Responses to articles and replies to responses.

The 2007 John Gaus Lecture was presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, on August 31, 2007.

One of the most significant questions in the twenty-first century for academics, politicians, and Western societies more broadly is: How will Islamism impact on our future? This question, like the concept of Islamism itself, is massively complex and extremely mutable, changing, adapting, and transforming in various ideological, geographic, and cultural contexts. These five articles present a small sliver of the work being carried out in the UK on the challenges that Islamism poses for European liberal democracies, especially Britain, and these pieces ultimately propose some learned and hypothesized strategies to bring about a successful and peaceful engagement with this phenomenon.

Recent years have witnessed a rapid proliferation of radical Islamist activity in western Europe, from MI5's claim in 2006 of 30 incipient “terror plots” and 1,600 individuals under surveillance, to actual terrorist atrocities in European cities, the most infamous and deadly of which included the transport network bombings in Madrid in 2003 and in London in 2005. Concomitantly, both the media and the wider social discourse have been rife with self-appointed punditry and a plethora of commentators pontificating on European radical Islam's putative causal factors and remedies. This paper will attempt to address the complex issues by providing a fuller, more nuanced understanding of some of the causes and antecedents of Islamic political radicalism among western European Muslims.

Takfiri jihadists, typified by an al-Qaeda perspective, claim that the “true” Muslim Umma (the Islamic community) is held together by a centrifugal universality based on religious identity, and that this religion compels people to engage in a form of radical violent Islamism to confront the evils of the Dar el-Harb (non-Islamic World). A closer examination of those mechanisms of individual radicalization (whether cultural, political, social-psychological, etc.), which lead people to carry out violence in the name of Islam, demonstrates that unique combinations of chance encounters; ideological commitments; individual and collective interactions with state and international organizations/institutions; and individual experience account for propensities to support and participate in radical violent Islamism. Individual processes of mobilization and radicalization and “macro-cultural” contexts serve to ground identities and create recruitment potential for radical violent Islamists to encourage others to join and participate in their cause.The support of the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. This work has been supported by a British Academy Small Grant “Memories and Massacres in the Formation of Algerian National Identity,” reference SG-41624 and an ESRC research grant under the auspices of the program, New Security Challenge, and the article reflects research being conducted on ESRC grant RES-181-25-0017. I would especially like to express thanks for the hard work of Rebecca Fowler in helping with both this article and the symposium in its entirety.

In this article I want to address a number of issues thrust into the open by different manifestations of Islamist politics and the intersection of religion and identity politics in Western societies. This intersection should be read in conjunction with the emergence in Muslim-majority societies of forms of political activism that ground themselves in Islamic doctrines and invoke religious traditions as frames of reference. It is necessary in reading the contentions surrounding Muslim identity politics in Western settings that we take into account factors shaping the dynamics of interaction between Western countries and Muslim societies, not least among which are the long-standing historical relations associated with the colonial experience and its aftermath.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference, Diversity and National Identity in the European Union: Multicultural Challenges, at the Instituto Portuges de Relaçoes Internacionais, University Nova de Lisboa. Lisbon, March 22–23, 2007, Lisbon. This revised version benefited from presentations by Nacira Guénif-Souilamas and Schirin Amir-Moazami at the workshop, Conceptions of Islam, University of Bergen, August 27–31 2007, Bergen.

If it is assessed against an objective of reducing the number of Muslims recruited or inspired to commit terrorist acts in the name of al-Qaeda, then the U.S.-led, UK-backed war on terror launched in the aftermath of 9/11 has failed demonstrably. This performance-related assessment, as William Tupman and Carina O'Reilly argue, favors examining counterterrorism experience and the consistency of government conduct during the war on terror (Tupman and O'Reilly 2004). Such an approach, however, tends to expose the disregard the architects of the war on terror had for counterterrorism experience and policy-makers in the U.S. or UK have not adopted it in the six years since 9/11. Performance measurement may be routine in other areas of government-sponsored activity, but the war on terror has always been presented as a separate and exceptional activity dealing with an extraordinary enemy where familiar rules of engagement and conventional government behavior do not apply. However, in writing this introduction on 9/11 in 2007, it is apparent that the failure of the response to the world's most dramatic terrorist attack has finally become clear to many who supported it for the major part of its duration. Not that there is a consensus about the nature and extent of the failure. Nor is there a willingness to look to prior counterterrorism experience that might have been used to promote a measured, effective, and counterintuitive response to 9/11. Rather, notwithstanding moves to re-brand the war on terror in softer tones with particular emphasis on counterinsurgency “hearts and minds” approaches (Kilcullen 2006), the sixth anniversary of 9/11 marks the culmination of a poorly targeted military led response that has unintentionally boosted al-Qaeda credibility and recruitment.

