Political Research Quarterly

Leo Strauss ends his Socrates and Aristophanes with a pregnant assertion: the best account of the Socratic turn is offered by al-Razi in his The Philosophical Way of Life.  Al-Razi’s account thus provides two invaluable opportunities: to gain some insight into Strauss’s unique understanding of Socrates, and the chance to examine the problem of Socrates from a nontraditional vantage point. Taking advantage of these opportunities reveals an oft-overlooked moment in the history of political philosophy: Socrates’s discovery of the regime. This essay examines al-Razi’s account while also casting a new light on Strauss’s own scholarship.

Scholarly interest in hybridity has focused largely on the present and recent past. Yet, one of the great theorists of hybridity is an ancient one: Herodotus. By describing a globe in motion—the motion of people across borders and through time—Herodotus draws a picture of a world that brings the hybrid to the fore. He thinks seriously about how we should regard diversity in light of global hybridity. Reading Herodotus as a theorist of the hybrid not only adds an interesting perspective to contemporary conversations but also reminds us of hybridity’s enduring importance as a subject of political inquiry.

This article explores the connection between political theory and political commentary in the editorial stance of Dissent magazine’s staff, especially Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, and Michael Walzer. It argues that central to the political thought of the Dissent circle was a rejection of ideological Puritanism on the American left. Dissent’s theoretical contribution was to develop a space for a policy-oriented social democratic platform that draws on both liberalism and communism while transforming them. Thus, Howe sought a socialism that drew on valuable liberal insights, while Walzer looked for a permanent uneasy coexistence between social democracy, liberalism, and communitarianism.

The exploration of the religious underpinnings of intolerance has long focused on the effects of religious behaviors and beliefs, but has ignored a variety of important facets of the religious experience that should bear on tolerance judgments: elite communication, religious values about how the world should be ordered, and social networks in churches. We focus on the communication of religious values and argue specifically that values should affect threat judgments and thus affect tolerance judgments indirectly. We test these assertions using data gathered in a survey experiment and find that priming exclusive religious values augments threat and thus reduces tolerance.

Public opinion polls demonstrate that Arab citizens support both democracy and shari’a. I argue that individual values related to the secular-Islamist cleavage are instrumental in explaining this joint support. The analysis of the Arab Barometer Survey shows that individuals holding Islamic values are more favorable of shari’a, whereas those with secularist values tend to support democracy. However, the bivariate probit estimations also confirm that Arab opinion about these governing principles is more complementary and less divergent. The results imply that constitutional models combining Islam and democracy, rather than strictly secular institutions, may be more acceptable to Arab citizens.

What explains the behavior of legislators on bills that restrict the rights of marginalized minorities? Studies of representation typically focus on factors like party or public opinion but seldom account for theories of minority representation like electoral capture or subconstituency politics. One reason for this is that data allowing for the comparison of these theories are seldom available for U.S. House districts. We overcome this hurdle by implementing multilevel regression with post-stratification to estimate opinion on gay marriage during the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act vote. We show that subconstituency politics explains legislators’ behavior better than electoral capture, party, or public opinion.

Case salience affects nearly every aspect of Supreme Court justices’ behavior, yet a valid actor-based measure of salience has remained elusive. Researchers have instead relied on external proxy indicators, such as amicus curiae participation and media coverage, to explain justices’ behavior. We propose a novel measurement of salience in which we use justices’ differential levels of engagement to generate actor-based measures of case and justice-level salience. Focusing on justices’ behavior during oral argument, we contend that the more engaged the justices are in a case—defined by the number of words they speak—the more salient the case.

Riker famously theorized that political actors faced with suboptimal outcomes might be able to garner a more desirable one by adding issues to the agenda. To date, limited support for Riker’s theory of heresthetics exists, primarily consisting of case studies and anecdotal evidence. We offer a systematic analysis of heresthetical maneuvers in the context of Supreme Court decision making. We argue justices who oppose a potential case outcome may add alternative issues to the record in an effort to restructure the terms of debate. Data from justices’ behavior during oral argument support Riker’s theory.

Judicial autonomy from societal actors is argued herein to be a critical aspect of the rule of law and to have been overlooked by the dominance within comparative judicial politics of the role of interbranch judicial independence. These distinct concepts are parsed and then interrelated to form a typology of four “judicial regime types”: liberal regimes, partisan control regimes, clandestine control regimes, and government control regimes. These regime types are then traced in five Central American countries.

