In the Current Issue

Volume 138 - Number 1 - Spring 2023

Articles

The 2022 Elections: A Test of Democracy’s Resilience and the Referendum Theory of Midterms
Gary C. Jacobson discusses the 2022 midterm elections. He examines why Democrats lost far fewer House seats than standard referendum models predicted given high inflation and Joe Biden’s low approval ratings. He argues that Donald Trump’s meddling and the Court’s Dobbs decision reframed the vote choice in ways that energized Democrats, hardened partisan attitudes, and minimized defections even among those with negative opinions of Biden’s performance.

Polarized Politics: Protest Against COVID-19 Containment Policies in the USA
KATHARINA GABRIELA PFAFF, THOMAS PLÜMPER AND Eric Neumayer analyze protests against COVID-19 containment policies in U.S. states. They show that protest was strongly influenced by partisan control over state governorship and legislatures. The authors argue that protest events occurred in states fully controlled by Democrats even when they adopted similarly stringent containment policies as Republican-controlled states and that the same increase in stringency triggered more protest in blue than in red states.

Explaining Types of Military Defections during Major Anti-authoritarian Protests
Kara Kingma Neu examines military defections during major anti-authoritarian protests and distinguishes between those that involve a united military organization and those that are fragmented. She explains these types of defections by looking at how a dictator’s use of coup-proofing strategies marginalizes all or only some middle- and high-ranking officers.

Quantum Political Science: Learning About Politics from Egypt
Lisa Anderson reviews Mona EL-Ghobashy’s Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation. Anderson draws on her experience as a political scientist and president of the American University in Cairo during the Arab Spring to assess El-Ghobashy’s subtle and provocative characterization of the events of the period, drawing broader conclusions about the practice of political science under conditions of uncertainty.

Can Social Movements Save American Democracy? A Review Article
ROBERT LIEBERMAN reviews Sidney Tarrow’s Movements and Parties. He argues that recent scholarship on the fragility of American democracy has generally focused on political elites rather than the mass public and that Tarrow’s book offers an essential corrective to this view. Lieberman notes that Tarrow shows how social movements have been central to historical patterns of democratization and democratic backsliding in American history and how movements have systematically interacted with political parties in ways that have profoundly shaped the American democratic experiment.

Why We Don’t Fight: A Review Article
Lionel Beehner reviews Christopher Blattman’s Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace. He applauds the author for breaking down the various schools of thought in the international relations discipline explaining war onset but argues the author’s analysis neglects important qualitative factors, as well as recent technological innovations, to explain “why we fight.”

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