Volume 138, Issue 4, Winter 2023

Meghan Garrity examines the concept of “ethnic cleansing,” identifying five areas of conceptual confusion that undermine the integrity and utility of the concept. She recommends abandoning the social science usage of ethnic cleansing in favor of four alternative concepts defined by the distinct intention of the perpetrator(s): massacre (to annihilate), mass expulsion (to remove), coercive assimilation (to eliminate a unique cultural identity), and control (to subjugate). This intervention eliminates conceptual ambiguity, improves theoretical precision, and opens a promising new research agenda.

How did we come to use and accept “congressman” and, later, “congresswoman” instead of “representative” as the nearly default designation for members of the House, while at the same time referring to senators exclusively by that title? And despite it being inherently inaccurate and unnecessarily binary, this convention for members of the House has gone unchallenged, even as gender-neutral language advances and even as the House of Representatives has considered such things as adding more gender-neutral bathrooms. This article traces, for the first time, the history of “congressman” (and “congresswoman”) as a linguistic meme popularized by the coverage of elections in nineteenth century newspapers. I draw on that history to argue that the House, press, and public should drop these gendered, civically confusing, and politically inappropriate honorifics in favor of the one specified in the Constitution. “Representative” is not just politically correct, it is constitutional.

Political science often uses a deficit model to understand governmental performance, focusing on what is missing, what has gone wrong, what needs to be improved. Evan Lieberman's book, Until We Have Won Our Liberty, presents a new question: what has gone right? Using a descriptive analysis of South African democratic performance since the advent of multiracial elections, Lieberman argues that South African democracy has performed remarkably well.