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Political plasticity refers to limitations on how fast, how much, and in what ways political behavior does (or does not) change. In a number of important areas of behavior, such as leader-follower relations, ethnicity, religion, and the rich-poor divide, there has been long-term continuity of human behavior. These continuities are little impacted by factors assumed to bring about change such as electronic technologies, major wars, globalization, and revolutions. In addition to such areas of low political plasticity, areas of high political plasticity are considered. For example, women in education is discussed to illustrate how rapid societal change can be achieved. This book explains the psychological and social mechanisms that limit political plasticity, and shape the possibility of changes in both democratic and dictatorial countries. Students, teachers, and anyone interested in political behavior and social psychology will benefit from this volume.

Harry Eckstein's 1973 classic article "Authority Patterns: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry" is critically reviewed. In that article, Eckstein proposes that the scope of politics can be ascertained through a taxonomic exercise that he labels progressive differentiation. In so doing, he delimits political study to the systematic analysis of authority patterns, which he defines as the "set of asymmetric relations among hierarchically ordered members of a social unit that involves the direction of the unit." This taxonomy is provocative in that it rules out of the discipline's domain standard fare within contemporary political science, concerning exchange among equals (virtually all of economic reasoning) and exchange between states (virtually all of international relations). An alternative delimitation is proposed, building on other insights from Eckstein's corpus but taking off from current research practice. Four subfields—political theory, comparative politics, democratic institutions, and international relations—are defined in such a way as to give coherence to the political science discipline.

The 2006 midterm has undercut some familiar assertions about contemporary electoral politics. Political analysts seem to have overstated Republican advantages in several areas: voter turnout, campaign finance, congressional apportionment, party unity, and social issues. The GOP's loss is the discipline's gain, as the election raises good questions for scholarly research. Adapted from the source document.

American political science has long aspired to emulate both the objective research methods of the natural sciences & their practical successes in controlling their objects of study. Regrettably, the putative tension between these two ambitions is rarely discussed. This essay seeks to touch off such a discussion by illuminating a significant problem that produces tension between objective knowledge accumulation & practical control of politics, but not of nature: self-disconfirming analysis. The problem is that in some situations, successful realization of the normative implications of political analysis may create new political patterns that are no longer consistent with the law-like regularities uncovered by that analysis. I demonstrate how this problem is manifest in the work of Robert Putnam, whose career exhibits a commitment to (naturalistic) scientific rigor as well as a passion for sociopolitical change. If the agenda implied by Putnam's scientific research were to be implemented, some of the causal claims established by that research would be removed from actual operation. I argue that the failure of political science to realize its naturalistic aspirations is at least partly attributable to this problem.

Since the first genuine multi-party elections in Russia were held in December 1993, party-state relations have followed a path that diverges markedly from the pattern in other post-communist states. As some accounts demonstrate, state capture in these conditions has followed diverse patterns, but the general trend seems to be towards increasing control by parties over the state. In Russia, however, it is the state that is colonizing the parties, rather than vice versa. Especially worthy of attention are the so-called parties of power, which reflect the extent to which, & the mechanisms by which, the state manages party politics & the administrative elites keep politics out of the state in Russia's managed democracy. Recent institutional reforms by the Putin administration point towards more, rather than less, encroachment of the state in party politics, which makes Russia less than a fully-fledged multi-party democracy. Tables. Adapted from the source document.