In only 10 years, Wikipedia has risen from obscurity to become the dominant information source for an entire generation. However, any visitor can edit any page on Wikipedia, which hardly fosters confidence in its accuracy. In this article, I review thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders to assess both the accuracy and the thoroughness of Wikipedia's coverage. I find that Wikipedia is almost always accurate when a relevant article exists, but errors of omission are extremely frequent. These errors of omission follow a predictable pattern. Wikipedia's political coverage is often very good for recent or prominent topics but is lacking on older or more obscure topics.

The stakes of political conflict involve contending values and issue definitions as well as policy. Welfare reform was the most important change in American domestic policy since civil rights. Its significance hinges crucially on how participants understood the issue, but existing research fails to resolve what their perceptions were. Most accounts suggest that welfare reform was an ideological contest concerning the proper scope of government, but there are other views. This study gauges the welfare agenda rigorously by coding speakers in congressional hearings on the basis of how they framed the issue and the position they took on it during the six chief episodes of welfare reform that occurred between 1962 and 1996. The reform efforts aroused four distinct divisions. Over time, positions moved rightward, but more important, the dominant issue changed: The ideological debate about government was overtaken by a more practical debate about how to manage welfare. This is the first study to track the substantive meaning of any issue in Congress over an extended period of time using hearing witnesses and a preset analytic scheme.

Since tenure decisions concern the award of an employment guarantee, the burden of proof ought to rest on the candidate; in cases of doubt, the vote should be negative. However, a number of corrosive tendencies often weaken the strict application of this principle. To counteract these tendencies, this article advocates a strategy of pre-commitment to fairly objective standards and reliance on the professional judgments of a variety of anonymous outside experts, as reflected in a candidate's success in the double-blind peer review process.

Dissemination of journal submission data is critical for identifying editorial bias, creating an informed scholarly marketplace, and critically mapping the contours of a discipline's scholarship. However, our survey and case study investigations indicate that nearly a decade after the Perestroika movement began, political science journals remain reserved in collecting and releasing submission data. We offer several explanations for this lack of transparency and suggest ways that the profession might address this shortcoming.

Previous research has documented how political scientists evaluate and rank scholarly journals, but the evaluation and ranking of scholarly book publishers has drawn less attention. In this article, we use data from a survey of 603 American political scientists to generate a ranking of scholarly publishers in political science. We used open-ended questions to ask respondents to identify those scholarly publishers (1) to which they would submit “a very strong book manuscript” in their area of expertise, and (2) that they “read regularly or otherwise rely for the best research” in their area of expertise. Based on these results, we created rankings of scholarly presses based on publication and reading preferences. We find that certain high-profile university presses constitute a clear first tier in American political scientists' preference orderings, followed by a mix of university and commercial presses that represent the second tier and beyond. Moreover, we confirm the validity of our approach by comparing the results of our rankings (based on open-ended questions) with results from previous research based on respondents' evaluations and derived from close-ended lists of scholarly presses. Our results demonstrate that the rankings of scholarly publishers are similar for both approaches. These rankings can be used to guide political scientists as they decide where to send their best book-length work.

Excitement about the political science job market builds around the time of the Labor Day Annual Meeting of the APSA, when schools start to post their openings for the next year. As we entered the job market, we found ourselves repeatedly collecting information about available positions as we prepared application materials. We monitored APSA's eJobs website, cut and pasted relevant job information into a single spreadsheet, and assembled letters using that information. Here, we introduce free and open-source tools to automate these data collection and letter generation procedures using R and LaTeX. Our system minimizes manual data entry by extracting and creating a spreadsheet from APSA's eJobs information. We walk applicants through the initial job search steps, including using eJobs, compiling position information, and producing attractive letters.

The justification for studying faculty research productivity is that it affects individual advancement and reputation within academe, as well as departmental and institutional prestige (Creamer 1998, iii). Publication records are an important factor in faculty performance evaluations, research grant awards, and promotion and salary decisions. The phrase “publish or perish” encapsulates the importance of research productivity to academic careers. In addition, questions are sometimes raised about whether an individual's status as a minority within academia (e.g., being a member of an underrepresented ethnic or racial group or being female in a male-dominated profession) affects his or her ability to publish or likelihood of publishing (Cole and Zuckerman 1984; Bellas and Toutkoushian 1999). Finally, most previous work that tackles the productivity causality puzzle comes from disciplines other than political science. Thus, one of the purposes of this report is to explore whether the existing findings about research productivity in other disciplines apply equally well to research productivity in political science.

Reality television programming has become a pervasive part of popular culture. Although such programming may seem to be mindless entertainment, it can serve as a tool to introduce political lessons in the classroom. This article examines how the concepts of alliance behavior and strategic voting can be explored by using the television program Survivor. An analysis reveals that contestants often behave strategically when forming alliances and voting, in ways that are similar to the strategic behavior of nation-states and individuals residing in democracies, respectively. This article does not suggest that reading political science texts should be replaced with viewing reality television, but rather that instructors can introduce abstract concepts to undergraduate students through popular culture. Such a technique can spark students' interest in politics and demonstrate the broad relevance of political concepts, leaving students with the desire to delve more deeply into the investigation of political phenomena.