In the months following the July 7, 2005, attack that killed 52 people and injured hundreds more, the British government was at pains to deny allegations that Britain was targeted by homegrown, al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists because of its Middle East foreign policy. Yet the government was privately aware by May 2004 that a “particularly strong cause of disillusionment amongst Muslims … is a perceived ‘double standard’ in the foreign policy of western governments (and often those of Muslim governments), in particular Britain and the U.S” (FCO/HO 2005). Specific causes cited were bias towards Israel vis-à-vis Palestinians; non-action on Kashmir and Chechnya; and “active oppression” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the wider “war on terror.” Other alleged causes included social and economic deprivation, Islamophobia (particularly following 9/11), and intergenerational clashes between first, second, and third generation Muslims. But little attempt was made either before or after July 7, 2005, to examine the interaction between these domestic and foreign sources of radicalization. This paper attempts to do so by examining the rhetoric and actions of a range of young British Muslims including: examples of 48 persons convicted of, charged for, or killed by violent jihad—evidence of young Muslim opinion on extremism and causes of violent jihadi terror in Britain. The evidence from this preliminary study, though not large enough to draw reliable statistical inferences, does suggest that not only is British foreign policy a significant source of alienation among young British Muslims, but that attitudes towards British foreign policy interact with and often reinforce domestic social, cultural, and economic sources of discontent. As explained in the literature review below, examining the links between perceptions of foreign policy towards the wider Muslim Ummah and sources of domestic discontent offers a more satisfying account of British Muslim radicalization than those offered by the dominant structural (social network theories) and “aggrieved actor” interpretations.I would like to thank Jonathan Githens-Mazer for organizing the PSA panel at the 2007 APSA Annual Meeting where I presented this paper. I would also like to thank Shah Miah for allowing me to cite evidence from his BA research project (Queen Mary, University of London); Emily Mclean Inglis and Anthony de Silva for research assistance; and Zamila Bunglawala for advice and data on British Muslims and the labor market.

Having been out of power in the House since 1994 and in the Senate for 10 of those 12 years as well, congressional Democrats' takeover of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections was an important moment in American political history. Having won the House and, somewhat more unexpectedly, the Senate by a bare majority, the Democrats recaptured control of an entire branch of the federal government for the first time since Bill Clinton left the White House. Controlling the levers of power in the House and the Senate—the legislative schedule, committees and subcommittees, and, to the extent that party bonds hold, the majority of votes in committee and on the floor—Democrats were poised to influence, but of course not unilaterally control, policymaking in the 110th Congress and the conduct of the last two years of the Bush administration through key congressional resources including funding and administrative oversight.I would like to thank all of the authors in the symposium for their willingness to participate and their excellent contributions. A special note of thanks also goes to Sean Kelly for his encouragement and advice on this project from first conception to final completion. Thanks also to Stephen Yoder and Rebecca Fowler at PS for their patience and guidance throughout.

For a quarter-century, conservative Republicans have used the “San Francisco liberal” label to place Democrats as outside the American mainstream. Imagine their dismay as the 110th Congress opened in January 2007 and Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat well to the left of most of her party, ascended to the podium as speaker of the United States House of Representatives. This was, to be sure, a departure. Traditionally, House Democrats had selected ideological “middlemen” for top leadership posts (Truman 1959), particularly those from the “Austin-Boston alliance” that held unbroken sway in House Democratic leadership selection from the initial teaming of Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas and Majority Leader John McCormack of Boston in 1940 to that of Tip O'Neill of Boston and Texan Jim Wright in the 1970s and 1980s. During this time, Democrats “almost never” selected “‘Americans for Democratic Action-type’ liberals” as leaders (Peabody 1976, 470).

