rigor. Political sys-tems are I think more complicated than eco-nomics, and political behavior is more com-plicated than economic behavior; nevertheless,economics provided the kind of model or hopeof a model that we could make use of for in-creased rigor in political science.

ML: There’s also a deductive quality in yourthinking about democracy, as well as a concernabout thinking about how it fits with reality.

RD: Yes, yes. I was influenced very early on, myfirst time at the—I spent a year at the Center atPalo Alto, the Center for Advanced Study there,and I became a good friend of Kenneth Arrow.I think he was not at the Center that year buthe lived in Palo Alto.

ML: Marvelous man.

RD: Marvelous man. Both as a person and as ascholar. And I became as I say greatly influencedby the way in which he dealt with phenomena.

ML: And this was in the early 1950s?

RD: I think it was 1955 to 1960.

ML: You were in one of the first classes at theCenter.

RD: Yeah, I was. I had been on the socialscience research committee under PendletonHerring. . .

ML: Another former President of APSA.

RD: Right. That came up with the idea. Andthen helped get money from the RockefellerFoundation to develop it.

ML: You know I’m the current chair of theboard of the Center for Advanced Study.

RD: [laughing]: Yes, you are, yes, oh my yes!I’m very proud of that, having made what smallcontribution I did.

ML: You made a big contribution.

RD: Well, thank you.

ML: So, Ken Arrow and you started to talk, andhe was of course working on issues of demo-cratic theory in a sense at that time, right, hisbook had just come out.

RD: So I was influenced by that as a model, away of thinking more abstractly, perhaps, thancustomary, about democratic theory. Makingclear the premises, the epistomological assump-tions and matters of that kind, and I think thatsort of set the stage. And then once you get in ofcourse, into that field, which was not highly—I don’t know how to put this properly—as aformal field of political science was not highlydeveloped at the time, once you get into it youquickly become aware of how rich the poten-tial subject matter is. One of the enormouschanges, perhaps anticipating your question,one of the changes in the world is the extraor-dinary increase in the number of countries that,by the standards that we use today, can be calleddemocratic—always, I repeat this and repeatthis, but, always keeping in mind the differencebetween the ideal and the threshold at whichwe now accept a country as democratic, or apolyarchy as I would say. And the enormousincrease in the number of those available forstudy—when I was a graduate student, therewere maybe half a dozen countries that youcould study: France and Britain and, I’m notquite sure of Canada at that time . . . and thenthe expansion created out there a field . . . thatwas both a challenge and an opportunity.

ML: Your own work on democracy evolves overtime, right? Maybe you could talk a little bitabout the kinds of criticism that you got andhow you responded to that, because your workreally did just keep going with the times.

RD: It did. I helped form this group on thesmaller European democracies, with people likea good friend of mine, Val Lorwin, who hadstudied Belgium, and Stein Rokkan, who stud-ied Scandinavian democracies. Stein and I werewalking down the streets of San Francisco—hewas out at the Center one afternoon or evening,

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and he said or I said or we both agreed in-stantaneously, “We need more studies of thesesmaller European democracies which are so lit-tle known, even among scholars in those coun-tries themselves.” Or in some of them, likeSweden (less so at the time in Norway, but it hada strong tradition there)—not much studying bytheir own scholars. And we agreed that some-thing should be done, and so we raised moneyand began to invite people to contribute to whatfirst became a series of essays on the smallerEuropean democracies, and then volumes! Andnow it goes on and on, as the number of smallerdemocracies around the world increases, so it’sa whole rich new gigantic field.

ML: And how did you get from democracy topolyarchy? What was that move? What did thatrepresent?

