In “Moral Issues and Voter Decision Making in the 2004 Presidential Election” (PS, April 2005, 201–209), D. Sunshine Hillygus and Todd Shields mistakenly describe the 2004 exit poll question as asking about “the most important issue facing the nation” (201) and “the most important problem facing the country today”(202). These texts should instead read “the most important issue in their presidential vote decision.” This correction does not affect the analysis or conclusions of the article.

Citizenship is an increasingly important focus in political and social theory, as well as in philosophy, legal studies, and some of the humanities. It is also a vital concern in the lives of many “real people.” It figures in the assurance or denial of rights, economic benefits and social services, education, due process of law, and opportunities to affect political decisions; but it does not guarantee equality, fairness, justice, economic well-being, dignity, or the respect of public officials or fellow citizens. We need to engage theoretical and normative aspects of citizenship when considering such topics as democracy and democratization, civil liberties, political participation, migration and asylum, nationality, culture, persistent inequalities, discrimination, identity and belonging, gender equity, race and ethnic relations, human rights, and globalization.

Modern liberal democracies owe their stability and relative success to the coming together of two ideals which originate in distinct historical periods: the ideals of self-governance and territorially circumscribed nation-state. Self-governance defines freedom as the rule of law among a community of equals who are citizens of the polis and who have the right to rule and to be ruled. This ideal emerges in 5th-century Athens and is revived throughout history in episodes such as the experience of self-governing city-states in the Renaissance, the Paris commune of 1871, the anarchist and socialist communes of the Russian Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War.

In the 19th century, the greatest questions concerning American citizenship were whether this new modern experiment in large-scale republican self-governance could work at all, and whether its initial reliance on slavery could be overcome. The answers proved to be that a large-scale republic centered on commercial, not martial aspirations could indeed endure, and that it could achieve the elimination of chattel slavery, though not without enormous costs. In the 20th century, the major issues became whether formally equal citizenship could be extended to all adults, regardless of race and gender. The answer proved to be that women and non-whites could gain genuine possession of the franchise and access to public office, even if only through great civic struggles, and even if those gains still left the nation far short of achieving practical equality in many spheres of public and private life. Though much remains to be explored in regard to those past developments, it is obviously timely now to ask, “What are the major issues facing American citizenship in the 21st century?” It is also tempting to speculate about how laws and public policies will deal with them, though that quest of course carries us out over even thinner ice.

Voting rights have traditionally been regarded as the core of democratic citizenship. While T. H. Marshall (1965) described citizenship as a bundle of civil, political, and social rights, political philosophers from Aristotle via Rousseau to Michael Walzer have understood citizenship to be essentially a status of full membership in a self-governing polity. This republican conception explains the central place of electoral rights: citizens are those who participate in collective self-government either directly or through voting for representatives and running as candidates for elective public office.Special thanks to Harald Waldrauch from whose ongoing research on the rights and legal statuses of migrants this essay has greatly benefited.

Citizenship in modern democratic states has a dual character. First, it denotes inclusion in a self-governing political community. Second, it means belonging to a specific national community, defined both by territorial boundaries and cultural practices. The democratic state appears in the guise of the nation-state, whose citizen is also a national. Political citizenship is universalistic and inclusive, while national belonging is culturally specific and exclusive. Everybody in the country is meant to belong, while the rest of the world is excluded: foreigners cannot belong. This dualism helps explain some contractions such as: why the age of democratic nationalism was a period of devastating wars based on the total mobilization of populations of warrior-citizens; how democratic states could justify the colonization of the rest of the world; and why democracy and racism are so often linked (Castles and Davidson 2000).

Since the 1980s, the question of citizenship has taken root as a major theme in the social sciences and as the focus of juridical, political, social, and cultural debates in all democratic societies. In Europe, citizenship has taken different shapes and definitions in its rhetoric, ideology, and practice with regard to immigrants; incorporation into nation-states and their expansion of political participation beyond boundaries relating to home and host country to include a broad European space. Citizenship is also an issue for European construction itself. Within nation-states citizenship has been expressed in different domains extending from the national community to the civil society, even though only “legal” citizenship allows the full participation of individuals and groups in the political community. At the European level, despite the transnational participation of immigrants encouraged by the very nature of the European Union and its supranational institutions and de facto expansion of dual citizenship, the claim for equal recognition as citizens that underlies the political strategies of immigrants remains within the framework of the legitimacy of the state of residence and citizenship.

