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Scholars have long feared that regional economic specialization, fostered by freer trade, would make the European Union vulnerable to economic downturn. The most acute concerns have been over the adoption of the common currency: by adopting the euro, countries renounce their ability to meet an asymmetric shock with independent revaluations of their currencies. We systematically test the prediction that regional specialization increases vulnerability to economic downturn using a novel dataset that covers all of the EU’s subnational regions and major sectors of the economy between 2000 and 2013. We find that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the most specialized regions actually fared better during the 2008-09 global financial crisis. Specialized regions performed worse only in states that remained outside the Eurozone. The heightened vulnerability of non-Eurozone states cannot be attributed to fiscal or social policy failures. Rather, our results suggest the common currency may have helped Eurozone members share risk. This bodes well for the resiliency of the EU, even as it navigates another economic downturn from the asymmetric impact of the novel coronavirus. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at (10.1007/s11558-020-09410-0)

The rise of top-heavy inequality—earnings concentration in a very thin layer of elites—calls into question our understanding of the distributional effects of the Liberal International Order. Far more people lose from globalization, and fewer gain, than traditional economic models suggest. We review three modern trade theories (neo-Heckscher-Ohlin-Stolper-Samuelson or H-O-S-S, new new trade theory, and economic geography) that each arrive at the conclusion of top-heavy inequality by introducing some form of unit heterogeneity—an assumption that the actors we once treated as identical actually differ from one another in important ways. Heterogeneity allows the gains from globalization to concentrate in a narrow segment of workers with superlative talents, extraordinarily productive firms, or heavily agglomerated cities. An analysis of European voting data shows that shocks from trade and migration elicit populist opposition only where the top 1 percent have gained the most. With few politically feasible alternatives to protectionism, most notably the failure of democracies to redistribute income, our analysis predicts a persistence of public support for antiglobalization parties, especially those on the Right.

Nationalism carried heavy costs in the Third Republic. The benefits of autonomy might have been great, but his own contributions could have affected the likelihood of success only slightly. Even if the Breton cause had looked more promising than it did, the temptation to “ride free” would have been great. Less frequently elite and nonelite cultures integrate into a hybrid, as seems to have occurred between the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman conquerors. According to the logic of the present model, neither event will give rise to nationalism so long as the cultural division of labor is maintained, that is, so long as the elite skills continue to be monopolized by the elite culture. Indeed, pressure for assimilation usually weakens the nonelite by inducing self-contempt and intense intergenerational and intrapersonal conflict. Except where they (a) extremely improve the position of the none Ute.

Political science produces highly policy-relevant research, but politicians ignore it in favor of their own (or their supporters’) biases. I give examples from such fields as anti-immigrant politics, political business cycles and the politics of redistribution. The sole area in which politicians do attend closely to scholarly research is where it assists their own efforts at electoral success (e.g. effect and duration of political advertising). But politicians equally ignore the expertise of climatologists, physicists, biologists, economists and even spies, where that expertise contradicts their own preferred policies. All of this points more to a problem of democratic politics than of political (or any other) science.

Peer review is central to political science. In this article we collect the ideas of journal editors in political science and several recent PhDs, who met as a panel at the 2011 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting to discuss the principles of the review process. This includes why reviewing is important to the development of one's own scholarship but also offers some nuts and bolts on reviewing.

What sustains slavery, and why at critical junctures—the fall of the Roman Empire, the early modern expansion of plantation agriculture, the later phases of the industrial revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s—has it often expanded or contracted so rapidly? Why have elites sometimes been united, but sometimes violently divided, over the choice between free and servile labor? Why has slavery usually been ended by legal prohibition rather than voluntary abandonment? An extremely simple dual-equilibrium picture can illuminate how, when, and with whose support slavery is introduced or abolished. Internal divisions over slavery are likely to be most intense as a society approaches either of these “tipping points.” The most striking example, explored fleetingly here, is the US Civil War.

Recent theoretical work has proposed that majoritarian electoral systems, by creating incentives for legislators to favor the interests of consumers over producers, should lead to more consumer-friendly and procompetitive regulatory policies and hence to lower real price levels. Empirical analysis confirming this effect has so far been confined to OECD democracies, but there are reasons to believe that, due to differences in state capacity and consumer-producer preferences, the same price effects might not obtain—or might even be reversed—in less economically developed democracies. Using a generalized estimating equation approach, we find that the expected relationship indeed holds in all democracies worldwide between 1972 and 2000. The marginal long-run price level in majoritarian systems is estimated to be lower by over 10%.