RD: Polyarchy was a term that I think had beendeveloped in the eighteenth century, as youknow from the Greek meaning “many rulers”(poly; archon). I came to the conclusion earlyon that we should not keep trying to use theword democracy in both its ideal and in its real-istic sense, particularly given the actual democ-racies that had evolved, with representation andthe growth of political parties and a whole newspecies, a whole new different kind of polit-ical system. We needed, then, to modify ourlanguage, so that we could describe democracyas an ideal, using the term democracy there,but we needed a term—it never actually be-came a household term, but we needed a termthat described actual eighteenth-, nineteenth-,twentieth-century democracies. And I stum-bled on the word polyarchy and started ap-plying that. As I say, it didn’t become theterm, and I do think it’s still confusing thatthe term applies to both, but I think we’rea little bit more comfortable now, perhaps,than we were in making sure which it is thatwe’re talking about, and when we use the worddemocracy, whether we’re talking about small-scale democracy, large-scale democracy, poly-archy as I would call it, multi-party democ-racy, a whole, much more diverse, much morecomplex . . .

ML: I think the term democracy itself has be-come more of a continuum than just an idealstate.

RD: I agree. And a number of people of coursehave (even I’ve made my stab at it) attempted todevelop a scale that I think very helpful, not tooversimplify it, but to be able to array the coun-tries of the world on a 10-point scale from themost democratic, with the democratic ideal be-yond that, those that are above a certain thresh-old the most democratic, and array them alonga line to the least democratic. That’s very useful.

ML: Now, one of the things that William Rikerdid, he looked at the various notions of democ-racy and decided that the only thing they had incommon was elections, contested elections. Soyou have a richer definition of democracy andpolyarchy than that.

RD: Yes. I think, if we move to later democ-racy and the sort of thing that he was talk-ing about, we have to include a wider arrayof institutions—to distinguish democracy fromauthoritarian governments, and even there weneed a scale to do so. But it means not just elec-tions, indeed free and fair elections; I think it’scome in the twentieth century to mean a uni-versal electorate, male and female, moving theage down a bit, that’s now just standard. Polit-ical parties and political competition and freeand fair elections, and something that I’ve triedto add on, without, I suppose, a great deal ofsuccess in the real world or elsewhere: the ulti-mate popular control over the agenda. If some-body else is controlling the agenda, what’s it allabout?

ML: That seemed to me the interesting movethat you made over the course of developingthis, is that participation in various forms be-came much more part of your argument aboutdemocracy.

RD: That’s true. Yes, participation . . . even inmy doctoral dissertation I’d seen that, but alsowe needed to think about democracy in otherspheres, and I became more interested anddid more research on democratic forms within

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business firms. Well, my own optimistic per-spective on that never prevailed, but I hadhoped [laughing] . . .

ML [laughing]: And much less so today thanyou think . . .

RD: And less so today. Business has becomemore and more oligarchical, don’t you think?

ML: I think that’s true. Well, when I was an un-dergraduate and a graduate student, I was partof a group of people who were quite critical of“the pluralists.” Right? Now, you were consid-ered a pluralist.

RD: I was indeed, yes.

ML: Do you think that’s a term that still hasmeaning today?

RD: Well, I think the core of the meaning is ob-serving some political systems and seeing that—well, let me go back into the history. I was re-acting to what seemed to me the oversimplifiedview of some, including the famous Italian the-orists, about the ruling class. I began, and thenmy experience in Washington as an intern laterfortified that, I began to see the ruling class aspluralistic in many countries, and as it turnedout, in more and more countries—meaning bythat that it was not a single homogeneous groupof people (men, they would be) with a commonunifying interest, but that there was more diver-sity there. That’s not exactly the same as democ-racy, but it means that if you have democraticinstitutions, they’re going to be more pluralis-tic in the sense that wider groups are going tobe participating.

ML: And that’s part of what’s behind WhoGoverns?, right?

RD: And that’s part of what’s behind WhoGoverns?. I can remember sort of beginning tothink about this while I was at the Center and af-terwards, where I’d done a lot of thinking aboutthis, talking about it, saying that, well, maybeI’d better take a look at some concrete, actu-ally existing political system and see what’s outthere. Of course you can argue that I began with

a bias toward seeing diversity or plurality, andthat would be a fair criticism. But once you be-gin looking for it in a country like the UnitedStates, or even in a place like New Haven, youbegin to see it, starting with our ethnic diversityfor example. And I found at that time that that,I wouldn’t say dominant but very powerful ten-dency to want to see this as somehow simplifiedwas too simplified.

