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We provide a justification for political liberalism's Reciprocity Principle, which states that political decisions must be justified exclusively on the basis of considerations that all reasonable citizens can reasonably be expected to accept. The standard argument for the Reciprocity Principle grounds it in a requirement of respect for persons. We argue for a different, but compatible, justification: the Reciprocity Principle is justified because it makes possible a desirable kind of political community. The general endorsement of the Reciprocity Principle, we will argue, helps realize joint political rule and relationships of civic friendship. The main obstacle to the realization of these values is the presence of reasonable disagreement about religious, moral, and philosophical issues characteristic of liberal societies. We show the Reciprocity Principle helps to overcome this obstacle.

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

The Post-War rise in importance of the individual in international political theory, as evidenced by the development of the international human rights regime, International Criminal Law and theories of global justice, has, paradoxically, been accompanied by an highly critical approach to the concept of human nature. Criticisms of human nature largely rest on the association of the concept of with social Darwinism, racism, sexism and eugenics, but, understood properly and at the right level of generality, the concept of human nature need not attract such undesirable, pseudo-scientific bedfellows. The modern science of evolutionary psychology is in the process of changing our understanding of the social implications of our genetic inheritance, and social and political theorists ought not to resist this change, and international relations scholars should not leave the field to realist scholars. Premature generalisations based on the findings of evolutionary psychology should certainly be resisted, but so should blanket rejections of the new knowledge. The task for international political theorists is to find a way of integrating the findings of the new human sciences into a humane understanding of the human animal.

Political scientists make heavy use of census statistics but have given scant attention to the politics behind the production of those statistics. Key issues that merit analytic attention by political science include vote dilution, the policy of population growth and composition, distributional accuracy and census undercounts, the establishment of statistical races, the color-blind challenge to the ethnoracial classification, the political independence of federal statistics, the important distinction between the scientific production and the political use of the census and other statistical products, public concern about government intrusiveness, and the shift from survey and census data to administrative and digital data. Adapted from the source document.

This essay applies existing research in new institutional economics to early modern European political theory so as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, the essay proposes that understanding early modern European political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries (in a particular sense of that term) can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists' normative prescriptions. Early modern political theorists faced significant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing material resources using impartial criteria. By contrast, many contemporary readers of these writers live in the developed and liberal-democratic West. Contemporary readers are thus liable to normalize their own conditions and to underestimate the political-economic constraints under which early modern political theorists wrote, thereby misreading some of the latter's normative prescriptions. By interpreting early modern political theorists as writers who faced institutional constraints that have significantly receded in today's West, contemporary readers can enrich their understanding of these writers' objectives.

Intro -- Contents -- Foreword by Bruce Miroff and Stephen Skowronek -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction -- Institutionalists and Radical Democrats -- The Third Tradition: Beyond Mechanics and Spontaneity -- Modernism as Channeled Flux -- Sovereignty and the State -- Citizenship and Legitimacy -- Civic Education -- The Search for Reform Politics -- 2. The Impulse toward a Science of Politics, 1880-1900 -- The Attack on Amateurs -- The Profession Builders -- The Strange Populism of the Founder of American Sociology -- The Literary Politician and the Administrative Elite -- The American Crisis Formulated -- 3. Science as Muckraking: The Cult of Realism in the Progressive Era -- Arthur F. Bentley: The Objective Science of Middle-Class Revolution -- The Fashioning of Scientific Politics -- Progressive Science as Critical Unmasking -- Between Science and Sentiment: The Chastened Optimism of Charles Austin Beard -- The Paradox of Realism -- Realism versus Reform: Beard's Confrontation with the American Political Tradition -- The Return to "Values -- The Demise of Fact Gathering -- 4. Reform and Disillusionment in the New Deal -- Charles E. Merriam and the Crisis of American Democracy -- Behavioral Political Science and the Crisis of American Democracy -- The Making of a Rational Public -- Charles E. Merriam and the New Deal -- Reform versus Science -- The Reformer as Therapist: Harold D. Lasswell -- The Early Works -- The Eclipse of Reform Science: Conclusions -- 5. The Behavioral Era -- V. O. and the Third Tradition -- Behavioralism as Pure Science -- Empirical Democratic Theory -- Legitimacy, Power, and the Political Subculture -- The Behavioralism of David Truman -- From Reformism to Behavioralism -- Pluralist Democracy -- The Seeds of the Whirlwind -- Reality Destroys Realism -- 6. The Eclipse of Unity.