FEATURED PUBLICATIONS | 2004

Statistical techniques that take account of missing data in a clinical trial, census, or other experiments, observational studies, and surveys are of increasing importance. The use of increasingly powerful computers and algorithms has made it possible to study statistical problems from a Bayesian perspective. This book is a collection of articles from leading researchers on statistical methods relating to missing data analysis, causal inference, and statistical modeling, including multiple imputation, propensity scores, instrumental variables, and Bayesian inference.

Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 is an analysis of the relationship between democratization and contentious politics that builds upon the model set forth in the pathbreaking book, Dynamics of Contention. Using a sustained comparison of French and British histories since 1650 or so as a springboard for more general comparison within Europe, Contention and Democracy goes on to demonstrate that democratization occurred as result of struggles during which (as in 19th century Britain and France) few, if any, of the participants were self-consciously trying to create democratic institutions. Consequently, circumstances for democratization vary from era to era, region to region as functions of previous history, international environments, available models of political organization, and predominant patterns of social relations.

During and especially after the Second World War, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war's devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate Western liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of western desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing. In light of their epoch's calamities these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and holocaust. Confronting their period's dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity, but which Enlightenment we should wish to have. Decades later, in the midst of a new type of war and reanimated discussions of the concept of evil, we share no small stake in assessing their successes and limitations.

Over the last 30 years, the U.S. penal population increased from around 300,000 to more than two million, with more than half a million prisoners returning to their home communities each year. What are the social costs to the communities from which this vast incarcerated population comes? And what happens to these communities when former prisoners return as free men and women in need of social and economic support? In Imprisoning America, an interdisciplinary group of leading researchers in economics, criminal justice, psychology, sociology, and social work goes beyond a narrow focus on crime to examine the connections between incarceration and family formation, labor markets, political participation, and community well-being.

How do domestic interests affect international policymaking? What is the role of the nation-state within multilateral regimes? How can we understand the diversity of state responses to the internationalization of environmental regulation? National Governance and the Global Climate Change Regime compares the roles of different actors and institutions in international environmental policymaking. It focuses on the formation of a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, the Kyoto Protocol, to show how domestic interests affect international treaty negotiations. Using analyses of both quantitative and qualitative data, Dana Fisher argues that domestic debates within states and subsequent national policy formation have a significantly larger role in international environmental regime formation than many scholars recognize.

Virginia Page Fortna's new book analyzes why cease-fire agreements between states succeed or fail. How to maintain peace in the aftermath of war is arguably one of the most important questions of the post-Cold War era, and one of the least explored issues in the study of war and peace. Fortna argues that belligerents and the international community can draft cease-fire agreements that foster peace by altering the incentives to attack, by reducing uncertainty about compliance with the cease-fire, and by preventing and controlling accidents that might otherwise escalate back to war.

Tilly's seminal writings sparked the study of social movements and historical social change. Both domains are vividly explored in his newest book. Westerners invented social movements during the eighteenth century, but after that social movements became vehicles of popular politics across the world. By locating social movements in history, Tilly provides rich and often surprising insights into the origins of contemporary social movements practices, relations of social movements to democratization, and likely futures for social movements.