ML: So you weren’t just responding to the Ital-ians, not just to Mosca and Pareto, but also toC. Wright Mills and Floyd Hunter and thewhole community power elite structure.

RD: I was, yes. I did. I have great respect forC. Wright Mills (I didn’t have that much re-spect for Floyd Hunter’s work), but, I felt itwas too simple. Just too simplified a view ofpolitics . . . . You could array countries aroundthe world, as one of my students and later fel-low scholars did, you could array them along ascale from those that were highly authoritarianto those that were nonauthoritarian . . .

ML: This is where your work on democracy andon power really sort of come together, right, inthinking about what a democracy is, that it hasto have at least some pluralist element.

RD: Yes.

ML: Now, the concept of power is anotherthing in which you have clearly been a leader,and it comes out in the book Who Governs?, andit produced again an interesting argument. Itwas a major controversy . . . I took a seminar, asI mentioned to you, with Peter Bachrach whenI was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, whichwas on power, and of course, he was one of yourmajor critics. But that was a very lively debatein the 1960s and well into the 1970s. Perhapsyou could tell us a little bit about that debateand what’s happened with the way of thinkingabout power.

RD: There was then a dominant, rather sim-plified view of power. And what I think openedup was a realization of its complexities—howdid you define its characteristic qualities—and

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of political regimes as being much more diversein the distribution of power. And also, then, themore serious attempt to figure out how to goabout observing and measuring it. That . . .

ML: That’s really crucial.

RD: That was really crucial. You can talk aboutit in the abstract, as the Italian theorists tendedto do . . . but then you need to get out in theworld and study it. How do you do that? Whatkind of methodology do you use? And I thinkthere’s been a great deal of progress in the fieldsince the 1950s. [Cut here in video] I think alsothe enormous increase in the number of coun-tries in the world, and the increase in the varietyof political systems makes it a much more chal-lenging field but a richer one as well . . . [Cuthere in video] . . . scholars in those countries,maybe trained elsewhere but now increasinglytrained within those countries, who study theirown political systems. I mean, it’s a much moredifficult field for any scholar because it is so veryrich, and trying to make some kind of sense outof it all is almost impossible. But it’s a very bigand, to overuse the term, rich field I think.

ML: It is. It’s very exciting actually, what’s goneon. [Cut here in video.] There was this, as wementioned, very important debate that you re-ally initiated to a large extent with Who Governs?in response to the simplified elitist views of theItalians. And there were others who got intothat debate trying to operationalize the term,like Jim Coleman and others, and then therewere a group of people like Peter Bachrach whoI worked with, and ultimately Michael Lipskyand Francis Fox Piven and others, who were,and Steven Lukes, who were quite critical ofyour view of power. Right? Because they feltthat there was a mobilization of bias or hege-mony or something else that actually—theywere called the neo-elitists, right, because therewas an issue about voices that were left out orvoices that weren’t heard, in the way in whichthe process worked. Now, I’m interested in yourresponse—because you then went on and re-sponded to them, right? What was at issue foryou in that debate as it developed? You started

by responding to the elitists, but then you hadto deal with the neo-elitists.

RD: I guess that I continued to see politics andpolitical life, life in Washington, as I say bothliving there and working there and so on, and af-terwards, as more complex than I felt many ob-servers, who were sometimes a bit distant fromit all, did. Even when I worked in Washingtonduring wartime with the War ProductionBoard, I found that its decisions were a bit morecomplex, if I can keep overworking that word,than many people who looked at it from afarwere aware of. Now, it’s true that I think a func-tion of science, and certainly a function of socialscience as well, is to simplify this complexity ofreality, and to provide a more adequate way ofunderstanding it and seeing it, because whenwe try to understand it as complexity we don’tunderstand it. It’s like looking out at the starsat night. It’s great to look out at night and seethe stars but you’re not understanding anythingabout the nature of the universe. It has to besimplified. And in simplification you lose somepotential information, but the gain is to providecomprehensibility and coherence.

