This issue of Perspectives on Politics presents a disparate sampling of research from across the discipline. The papers are diverse in terms of substantive focus, methodological approach, and disciplinary subfield. They offer, in various creative combinations, historical analysis, theoretical exploration, policy advice, and informed prognostication. More importantly perhaps, the authors whose work you find here range across ranks from the very junior to full professors and across institutional affiliations from small liberal arts colleges to some of our most prominent public and private research universities, all with several stops in between. In these ways I hope the work we are publishing does not simply reflect or even celebrate the diversity of our discipline. I hope instead that our continuing to publish work of this quality and provenance goes some distance toward insuring that rich diversity will remain a central feature of our future.

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Sherman Minton? Not just a clue in the game of political trivia, Minton is an exemplar in what Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz argue is an increasingly rare specimen—the “short term” justice on the United States Supreme Court. With Minton in mind, Crowe and Karpowitz offer a provocative diagnosis of the politics of Supreme Court justices. Allsion Martens takes up a different aspect of this theme in her reassessment of Judicial Supremacy. Both of theses papers address current political concerns and illustrate how political scientists can bring their distinctive insights to bear on legal scholarship. In the process both papers press forward a conversation between our own discipline and those scholars who inhabit law schools that we have encouraged in previous issues of Perspectives (see Barry Friedman's 2006 “Taking Law Seriously,” in volume 4, issue 2).

Sidney Milkis and Jesse Rhodes direct our attention away from American judicial politics and toward the executive branch. They argue that, following on the presidency of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush has successfully used his office to build not just the Republican Party, but a new “party system” in the United States.

Oleg Smirnov changes the subject entirely. He simultaneously raises a considerably more abstract issue—the possibility of stable, decentralized cooperative behavior in the face of predicaments surrounding common pool resources—and addresses himself to the implications current research on this topic holds for public policy. His aim is to show how convergent research on “Altrusitic Punishment” in evolutionary game theory and several experimental social sciences helps us understand the conditions under which decentralized and centralized policies might operate effectively.

Rodger Payne seeks to catch the neo-realists among International Relations scholars in what we might call a pragmatic contradiction. He argues that while their own theory of politics discounts ideas and principles, they themselves peddle ideas to elites and the public. More specifically, he chides neo-realists for complaining in policy debates when political leaders dissemble, mis-represent, spin, and otherwise skirt the truth. Such practical complaints, Payne insists, seem to be consistently at odds with the theoretical expectations that neo-realists would have us embrace. In so doing, Payne advances what seems to be a fundamental challenge to the very coherence of the various forms of neo-realism on offer among our colleagues.

As his title intimates, Jeffrey Legro takes up yet another pressing political issue—the ways the emergence of China as a political and economic force will alter world affairs. While extant theories suggest that we attend primarily to either the destabilizing impact of China's relative power or the integrative effects of its economic interdependence, Legro focuses on a third phenomena. He insists that national ideas regarding effective foreign policy afford the inescapable medium on which the pressures to instability or integration will work themselves out. More precisely, he argues that these ideas will not only shape the strategies Chinese leaders will forge as they confront unavoidable contingencies but that they afford invaluable levers for American foreign policy makers.

Our last three papers bring us to the domain of comparative politics. Each takes up a theme of accountability and representation. Joshua Tucker relies on recent “revolutions” in post-Communist regimes to refine our views about political protest and collective action. Here too he is taking up a substantive topic that we have engaged in previous issues (see Mark R. Beissinger's 2007 “Structure and Example in Modular Political Phenomena: The Diffusion of Bulldozer/Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions,” in volume 5, issue 02). Tucker argues that, when publicized, electoral fraud provides a focal point that can (but need not) help to coordinate large-scale political protest. Karen Beckwith and Kimberly Cowell-Meyers set themselves the task of assessing the impact of “critical mass” in the politics of gender. In the process they shift our attention from how accountability operates in the streets to how it works in representative institutions. They argue that if we hope to understand the mechanisms of how women are represented politically we must look beyond the makeup of legislative bodies. We must also consider not just the “sheer numbers” of woman legislators but also the conditions that obtain in parliamentary institutions and civil society. Finally, Michael Goodhart challenges democratic theorists to take the institutions of the European Union as a test of their own categories and concepts. In so doing he trespasses across the conventional divide between empirical analysis and normative assessment. Goodhart argues forcefully that supranational entities such as the EU demand a fundamental reworking of democratic theory.