One pleasure of editing a journal such as Perspectives on Politics is that sometimes a manuscript will answer a question that I had only vaguely formulated, but nevertheless knew was intriguing and important. Such is the case with many of the articles in this issue; I hope that others find the same sense of satisfaction in now having an answer to a question lurking somewhere in their professional consciousness.

Mala Htun's lead article, “Is Gender like Ethnicity? The Political Representation of Identity Groups” is one example. We are all now so familiar with the phrase “race, class, and gender” that it is difficult to stop and query whether the implied analogy among these three concepts is really warranted. Htun shows that in electoral systems around the world, political responses to ethnicity and gender do bear some similarities but nevertheless do not operate in comparable ways. A surprising number of democratic nations (to an Americanist, at least) require political parties to ensure that a certain proportion of their candidates are women. Other nations, however, and sometimes the same ones, require legislatures to reserve a certain number of seats for ethnic or racial minorities. Occasionally nations get it “wrong,” with complicated and usually unhappy consequences. Htun explains these patterns by noting that women are spread through most political parties in roughly even proportions, whereas ethnic minorities often prefer or are pushed into group-specific parties. This fascinating paper covers most countries in the world, addresses two of the most important political cleavages, and gives us depth as well as breadth of explanation.

In “Pitkin's Dilemma: The Wider Shores of Political Theory and Political Science,” Ruth Lane answers another question that I among others have pondered—what happens when one subjects Michel Foucault's brilliant insights to the cold, clear light of positivist social science? Lane shows that they do not melt into airy nothingness; on the contrary, treating Foucault as a social scientist is the first link in an imaginative chain that brings together sociologists Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman, economist Thomas Schelling, political scientist Kenneth Shepsle, and philosophers Hannah Pitkin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. By explicating the links of this chain, Lane shows us to how to resolve Pitkin's dilemma, that “in the attempt to create intellectual order, the [political] theorist imposes order on individuals” despite their own preferences and actions. Must the democratic theorist be a closet totalitarian? Lane says no, and argues that, taken together, the thinkers she analyzes enable us to understand politics as an unending and fluid game played by independent but interactive citizens. Foucault insisted that politics is everywhere—even in the “capillaries” of a society—and Lane shows how that fact can be liberating rather than frightening.

Jeffrey Isaac and Peter Breiner seek to answer another recurrent question: what do social scientists owe themselves, their profession, their universities, and their nations in time of war? Unfortunately for our peace of mind, the authors give different answers. In “Social Science and Liberal Values in a Time of War,” Isaac follows Max Weber in insisting that social scientists have several responsibilities: to defend the liberal values of civil and intellectual freedom that make a robust social science possible; to recognize that such a defense is especially important, and especially difficult, during war (particularly during an open-ended war on terror); and to be more active in our scholarship and in pushing our professional associations to take public stances against policies that violate those liberal values. Isaac urges us, in short, to consider whether APSA should speak out against aspects of the Patriot Act and other post–September 11 policies on the grounds that they threaten our ability to do good social science.

To Peter Breiner, what Isaac sees as a controversial assertion is insufficient. In his commentary on Isaac's essay, Breiner argues that political scientists have a responsibility not only to speak out individually and collectively on behalf of liberal values threatened by war, but also to clarify the political claims of disputants in that war. From the effort to slide the Iraq invasion under the umbrella of a war on terror, to the number of troops sent to the Middle East and the “weak” deployment of what Joseph Nye calls soft power—political scientists have a right and perhaps an obligation to use their special knowledge in as nonpartisan a way as possible to illuminate partisan stances and actions. Breiner does not call on APSA or university administrations to take positions, as Isaac does, but he challenges us political scientists to place our analytic capacities in the service of the public interest, regardless of how fraught the atmosphere is.