ML: The other thing in my memory of whatwas going on at that time was, there was a realissue about how you operationalize and howyou actually test, and what kinds of theories andmodels you can test and which ones you can’t,and that’s another area in which I think yourcontribution is quite significant.

RD: Well, I appreciate your bringing that up,because that too was something that I began tothink about during that year that I spent at theCenter in Palo Alto—issues of operationalizingconcepts and testing concepts and so on. Howto bring them into touch with reality in rigor-ous, methodologically rigorous ways became achallenge to me. And once again, people likeJames Coleman, their attempts at that I thinkhad an influence on my way of thinking aboutit. [Cut here in video.]

ML: I’m hearing several themes as we talk. Yoursubstantive interest in democracy and power,and democratization and diffusion of power, but

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also your methodological commitment to testa-bility and operationalization. Finally, I’m alsohearing something which I guess I hadn’t quiterealized before, your commitment to a kind ofinterdisciplinarity. You’re talking about beinginfluenced by economists; James Coleman wasan eminent sociologist. So, a way of thinkingabout social science as a social science, not justas political science. Is that something that youthink is a good thing for us to be developing?One of the things that’s happened is that so-cial science has spread its boundaries. The dis-ciplinary cores are shifting, in a sense. Is thatgood, do you think, for the future, or should webe going back to core ideas in political science?

RD: I think that it’s important always to retainawareness of what you call core ideas, includingthose in the tradition of political philosophy. Ithink keeping in touch with those earlier polit-ical philosophers, being aware of them as partof our training, I think that’s still quite worth-while. I know, or I would guess less and less ofthat may be taking place. But at the same time,I think that we should try to remain aware ofthe richness and complexity of the world thatwe deal with out there, and how much more, ina way—[laughing] it’s always been complex, buthow much more complex it’s grown. Especiallythe field of democracy now, in just the sheernumber and varieties.

ML: So when you think about what has hap-pened in social science since you began, do yousee it as advancing? Are there things we’ve lost,things we’ve gained? What would be your as-sessment, looking back at this point in your life?

RD: A gain in social science is now the rich-ness and variety of the types of inquiry that weundertake, and the fact that it is a worldwidediscipline, which is enormously enriching thisfield. The cost of all of this is that as we growmore specialized, it becomes more and moredifficult for anybody to grasp broad areas of thefield. As we grow more specialized we may beless and less sensitive to aspects of the world thatare outside of our specialty. Much as I respect

aspects of rational choice theory, to see that assomehow a dominant way of thinking would bea terrible blunder, because, as I say, it’s impor-tant, but it cannot encompass the empirical va-riety and complexity of the world. Nothing can.But it can’t be done by rational choice. That canbe a part, it should be a part, but social scienceis a much broader enterprise. It’s got to be.

ML: And is your sense that rational choice hasthat hegemonic or dominant role right now?

RD: I don’t know about right now. I think itdid for a while. It came to play I think toodominant a role, to the exclusion of kind oftough-minded empirical research out there inthe world. There’s only so much about theworld you can deduce [laughs]. You’ve got toget out there and . . . .

ML: But it seems to me at Yale, for sure, there isa large group of people now who are doing ex-actly that kind of tough-minded empirical work.

RD: There is. I’m very encouraged by that.Sure.

ML: And I think it’s happening all over. I thinkrational choice has become another tool in thetoolbox.

RD: I’m glad to hear that. That’s been my im-pression and I think that’s where it should be.The richness, I’m repeating myself, but, the di-versity of research in political science is just im-pressive.

ML: I absolutely agree.

RD: It’s a positive. You know, often there’s atendency for older people, whether social sci-entists or whatever, to look back on the goodold days. The good old days were not that goodin social science.

ML: Well, you’ve been somebody who’s re-ally brought the scientific impulse—I mean thatin the nicest possible way—the emphasis ontheory building, theory testing, conceptualiza-tion . . .

RD: Well, thank you.