It is widely assumed that candidate issue convergence or “dialogue” is beneficial for voters in campaigns. Using a lagged weekly measure of issue convergence in political advertising about specific campaign issues from the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, I show that dialogue, as it is currently defined by campaigns and elections scholars, is as likely to harm voters as it is to help them. These findings require scholars to think more deeply about what role, if any, issue convergence plays in deliberative campaigns.

Scholars have seemingly established that constituents hold “out of step” legislators electorally accountable. Empirically, however, such claims have not been based on measures placing districts and perceptions of legislators’ preferences in the same space. We remedy this using the 2006 and 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, and Aldrich and McKelvey’s scaling procedure, finding that electoral success is roughly consistent with Downsian logic but not with the blanket statement that out-of-step incumbents are penalized. Voters punish out-of-step incumbents conditional on having a sufficiently more “in step” challenger. Effects are substantial, but so are incumbent advantages.

The impressionable years thesis asserts that early adulthood is accompanied by increased attitudinal vulnerability. Although there is tentative empirical evidence to support this idea, it remains unclear whether this sensitivity is due to exposure to change-inducing circumstances, typically encountered in early adulthood, or due to the weight attached by young people to new information. I address this question, focusing on a political event—the Watergate—that offers a test of youth’s heightened susceptibility, holding exposure constant. The results confirm the impressionable years thesis and shed light on how it is most likely to be manifested empirically.

This research conceptualizes political engagement in Facebook and examines the political activity of Facebook users during the 2008 presidential primary (T1) and general election (T2). Using a resource model, we test whether factors helpful in understanding offline political participation also explain political participation in Facebook. We consider resources (socioeconomic status [SES]) and political interest and also test whether network size works to increase political activity. We find that individual political activity in Facebook is not as extensive as popular accounts suggest. Moreover, the predictors associated with the resource model and Putnam’s theory of social capital do not hold true in Facebook.

Publicity is central to terrorism, but demonstrating a link between press freedom and the targeting of attacks is challenging. There are several reasons for this: (1) studies do not distinguish between press freedom and press attention; (2) perpetrators use press freedom to weed out unacceptable targets rather than to determine which targets to attack; (3) only foreign, not domestic, perpetrators depend on press attention; and (4) foreign terrorists satisfy their desire for press attention by attacking powerful states. Our models confirm this argument about press freedom and national power even after controlling for executive constraints, polity, and foreign policy activity.

We examine whether votes on minority rights make the public less sympathetic to the targeted group. Panel data are used to test whether votes on marriage changed public attitudes about gays and lesbians. We propose the marriage debate had a stigmatizing effect on attitudes about gays and lesbians in states where marriage was on the ballot. Results reveal a conditional relationship. Religious people in states where marriage was voted on had lower affect for gays and lesbians after the campaign. Independent of policy outcomes, subjecting a minority group to public judgment about rights may promote animus toward the group.

Influential economic models predict that as inequality increases, the public will demand greater redistribution. However, there is limited research into the determinants of support for redistributive tax increases because such proposals have been so rare in America in recent decades. We use Washington State’s Proposition 1098 to examine how economic self-interest, concerns about inequality, and partisanship influence support for redistributive taxation. The results show that all of these factors influenced support, with strong support among the lower income, indicating that when the distributional implications of policies are clear, citizens can translate their self-interest and broad attitudes into congruent redistributive preferences.

We examine the extent to which governments consider the role of bicameral conflict resolution procedures in legislative agenda-setting. We argue that governments may use these institutions to promote policy change in the event of bicameral conflict, especially when facing uncertainty over bicameral policy preferences. We test our arguments using comprehensive original data on forty years of German legislation and find that bicameral conflict resolution committees play a more sophisticated role in governmental policy making than previously suspected.

“The ‘Palin Effect’ in the U.S. 2008 Presidential Election” analyzes the effect of Sarah Palin on presidential vote choice. Two of the substantive conclusions are (1) Palin cost McCain votes among independents and moderates, and (2) Palin had the largest effect on vote choice of any recent vice-presidential nominee. Our analysis shows that the data do not support these findings. We find that respondent evaluations of Palin have a positive effect on McCain vote choice, even among independents and moderates, and Palin’s effect on the election outcome is comparable with ten of the last fifteen vice-presidential nominees.