The election of a Democratic majority to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 110th Congress paved the way for Nancy Pelosi of California to become the first woman speaker. As the incumbent Democratic leader, Pelosi was well known on Capitol Hill. Yet as the incoming speaker, and the first woman speaker, she faced the certainty of receiving extensive media scrutiny in the run up to the 2006 election, during the transition period, and during her first year in office. How would she become viewed by the American people? And who would shape the public's perception of her? What role would gender and her status as the historic first woman speaker play in focusing the lens of media attention?

In the week following the November 2006 midterm elections, which gave the Democratic Party control of Congress, both parties in the House held elections for various leadership offices. A total of six positions in both parties were contested, an unusually large number, but the campaign for one office—the Democratic majority leader—garnered the most attention. That race pitted two moderate Democrats against each other, threatened to split the party, and featured a remarkable intervention by the incoming speaker.Thanks to Doug Harris, Jeffrey Lewis, Keith Poole, and Eric Powers for their valuable suggestions and assistance.

The 2006 midterm elections were nothing short of stunning. Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress. More surprising than Democratic gains in the House were their gains in the Senate. In order to achieve a majority in the Senate the Democrats needed to reelect all of their incumbents and elect Democrats in three out of four competitive states, all of which had supported George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential elections (Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, and Virginia). Riding a wave of public discontent associated with the president's Iraq War policy, Democrats beat incumbents in Missouri, Montana, and Virginia to take a slim one-seat majority in the Senate. Democrats organized the Senate in the 110th Congress, with the support of two independents—Bernie Sanders (VT) and Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman (CT).The authors thank Doug Harris for encouraging us to pursue this project and including it in the forum. Our analysis benefits from our separate experiences as participant-observers in the Senate. While a Presidential Management Intern, Frisch served in the Senate Office of Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ); Kelly was an APSA Congressional Fellow and worked for the Senate Democratic Leadership in the Democratic Policy Committee. nominate data used in this paper are made available by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal at www.voteview.com. Data on campaign contributions were supplied by Jamie Pimlott to whom we owe a debt of gratitude.

During the 2006 campaign, many on the political right expressed anxiety about the slate of Democratic representatives and senators poised to become committee chairs in the event of a Democratic victory. After the election, despite post-election promises of “unity” and “bipartisanship” among congressional Democrats, the question remained: How well would this progressive group of “old bulls” work with the new majority, the existence of which was due in part to the 61 Democrats representing House districts that President George W. Bush won in 2004? (Greenblatt 2007, 524) In this paper, we investigate the claim that Democratic committee leaders in the 110th Congress are out of step with their party caucus by comparing the ideological leadership profiles of chairs in the 110th Congress with those of their Republican predecessors in the 109th, as well as those of Democratic chairs from the “Textbook,” “Reform,” and early “Post-reform” eras. We show that Democratic chairs in the 110th Congress are primarily drawn from the most liberal ranks of the Democratic Caucus, particularly in the House.The authors wish to thank Sara Callow for her excellent and timely research assistance.

On Election Night activists on the left eagerly awaited the results hoping their hard work in the election would produce a favorable shift in the balance of power in Washington. When the votes were all counted and Democrats Jim Webb (VA) and Jon Tester (MT) were finally declared the winners of Senate seats in two of the closest races, the Democrats regained control of both the House and Senate for the first time since the Republican takeover of 1994. As a result of the election, one set of interest groups would fall out of favor and another set would find new access on the Hill. Pharmaceutical firms, oil and gas companies, and student loan providers, targets of the Democrats' populist “100 Hours” agenda and big contributors to the Republicans, were instantly thrown on the defensive. Anti-war groups, environmental groups, and labor unions with weak ties to the Republican leadership and strong relationships with the incoming Democratic leaders, were newly empowered. As the legislative director for one of the largest unions, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, observed a few months into the 110th Congress, “It's a whole new ball game. Key leaders on the Hill are much more receptive, and I look 10 years younger.”