The challenges of teaching introductory-level U.S. politics to reluctant audiences are well known and widely lamented. This article investigates the pedagogical potential of political satire, specifically The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in engaging students in this tough-to-teach course. Based on a review of available literature and student survey data from the fall 2008 term, I argue that using this popular program in the classroom can enhance an introductory U.S. politics course. A review of both these survey data and student papers based on the program suggests promising possibilities for encouraging students' political engagement and critical-thinking skills. This preliminary examination demonstrates that further study on the program's potential both for student engagement and student learning outcomes is warranted.

The majority of Ph.D. programs in political science in the United States provide some kind of teaching training for graduate students, which ranges from assisting other instructors to designing and teaching new courses. In most cases, departments make an effort to guide these students in their new role as instructors; however, first-time teachers whose first language is not English do not usually receive any special guidance on how to successfully address the challenge of communicating effectively with their students—an all-too-real problem for many foreign instructors. This article provides some basic tips for improving the communication process that develops in the classroom, and is particularly tailored for individuals whose first language is not English and who are about to take the first steps of their teaching careers.

People often make choices that go against their own best interests. In the controversial bestseller Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that people can benefit from simple “nudges” to improve their decision-making. In an upper-level undergraduate course on political decision-making, I created a series of assignments around Nudge. In the project, students designed their own “nudges” to solve a variety of political and social problems. Students gave this assignment rave reviews, not only for the course content they learned, but also for what they discovered about their connections to society and its problems. In this article, I describe the assignment and report students' evaluations of it. This assignment could be tailored to any course on political behavior, public policy, or public administration.

Prior research in political science and other disciplines demonstrates the pedagogical and practical benefits of active learning. Less is known, however, about the extent to which active learning is used in political science classrooms. This study assesses the prioritization of active learning in “gateway” political science courses, paying specific attention to simulations, structured debates, and the case method. Nearly five hundred individual course syllabi for introductory-level political science courses are examined. Although the level of active learning prioritization is surprisingly low, the dimensions on which it varies suggest opportunities for adoption across subfields and classes of varying size.

The political science program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) announces its awards for basic research support and dissertation improvement grants for fiscal year 2010.

Walter Owen Filley, Jr., passed away on March 23, 2010, at age 89 in Manchester Center, Vermont, where he had lived for seven years in an assisted living facility. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 22, 1920, he attended New Haven High School and graduated from the the Choate School in 1937. He then spent a year as an exchange student sponsored by Choate in a South German school. He received his BA from Yale in 1942 before joining the Army for three years, serving mostly as a sergeant in the Counterintelligence Corps with the 2nd Armored Division in Western Europe from 1944 to 1945.

Dennis W. Hostetler of Collinsville, professor emeritus of public administration and policy analysis, died December 31, 2010, after a long illness. He was 68.

It is with a heavy heart that the American Australian Association and APSA Congressional Fellowship announce the passing on Saturday, February 19, 2011, of American Australian Association/APSA Congressional Fellow Sarah Jane Merl Miskin of Canberra, Australia. Her immediate survivors include her husband Ben Miskin. Having battled with cancer which delayed her participation in the class of 2008–09, the cancer went into remission and she joined her 2009–10 class of Congressional Fellows for the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Foreign Affairs Seminar in October 2009. The remission, however, was regrettably short-lived, and she had to return to Australia in January 2010. Throughout this tragic roller-coaster of health, and in the regrettably brief four months of her association with the fellowship, Sarah Miskin displayed a tenacity of spirit, an indomitable optimism, an infectious love of friendship, and a thorough commitment to the fellowship—her legacy includes a standard of excellence as a Fellow which will be hard to match by the generations of Fellows who will follow in her wake. She was the epitome of what can hope for in the international participation in the fellowship.

Dr. Philip J. Schlessinger died at age 96 on September 22, 2010. He had taught political science at Los Angeles City College (LACC) for more than 60 years.

Frank Tachau, one of the leading scholars of Middle Eastern politics, died on July 23, 2010, at the age of 80 in Sykesville, Maryland, after battling with multiple myeloma for two years. Born in Braunschweig, Germany, Professor Tachau moved with his family to Chicago at the age of seven in 1936. He studied at the University of Chicago, earning a bachelor's and a master's degree in political science. His MA thesis on the diplomacy of the Turkish Straits between 1936 and 1946 led to his remarkable Ph.D. dissertation, which offered one of the first scholarly accounts of Turkish nationalism in 1958. What distinguished Professor Tachau's analyses from others studying the Middle East was his extensive ethnographic work in the region. His unique language skills allowed him to learn modern Turkish very quickly in 1956 and opened the door for him to master historical Ottoman Turkish as well. During his multiple visits to the region, Professor Tachau studied the history of the Ottoman Empire and also noted the emerging institutions of the new Turkish republic. His extensive stays in the region equipped him with unique insights into the views of the country's political elite and the mechanisms of its fledgling democracy.