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ML: . . . and that makes a huge difference. Iwant to conclude with a concern that I have,that I think you share, about what’s happened tothe field, and this comes back to your concernabout power as being both a crucial conceptto understand democratization and also a cru-cial concept to understand the political world.And my concern is that we aren’t focusing verymuch on power as political scientists any longer.I don’t know if that’s your sense or not, and ifyou think that would be a loss if that were thecase.

RD: You’re a better judge than I as to wherethe field has gone, where it is now. But the an-swer is definitely it would be a loss. Power andinfluence have been the center of—this is not

necessarily an argument in favor of keeping it,but power and influence have been the centerof the field of the study of politics from the be-ginning. And what’s more, they are the centralelements in all of our lives, our daily lives andour family lives, this interview going on—andthey’re enormously complex. If you expand as Itried to do some years ago to power as kind ofa subset of the broader field of influence, witha variety of ways in which influence of humanbeings takes place, it’s almost too complex tobe able to turn into a scientific discipline. Butthat’s the challenge.

ML: That’s the challenge. Bob, thank you somuch.

RD: You’re welcome.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings thatmight be perceived as affecting the presentation of this interview.

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AR377-FM ARI 7 April 2009 11:25

Annual Review ofPolitical Science

Volume 12, 2009Contents

A Conversation with Robert A. DahlRobert A. Dahl and Margaret Levi � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Neorepublicanism: A Normative and Institutional Research ProgramFrank Lovett and Philip Pettit � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �11

Domestic Terrorism: The Hidden Side of Political ViolenceIgnacio Sánchez-Cuenca and Luis de la Calle � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �31

Women in Parliaments: Descriptive and Substantive RepresentationLena Wängnerud � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �51

Self-Government in Our TimesAdam Przeworski � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �71

Social Policy in Developing CountriesIsabela Mares and Matthew E. Carnes � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �93

Variation in Institutional StrengthSteven Levitsky and María Victoria Murillo � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 115

Quality of Government: What You GetSören Holmberg, Bo Rothstein, and Naghmeh Nasiritousi � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 135

Democratization and Economic GlobalizationHelen V. Milner and Bumba Mukherjee � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 163

Has the Study of Global Politics Found Religion?Daniel Philpott � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 183

Redistricting: Reading Between the LinesRaymond La Raja � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 203

Does Efficiency Shape the Territorial Structure of Government?Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 225

Bargaining Failures and Civil WarBarbara F. Walter � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 243

Hobbesian Hierarchy: The Political Economy of PoliticalOrganizationDavid A. Lake � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 263

v

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AR377-FM ARI 7 April 2009 11:25

Negative CampaigningRichard R. Lau and Ivy Brown Rovner � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 285

The Institutional Origins of Inequality in Sub-Saharan AfricaNicolas van de Walle � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 307

RiotsSteven I. Wilkinson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 329

Regimes and the Rule of Law: Judicial Independence in ComparativePerspectiveGretchen Helmke and Frances Rosenbluth � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 345

Field Experiments and the Political Economy of DevelopmentMacartan Humphreys and Jeremy M. Weinstein � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 367

Laboratory Experiments in Political EconomyThomas R. Palfrey � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 379

Field Experiments on Political Behavior and Collective ActionEline A. de Rooij, Donald P. Green, and Alan S. Gerber � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 389

Experiments on Racial Priming in Political CampaignsVincent L. Hutchings and Ashley E. Jardina � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 397

Elections Under AuthoritarianismJennifer Gandhi and Ellen Lust-Okar � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 403

On Assessing the Political Effects of Racial PrejudiceLeonie Huddy and Stanley Feldman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 423

A “Second Coming”? The Return of German Political TheoryDana Villa � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 449

Group Membership, Group Identity, and Group Consciousness:Measures of Racial Identity in American Politics?Paula D. McClain, Jessica D. Johnson Carew, Eugene Walton, Jr.,and Candis S. Watts � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 471

Opiates for the Matches: Matching Methods for Causal InferenceJasjeet Sekhon � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 487

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 8–12 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 509

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 8–12 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 511

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Political Science articles may be foundat http://polisci.annualreviews.org/

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