When a political party wrests control of either house of Congress from the other, expectations for change are usually high and that was certainly the case in January 2007 when Democrats took majorities in both chambers for the first time in 12 years. What did the new majorities—and specifically their leaders—promise? To what extent have they delivered? And how do the experiences of the new majorities during their first nine months conform with or raise questions about our theories of Congress? This is perforce an interim report but, even so, it can perhaps shed some light on our theories as well as provide a first assessment of the new majorities and their leaders.In addition to the references cited here, this paper is based on interviews, observation and news accounts.

Both scholars and pundits alike have attributed the Democrats' success in gaining control of the House and Senate in 2006 to their “nationalization” of the election and their success in connecting Republican candidates to both the war in Iraq and the highly unpopular George W. Bush presidency. The “election has been nationalized around two standards that could not be more unfavorable to the GOP: an unpopular war and an unpopular president” (Novak 2006). Many have gone so far as to say that the election results provide evidence that former House Speaker Tip O'Neil's famous aphorism, “all politics are local,” has been “swept aside” (Lambro 2006) and does not apply during wartime. “If one trend emerged this year when 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats were at stake, it was this: All politics are not local” (Israel 2006).We would like to thank Francisco I. Pedraza for his research assistance.

In political science, urban politics is a well-established subfield. And more recently, suburban political behavior has received a fair amount of attention (Gainsborough 2001; 2005; McKee and Shaw 2003; Oliver 2001). But with a few exceptions (see Francia and Baumgartner 2005–2006; Gimpel and Karnes 2006), the political behavior of rural residents has been conspicuously absent thus far in a growing literature on the political role of place. This is quite surprising given the clamoring in the popular press about “red states” versus “blue states” in the most recent presidential contests. All of the post-presidential election maps that highlight red Republican counties and blue Democratic counties display a sea of red covering the vast swaths of rural, middle America. The ocean of Republican red is enough to make one ask: What's the Matter with Kansas? (Frank 2004)—one of those thinly populated plains states with hardly a glimmer of blue on a county-level map of the 2004 presidential election.

“Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?” This survey question, which appeared on the 2004 National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll, attracted as much controversy as any in recent years. More respondents chose “moral values” than any other issue. Among this 22% of respondents, 80% voted for President Bush. Initially, news reporters and pundits interpreted this finding as indicating that moral values played a decisive role in Bush's victory. The morning after the election, Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC program Hardball, suggested the election was “a referendum on values” (“Chris Matthews Gives his Assessment”). Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press, said that “People had an agenda. They put their moral values ahead of some of their economic interests” (“Analysis”). A reporter for the CBS Morning News concluded that “in the end, the number-one voter motivator [was] morality” (“Morality Proves Number One”).

Many media pundits explained Bush's victory in the 2004 presidential election as due in large part to an advantage that he held over Kerry in personal characteristics or character traits, at least as perceived by the voters. By these accounts, Kerry was seen by many voters as aloof, humorless, vacillating, and indecisive. In contrast, Bush was viewed as warm, authentic, and a strong leader. Such interpretations were expressed by a wide range of journalists. For example, New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks (2004a) claimed that if “… the Democrats had nominated Dick Gephardt, this election wouldn't be close, but character is destiny, and Kerry's could be debilitating …” Also in the New York Times, Kate Zernike and John Broder (2004) found that in interviews around the country taken the day after the election, “the voices of voters … fairly shouted that the outcome was … about a fundamental question of character.” Leadership was the trait most commonly cited as one of Bush's strengths. As one voter whom they interviewed put it, “People say George Bush is a cowboy … People say he shoots quick … sometimes you have to do that, you have to be decisive. Kerry never projected that.” Kerry was also faulted for being dull and uninspiring. Brooks (New York Times 2004b) felt that Kerry talked “like a manager or an engineer.” Others felt that Kerry lacked the personal warmth or charm that would allow voters to relate to him. Klein (2006, 221) felt that Kerry “… remained aloof, a distant figure, a politician in all the worst senses of the word.” Perhaps the worst insult was hurled by one of my students, who called Kerry “too professorial.”Author's note: I appreciate the comments provided by two of my colleagues, David Holian and Greg McAvoy.