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According to popular wisdom, judicial independence & the rule of law are essential features of modern democracy. Drawing on the growing comparative literature on courts, we unpack this claim by focusing on two broad questions: How does the type of political regime affect judicial independence? Are independent courts, in fact, always essential for establishing the rule of law? In highlighting the role of institutional fragmentation & public opinion, we explain why democracies are indeed more likely than dictatorships to produce both independent courts & the rule of law. Yet, by also considering the puzzle of institutional instability that marks courts in much of the developing world, we identify several reasons why democracy may not always prove sufficient for constructing either. Finally, we argue that independent courts are not always necessary for the rule of law, particularly where support for individual rights is relatively widespread. Adapted from the source document.

The past generation has witnessed a resurgence of religion in global politics, but political science has been slow to catch up with it. The reason lies in the secularism embedded in the field's major theories, one that reflects actual secularism in world politics, beginning with the events surrounding the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 & growing steadily through the middle twentieth century. Today, a small but growing number of political scientists have begun to explore religion, doing so in ways that depart from secular assumptions & embrace religion's distinctiveness to greater & lesser degrees. Adapted from the source document.

This essay reviews two research programs. The first focuses on variations in the number of women elected to national parliaments in the world (descriptive representation), & the second focuses on effects of women's presence in parliament (substantive representation). The theory of the politics of presence (Phillips 1995) provides reasons for expecting a link between descriptive & substantive representation. The safest position would be to say that results are "mixed" when it comes to empirical support for the theory of the politics of presence. However, when a large number of studies covering a wide set of indicators on the importance of gender in the parliamentary process are piled together, the picture that emerges shows that female politicians contribute to strengthening the position of women's interests. Adapted from the source document.

This article summarizes a small part of the literature on laboratory experiments in political economy. The experiments discussed are primarily aimed at testing predictions of equilibrium models of voting in committees & elections. The specific topics discussed are voter turnout, the Condorcet jury theorem, & the swing voter's curse. The latter two topics address questions of information aggregation by voting rules. All the experiments find significant evidence of strategic voting &, with a few exceptions, find support for the equilibrium predictions of the theories. Adapted from the source document.

This article asks three questions. Why is government organized across multiple levels? Does efficiency determine the level at which decisions are made? Does efficiency frame how policy problems are bundled in jurisdictions? Rather than examine how government structure may or may not lead to efficient outcomes, this article considers how efficiency constrains government. The purpose here is to probe fundamental commonalities of government structure which are usually taken for granted because they exist in an otherwise fluctuating political universe. Adapted from the source document.

This article provides a political explanation for the unexpectedly high levels of income inequality found in the African region today. Traditional explanations for inequality are reviewed & found not to be compelling. Instead, it is argued that natural endowments in the region shaped the nature of colonial institutions, which in turn created the conditions for the high levels of inequality found today. The surprisingly high levels of inequality in Africa can be understood as resulting from a process of class formation linked to dynamics of state building that have their origins in the economic institutions of the early colonial state. Insofar as political power has often been used to gain economic advantages during the postcolonial era, inequality has changed little over the past 40 years, despite the official focus on development & poverty alleviation by donors & governments alike. Adapted from the source document.

This article examines the concepts of group membership, group identity & racial identity, & group consciousness. For each of these we discuss theoretical definitions, research using the various definitions, & issues of measurement. We show that these concepts are distinct & build on each other, rather than being interchangeable. We also explore the concept of linked fate, which evolved from the concept of group consciousness & is central in the race & politics literature. Finally, we address the very important question of whether we are in danger of overextrapolation -- taking concepts developed in research on one group & grafting them onto other groups. Adapted from the source document.

There is still no broad consensus on the extent to which racial prejudice influences white Americans' political attitudes, in part because of an ongoing dispute over the nature & measurement of racial prejudice. We review measures of new, subtle forms of racism toward African-Americans & consider criticism that such views do not clearly constitute racial prejudice despite their political impact. We then evaluate a number of ways in which explicit prejudice can be assessed in surveys, highlighting the continued existence & successful measurement of overt prejudice. We also consider ways to measure prejudice other than direct survey questions. Social psychologists have gravitated to the measurement of implicit racial attitudes, an approach that we review critically as potentially interesting but with unknown payoff for political researchers. Finally, we discuss the value of experiments as a way to gain direct evidence of politically potent racial discrimination & assess the prejudicial nature of explicit racial attitudes. Adapted from the source document.