We report on the journal's operations during the year from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011. We once again express our thanks to the APSA: Presidents Brady and Pateman, the staff (especially Michael Brintnall and Polly Karpowicz), Council, and Publications Committee. (While we have enjoyed ready access to previous presidents, it has been a new experience to have an APSA president right down the hall from the lead editor.) Members of our Editorial Board, this year as last, have given us wise counsel on more than a few submissions. Joseph Riser, our senior editor, has continued his seemingly tireless and unflappable service; and our editorial assistants, Joslyn Barnhart, Darin Dewitt, and Beltrán Undurraga, have pulled together in harness as have few previous teams, keeping our technical processing rapid and our backlog almost always at zero. As rotation on the panel of co-editors continues, we express our profound gratitude to departing editor Jeff Lewis, who exhibited a new level of masochism by becoming UCLA department chair, but who also agreed to finish (and since has finished) all of his pending assignments and to be available for consultations on an “as needed” basis. We also thank, once again, the authors who submitted their papers for consideration, the referees who reviewed them, and the patience, dedication, and forbearance that all demonstrated.

We report here on the journal's operations during the year from July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010.

We report here on the journal's operations during the year from July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009. In doing so, we want first to express our thanks to the APSA: its staff, Council, and Publications Committee, both for good advice and for important material support. The impact of both is documented, albeit only partially, in the following article. The APSR Editorial Board and its Executive Committee have also been invaluable, and we have benefited particularly from the concentrated counsel that a subcommittee provided during a two-day site visit to UCLA in July. Editorial Board members have also given unstintingly of their time to serve as guest editors on UCLA-connected submissions that might otherwise raise conflicts of interest. We owe very special debts of gratitude to our Senior Editor, Joseph Riser, whose serene and wise disposition seems never to falter; our graduate editorial assistants (EAs), Megan Gallagher, Diana Ichpekova, Rebekah Sterling, and Matt Spence; two of our original co-editors, Kathleen Bawn and Michael Chwe, who gave extraordinarily dedicated service but decided to leave the group effective July 1, 2009; and Gary Cox (UCSD) and Arthur Lupia (Michigan), who agreed to join our weekly meetings via videoconference—in Gary's case, for the long term; in Skip's, temporarily. Finally, we thank the authors of the nearly 700 papers submitted to us and the over 2,000 referees who gave, unremunerated and anonymously as always, their astute and often admirably detailed counsel.

This report was the first to be prepared by the UCLA-based team of co-editors that took over leadership of the Review in July 2007 from Lee Sigelman, who had edited it for the previous six years. Here we report on the journal's operations during the year from July 1, 2007, to June 30, 2008, including both decisions made during the early months by Lee, as he closed up shop, and those made by the new team. Because revisions often take authors many months to complete, the time span between original submission and final acceptance of an article can be long. As a result, the issues of the journal published between mid-2007 and mid-2008 owe at least as much to Lee as they do to us—indeed, of the articles accepted during those 12 months, 83% either had been accepted by Lee or came to us as revised versions of papers he had initially handled, almost all of which we accepted. So our first task is to acknowledge the extremely important contribution Lee made to the publication in this transitional year, even as he was beginning a well-deserved rest. We are grateful to Lee for all his help, and our respect for his management skills only increases with time.

Harry Eckstein's Theory of Stable Democracy briefly revolutionized thinking about authority structures in nongovernmental organizations but has left little lasting mark. Indeed, the theory failed as an account of stable democracy but, by emphasizing correctly the commonalities between public and private authority, it pointed the way to a general theory of authority in organizations. Such a theory is now emerging, chiefly from work on authority in capitalist firms. It is time for students of politics again to look beyond the state, as Eckstein argued, to the much wider universe of authority relations.

A similar set of concepts has been central to the literatures on the formation of trade policy coalitions and the “new economics of institutions”: the political and economic consequences of the degree to which assets are specific to a particular economic activity. In this survey, the authors take the necessary first step of summarizing the main findings of these two literatures and then suggest ways in which the issue might be joined. In addition to providing a more coherent understanding of the findings of these two literatures and some new directions for them, the authors show that many puzzles remain in the field of trade politics—puzzles for which there are no appealing answers or, where there are answers, no strong evidence in support of them. This essay, then, in addition to being a theoretical review of the literature, puts forward an agenda for future study of international trade politics.

