Volume 140, Issue 1, Spring 2025

We examine media coverage of the congressional response to the COVID-19 pandemic to gain deeper insight into the long-documented tendency of news reporting to focus on conflict and stalemate in Congress. Although Congress has rarely enacted so much policy so quickly or in a more bipartisan manner, we find that most reporting still focused on conflict and stalemate. Our study confirms prior research documenting a clear media preference for conflict narratives, likely grounded in both the media's economic incentives and journalistic norms. But we also highlight an underappreciated driver of the media's focus on conflict: beat reporting. Even during a time of historic legislative productivity, Congress still spent most of its time bogged down in disputes. It would be unrealistic to expect Congress to avoid conflict, given the important role it plays in representing the nation's considerable political differences. Under a beat-reporting model providing continuous coverage of the institution, the bulk of news reporting simply reflects the large amount of time Congress devotes to hashing out conflicts. As such, it ultimately yields far more attention to the things that Congress routinely does—namely, squabble over legislation that has no realistic chance of becoming law—rather than to its rare but incredibly important bursts of action and cooperation.

In the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic, external factors significantly impact a country's ability to contain the virus and shape public responses to government policies. Taiwan, lauded for its effective early pandemic management, faced considerable international challenges, particularly from China. This study delves into the intricate relationship between Taiwanese citizens' trust in China and their satisfaction with the government's COVID-19 policies. Utilizing data from six rounds of the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) conducted between 2020 and 2022, this research uncovers how public opinion about China can profoundly influence satisfaction with domestic policies, especially during a crisis. The findings highlight that public health policy satisfaction is not solely determined by internal factors but is also shaped by perceptions of external threats. This research adds to the growing body of literature on how external threats mold public opinion and offers insights into China's broader impact on Taiwan's domestic politics. By understanding these dynamics, policymakers can better navigate the complex interplay of international relations and public health policy satisfaction during global crises.

This article contends that Dwight Eisenhower's role in the 1956 Federal Highway Act was a decisive leadership failure. More broadly, it illustrates problems that result from assuming, as most political scientists do, that presidential success should be defined as the ability to control the legislative process. Fred Greenstein and Richard Neustadt—the originators of widely shared contemporary assumptions about the presidency—thus incorrectly theorized the presidency's place in the American constitutional system. By empowering independently elected legislators, the separation of powers incentivizes presidents with ambitious legislative agendas to accommodate the agency of other constitutional actors through a degree of transparency and deliberativeness. The article concludes by sketching an alternative presidential leadership model to the one offered by Greenstein and Neustadt, one that accommodates rather than resists the Constitution's constraints.

You have been transported back to the year 1995 to address the United Nations General Assembly on what to do about climate change. What would you tell them? Just prior to your time travel you finished reading Fixing the Climate: Strategies for an Uncertain World, a new book by political scientists Charles F. Sable and David G. Victor. Convinced of their take on climate change policy, your advice to the global elite would be succinct: Don’t do Kyoto. Rethink Paris. Do Montreal. International climate change diplomacy has tried a rigid top-down approach (the Kyoto Agreement) and a more flexible bottom-up approach (the Paris Agreement). Neither approach has gained sufficient traction on the climate change problem. The authors propose a new direction. Borrowing from the framework of the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which made great strides in eliminating use of ozone-depleting chemicals, they outline a framework for “experimentalist governance” that relies on public and private organizations to promote a problem-solving approach that is at the same time both bottom-up and top-down, market-based and institution-based, technocratic and democratic. The case studies they use to support their proposal make a strong case for infusing climate change policy with Montreal’s experimentalist approach, but they also reveal substantial limitations in contexts where experimentation leads to innovation that could place significant demands on consumers and society at large to change behavior and make hard trade-offs. Read Fixing the Climate to learn both how experimentalist governance can help turn the corner on climate change for many purposes and where more than experimentalism will be needed.

‘Many people assume that Franco-American relations since 1776 have been far more harmonious than those of the United States relationship with Great Britain. After all France fought on the side of the new aspiring Republic in the American War of Independence against a colonial power. Although still a country ruled by a king, France itself became a republic shortly after the American Declaration of Independence. But in fact, France and the United States (and the Colonies that preceded them) have often had poor relations. In his book David Haglund asks why security relations between France and the United States been so fractious since the beginning of the American Republic, and even well before it. He debunks the generally accepted mythology and its attendant symbology of two ‘sister republics’. The French-built and donated Statue of Liberty in New York harbour and statues of General Lafayette on the Seine opposite the Quai d’Orsay in Paris are misleading. In truth any ‘special relationship’ between France and the United States has been special on the whole in its lack of mutual liking, even respect. Haglund traces this difficult, even ‘suboptimal’, relationship over three centuries and shows how the weight of history still continues to upset Franco-American relations on a regular basis.’

The conventional wisdom about local democracy is that it is more responsive because it’s closer to the people. Political science research suggests we shouldn’t be so optimistic—that powerful interests and forces constrain local democracy. But we still face big challenges, some of which can only be addressed at the local level in the American federal system. Over the past decade, a renewed interest in local government action has been matched by a wave of new scholarship on local governments in the U.S. This research engages closely with local policies and key questions about democracy, using an increasingly sophisticated set of research methods. In her new book, Sarah Anzia uses a new survey of local governments to examine under what conditions local interests groups are likely to shape electoral outcomes and policy in the U.S.

Junyan Jiang’s review essay of Dan Slater and Joseph Wong’s From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia. It highlights the innovative and compelling aspects of the book but also raises some questions about the authors’ interpretations of the conditions, content, and consequences of elite-led democratization in East and Southeast Asia.

George Thomas offers a critical analysis of the Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding by Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer. Thomas argues that the American experiment was born of religious and political conflict that owes a much deeper debt to liberal enlightenment thought than to Christian natural law thinking