This article reviews the literature on the onset & dynamics of domestic terrorism, with special emphasis on the interactions between terrorist organizations, the state, & society. Because this literature has often been based on case studies, we seek to impose some structure to its findings. We challenge the distinction between domestic & international terrorism, which truncates the sample of violence, & we show that the actor-sense of terrorism (violence carried out by underground organizations) is the most appropriate model for causal analysis. Terrorist organizations tend to emerge in developed countries in which the state is able to prevent the loss of control over any part of its territory. Terrorists take advantage of the state's mistakes (when, for example, it is over-repressive or makes ineffective concessions) in order to boost their support. Terrorists cannot survive without some degree of support. Consequently, levels of violence & targets are determined by social constraints. Adapted from the source document.

The redistricting process evokes major questions about representative democracy, fairness, & political accountability. This article covers the state of the field along three dimensions. First, it explains how redistricting bears on questions about racial & minority representation. Second, it examines how redistricting influences electoral competition, focusing on the alleged power of partisans & incumbents to draw maps that eliminate all but token opposition. Third & last, it discusses the issues surrounding the redistricting process itself & how various procedural reforms may influence political outcomes. Although significant progress has been made in understanding how different redistricting schemes create various biases in the electoral system, a review of the literature shows that major questions have not been resolved regarding the effects of redistricting on electoral competition, partisan polarization, & representation of communities of interest, especially minorities. Moreover, there is insufficient evidence from empirical research to justify any particular reform of the redistricting process. In addition to filling these gaps, future work might also broaden the scope of research to assess how redistricting affects other aspects of democracy, including political participation, efficacy, & trust. Adapted from the source document.

Neorepublicanism may be defined as the attempt by current political scientists, philosophers, historians, lawyers, & others to draw on a classical republican tradition in the development of an attractive public philosophy intended for contemporary purposes. Three main ideas have been especially prominent in the neorepublican literature. First & most important is the conception of a free person as one who does not live under the arbitrary will or domination of others. Second is the associated conception of a free state as one that attempts to promote the freedom of its citizens without itself coming to dominate them. & third is the conception of good citizenship as consisting in a vigilant commitment to preserving the state in its distinctive role as an undominating protector against domination. The aim of the neorepublican research program is to rethink issues of legitimacy & democracy, welfare & justice, public policy & institutional design, from within the framework that these basic ideas provide. Adapted from the source document.

Since the first half of the twentieth century, whites have become much more accepting of the principle of racial equality even as they have continued to endorse negative racial stereotypes about African-Americans. Some scholars argue that this ambivalence has been exploited by contemporary political elites who have learned to fashion subtle racial appeals that activate these latent attitudes without appearing to violate widely held norms of racial equality. This strategy has been dubbed racial priming. In this brief article, we summarize & evaluate the work in this area, with a particular emphasis on studies that employ experimental research designs. Adapted from the source document.

We address two questions that are central to the literature on the emergence of democracy & economic globalization. First, does democratization foster higher levels of trade & capital account openness? Second, do trade & capital account openness increase the likelihood of democratization? We review the literature in international political economy & comparative politics that has theoretically & empirically addressed these questions. We then conduct some empirical tests in a sample of developing countries to briefly evaluate the empirical relationship between democracy & economic globalization. Our analysis reveals that evidence for the claim that democracy fosters trade & capital account liberalization is robust but that empirical support for the predicted positive effect of economic openness on democracy among developing countries is weak. More theoretical work is needed to clarify the link between democracy & economic liberalization, & to this end we provide possible topics for future research. Adapted from the source document.

Current scholarship on elections in authoritarian regimes has focused on exploring the relationship between elections & democratization, & it has generally used analytical frameworks & methods imported from the study of genuinely democratic elections to do so. These tendencies have kept scholars from asking a wide range of questions about the micro-level dynamics of authoritarian elections & the systematic differences among them. With these issues in mind, this review examines literature that investigates the purpose of elections in dictatorships; the electoral behavior of voters, candidates, & incumbents in these elections; & the link between elections & democratization. The review ends with a call to redirect the study of authoritarian elections toward uncovering & explaining the important differences among them. Adapted from the source document.