Designing Social Inquiry, by King, Keohane, and Verba (KKV), deserves praise for many reasons. It attempts, seriously and without condescension, to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative political science. It reminds a new generation of students, in both traditions, of some main characteristics of good theory (testability, operationalizability, and "leverage," or deductive fertility). It clarifies, even for the profoundly mathematically challenged, some of the central strictures of statistical inference (why one cannot have more variables than cases or select on the dependent variable, or why it biases results if measurement of the independent variable is faulty). It abounds with practical wisdom on research design, case selection, and complementary methodologies. Perhaps most important, it opens a dialogue between previously isolated practitioners of these two forms of analysis and provokes worthwhile discussion. For all of these reasons and more, the book should be, will be, and-indeed, even in its samizdat formsalready has been widely assigned and read. It is, quite simply, the best work of its kind now available; indeed, it is very likely the best yet to have appeared.' At the same time, I think, Designing Social Inquiry falters in its aim of evangelizing qualitative social scientists; and it does so, paradoxically, because it attends insufficiently to the importance of problemation and deductive theorizing in the scientific enterprise. As natural scientists have long understood (see Hempel, 1966), inference proceeds most efficiently by three complementary routes: (1) making clear the essential model, or process, that one hypothesizes to be at work; (2) teasing out the deductive implications of that model, focusing particularly on the implications that seem a priori least plausible; and (3) rigorously testing those least plausible implications against empirical reality.2 The Nobel physicist and polymath Richard Feynman may have put it best:3

This book investigates the effects of electoral systems on the relative legislative and, hence, regulatory influence of competing interests in society. Building on Ronald Rogowski and Mark Andreas Kayser's extension of the classic Stigler–Peltzman model of regulation, the authors demonstrate that majoritarian electoral arrangements should empower consumers relative to producers. Employing real price levels as a proxy for consumer power, the book rigorously establishes this proposition over time, within the OECD, and across a large sample of developing countries. Majoritarian electoral arrangements depress real prices by approximately ten percent, all else equal. The authors carefully construct and test their argument and broaden it to consider the overall welfare effects of electoral system design and the incentives of actors in the choice of electoral institutions.

We begin with some fundamental and still highly influential work on regulation and its effects by two leading economists of the mid-twentieth century, George Stigler and Sam Peltzman. We then move to develop a specific Stigler-Peltzman political support function and analyze the role of electoral responsiveness in it. We next consider possible welfare and distributional effects of regulated, high-price economic systems. We then consider how the analysis might differ in a small, open, export-dependent economy. Then, having analyzed the effect of various kinds of democratic constitutions, we consider some of the implications for nondemocracies, weakly institutionalized democracies, and less developed economies. Finally, we consider whether electoral systems can be regarded as exogenous and whether this affects our overall analysis. The Stigler-Peltzman Framework The essential insight of the Stigler-Peltzman (S-P) analysis of regulation can be conveyed by a single and widely familiar diagram shown in Figure 2.1 (cf. Peltzman 1976, p. 224). Suppose that the price of a given industry's product is represented on the horizontal axis and its profits on the vertical one. At the perfectly competitive price ( p c ), profits will be zero. To the extent that regulation in any of its familiar forms – licensure schemes that artificially restrict supply, regulatory boards that set minimum prices, impediments to efficient retailing, tariffs, quotas, and so on – raises the product's price above this competitive level, total industry profits begin to rise until price reaches the level that a monopoly would impose; this is denoted as p m . If regulation becomes so restrictive of supply as to push price even beyond this monopolistic level, industry profits again decline, returning to zero (or even becoming negative) as the price becomes prohibitive.

We have proposed that a democracy's electoral rules are linked to the regulatory output of that country's elected legislators, and that this effect manifests itself in a country's real-price levels. In particular, we contend that the greater seat-vote elasticities of majoritarian electoral systems will tilt policy in favor of consumers, while proportional systems should strengthen producers; and that the pro-consumer bias of majoritarian systems should lead to systematically lower prices. Empirical testing of our hypothesis in Chapter 3 supported the expected relationship between majoritarian electoral institutions and lower real prices among the wealthy, developed democracies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Among the twenty-three OECD democracies, a country that shifted from a proportional to a majoritarian electoral system was estimated typically to enjoy a short-run yearly reduction in real prices of about 1.2 index points (where U.S. prices = 100), corresponding to a long-run reduction in real prices of at least 10 percent. This is about half of a standard deviation of average prices across OECD countries – over time, a significant effect.