It is a relief to turn from the dilemmas posed for scholars by a real war to the dilemmas posed for scholars by a war of ballots and court orders. Our symposium on “How the Rules You Make and the Way You Count Determine the Winners You Get” has been in the works since before Perspectives began, and I am delighted (and thankful) to see it in print at last. Just to put you in the mood for it, we designed the table of contents for this issue to match Palm Beach County's infamous butterfly ballot, which arguably led a lot of voters who meant to vote for Al Gore to inadvertently punch the hole registering Pat Buchanan as their choice. We trust that Perspectives readers will have better luck in finding the articles of their choice.

The symposium on U.S. elections exemplifies one of the main purposes of this journal—to show, as Breiner urges, how political science can illuminate issues that are debated in a necessarily more superficial way in the popular media. Who is permitted to vote, whether they sign up to do so, what technology is used to record their votes, how their votes are counted and whose votes are counted—or not—and what county of Florida they live in: such quotidian concerns affect who becomes governor, senator, or even president of the United States. Henry Brady, whose great insight and diligence brought this symposium together, explains the individual pieces in his introduction; here let me simply suggest that if anyone tells you that political science is nothing but slow journalism, you can point them to this group of papers for a refutation.

Finally we return to the war in Iraq; it cannot be escaped. The “Perspectives” essay was written by a PhD student in political science who also happens to be a captain in the United States Army. Russell Burgos, in “An N of 1: A Political Scientist in Operation Iraqi Freedom” describes how living in the Sunni Triangle has turned him from being a “systemically inclined neorealist to something more like a leaning constructivist.” While explicating and defending that shift, he writes of the distinctive, and perhaps dangerously different, attitudes of soldiers compared with U.S. civilians, and of how norms shape everything from the decision to go to war to the decision about whom to shoot at and with what weapon. Captain Burgos wonders why the United States showed so little sign of risk aversion in deciding to invade Iraq and explains why he is newly impressed with the power of symbols. This essay is a unique mix of direct observation and scholarly reflection, and a tribute to people's ability to combine deep patriotism with honest skepticism.

Joseph Collins, professor at the National War College and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, provides one response to Captain Burgos' essay. He shares the liminal position of being an observer as well as an actor in what is being observed, and he concurs with Burgos's emphasis on the role of norms in the ostensibly hard-edged arena of war making. Collins disagrees with Burgos on other crucial points, however, in particular the gap between civilian and military views. Ole Holsti also comments—here reinforcing Burgos's point about the increasing partisan and ideological gap between the military and civilians. However, Holsti does not anticipate a military coup or even another Douglas MacArthur–style defiance of civilian authorities. If anything, he hints, as of this writing ideologically driven civilians have too much power over pragmatically minded military officers. Holsti also raises the idea of a national service requirement to bridge the gap between soldiers and civilians—an idea that has become in my view even less likely while more essential in light of the current effort to blame torture in American military prisons on a few bad apples who somehow found their way into the army. If the army were us, perhaps that distancing would be harder to accomplish.

Perspectives invites more research on these difficult moral, political, and policy issues, especially from the vantage point of nations outside the United States. In the meantime, we invite readers to dig into the usual array of book reviews that show off our discipline's wide-ranging expertise. We are very grateful to reviewers for their careful, instructive, and engaging articles; they make it possible for the many corners of political science to connect with one another.

The next issue of Perspectives will include a symposium on methods for predicting Supreme Court decisions (the lawyers versus the modelers). It will also showcase the report of the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, which examines the political consequences of growing economic inequality in the United States. The issue will also include an article on the ethnic politics of India, the neuroscience behind political leadership, and more. It will be fully edited and stewarded through the production process by Thomas Kozachek, the new managing editor of Perspectives. Tom replaces Lisa Burrell and an interim managing editor, Kevin McKenna. He became a professional copyeditor for top-flight university presses after attaining his PhD in music from Harvard University—so anyone drafting a manuscript on politics in Mozart's The Magic Flute can be sure of a sympathetic as well as expert ear. Of course, we welcome manuscripts and proposals on all other topics of interest to political science as well, and will endeavor to treat them with the same level of expertise and sympathy.

A final note: As of September 1, 2004, the book review section of the journal will be edited by Greg McAvoy rather than coedited with Susan Bickford. The book review office will remain at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All correspondence should continue to be directed there.