The Yale Initiative: Political Order in the Changing World, 2001-2009
In 2000, the Yale Political Science Department began a major expansion. To capitalize on this opportunity and guide our hiring, the faculty identified five problem areas vital to any consideration of political order in the changing world. Over the ensuing decade, more than two dozen new faculty members were brought on board under this initiative. Conferences organized around the themes of the initiative brought together scholars from across the traditional subfields of political science. Workshops addressed to these themes were established for an ongoing exchange of ideas. In all these ways, the initiative has left a distinct and durable mark on the Department. Its success in focusing our energies and projecting them outward onto the larger community of scholars leads us anticipate other efforts of this sort in the future.
PROBLEM AREAS TARGETED BY THE INITIATIVE:
Order, Conflict, and Violence
Concerns: revolution, riots, civil war, genocide, international war and peace; what makes conflict more or less violent; classical theorists of order and conflict such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Kant; the evolution of national; non–national, or transnational political orders; the politics of crime; the legitimation of order; or the state as an instrument of political order.
Representation and Popular Rule
Concerns: interest groups, political parties, money in politics; taxation; mass media; subsidiarity and transnational representation; redistricting and group representation (based on ethnicity, race, gender, or something else); failures of representation; demands for secession and suburban white flight; mass political action or the lack of it; preconditions for popular rule; or classic insights on these questions, such as those of Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, or Mill.
Distributive Politics
Concerns: distributional foundations and consequences of different regimes; capitalism and democracy; interactions between global markets and nation states; rights, entitlements, and welfare states; collective action; normative theories of distributive justice and positive theories of social choice, whether classical or contemporary; or the global distribution of goods and bads.
Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances
Concerns: the value of classic reflections such as those of Hegel or Nietzsche; relevant contemporary philosophical literature; the political psychology of partisanship and ideology; ethnicity, race, class, gender, nationalism, and religion as sources of political attachment; immigration, displaced persons, refugees and dual citizens; identities and allegiances in international politics (what brings states together, keeps them together, and drives them apart).
Crafting and Operating Institutions
Concerns: political institutions above and below the nation state and their evolution; constitutional design and democratic performance; the relevance of classics of institutional choice (e.g. Plato, Machiavelli, The Federalist) or contemporary analytic theory; parliamentism v. presidentialism, bicameralism v. unicameralism; confederal, federal, and unitary systems; components of institutional regimes such as courts, legislatures, bureaucracies, and executives, as well as their interactions; the political functions of non–governmental organizations.
CONFERENCE VOLUMES COMING OUT OF THE INITIATIVE
Ian Shapiro, Rogers Smith, and Tarek Masoud, eds, Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin, eds, Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State (New York University Press, 2006)
Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovich, eds, Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Ian Shapiro and Sonu Bedi, eds, Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the Accidental, and the Unforeseen (New York University Press, 2007).
Stathis Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro, Tarek Masoud, eds, Order, Conflict, and Violence, co-edited (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Ian Shapiro, Peter Swenson, and Daniela Donno, eds, Divide and Deal: The Politics of Distribution in Democracies (New York University Press, 2008).
Ian Shapiro, Susan Stokes, Elisabeth Wood, and Alexander Kirshner, eds, Political Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