The confluences of global flows, by forming new spaces and entanglements of possibilities, have a mutating effect on citizenship. In an ever-shifting landscape configured by mobilities and positionalities, the idea of citizenship tied to the terrain and imagination of a nation-state (Anderson [1983] 1991) is called into question. In theory, citizenship as protected entitlements depends on membership in a nation-state. But increasingly in practice, entitlements and benefits are realized through specific mobilizations and claims in milieus of globalized contingency. The movements of global markets, technologies, and populations interact to shape novel spaces of political mobilization and claims. As rights and protections long associated with citizenship are becoming disarticulated from the state, they are re-articulated with elements such as market-based interests, transnational agencies, mobile elites, and marginialized populations.

On Sunday, October 10th, 2004, the New York Times Magazine featured an article with the cover title, “Really, What Does He Think? John Kerry and the Post-9/11 World” (Bai 2004). On the cover of the magazine was a serious-looking photo of Senator Kerry, superimposed with keywords such as “Terrorism,” “Iraq,” “Al Qaeda,” “Multilateralism,” “Nuclear proliferation,” and so on. While the article itself was intriguing, even more intriguing was the magazine's attempt to capture Kerry's core ideas on American national security with the use of keyword graphics—namely, the keywords on the cover, placed in what appeared to be a random order around the photo of Kerry, and the underlining of “John Kerry,” “terrorism,” and “Americans” in the inside title. Catchy graphics, but hardly an accurate depiction of the keywords that might actually represent Kerry's thinking on American national security. And, for all the comparison made in the article itself with President Bush's stance on national security, where were the graphics for George W.? (They did not emerge in the next New York Times Magazine.) The magazine was, nonetheless, making an important point: that words (and the ideas they represent) are emotive—particularly in the highly charged climate of the 2004 presidential campaign.I am grateful for comments and suggestions from Andrew Bailey, Diane Maurice, David Mayhew, and Frances Rosenbluth. I am also grateful to the Georg Walter Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy (Yale Center for International and Area Studies) for funding that initiated this article, and to Mina Moshkeri (LSE Design Unit) for her assistance in preparing the graphs.

The theory of minority political incorporation (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984; 2001) addressed the rise of African Americans and Latinos in urban politics through coalitions that combined the mobilization of African-American communities and White liberals (Sonenshein 1993) and, at times, Hispanics. While Hispanics were important to the theory of political incorporation, their role was neither consistent nor central in coalitions for minority advancement during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. However, Latinos; impressive demographic strength is now translating into major voter registration and turnout gains, and Latinos increasingly are taking the lead in minority incorporation in some cities and states. There is, perhaps, no better example of Latinos; increasing political clout than City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa's smashing electoral victory to become the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles in more than 130 years. Villaraigosa's election attracted national and international attention, and energized Latino activists around the country.

The research on voter turnout in America is impressive in quantity and quality, but it lacks breadth. National and state elections have received most of the attention, while the myriad of other elections, from municipal contests to policy referenda, have often been ignored. As a result, we know a great deal about turnout in state and national elections, and much less about turnout in other races. The temptation is to generalize the state and national conclusions to other elections, but this is risky. For example, in a recent aggregate-level study of small town elections in Iowa, Rice and Schlueter (2004) report a relationship that runs contrary to virtually all of the state and national literature: education and turnout are negatively correlated; that is, the citizens in better-educated communities vote in local elections at lower rates than the citizens in less-educated communities. This finding exposes the limitations in our understanding of voter turnout. If all we want is to speak with assurance about turnout in state and national elections, then the current literature is very helpful. If, however, we want to be able to speak more generally about turnout (and speak more specifically about turnout in elections other than state and national contests), then we need to study more types of elections.For a copy of the data, contact Professor Tom W. Rice, department of political science, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52241 ([email protected]).

Doctoral students in political science are understandably concerned with job placement. Most students enter graduate school with an eye to academia and want to know what they must do to secure their ideal academic position. Faculty members readily offer guidance on how to increase students' likelihood of obtaining an academic job. And PS has published many articles that focus on this topic, ranging from empirical descriptions of the job market to personal accounts of job-hunting experiences. Unfortunately, graduate students often receive anecdotal or contradictory advice. To help rectify this, we undertook a more systematic examination of the qualities department hiring committees seek when granting interviews to job applicants.The authors would like to thank John Coleman, Katherine Cramer Walsh, Charles Franklin, the anonymous reviewers at PS, and the survey respondents.

Positive turnout rates in the United States and elsewhere are widely considered “an embarrassing limitation of the economic approach to politics” because, for any one voter, “the costs of casting a ballot in any large election are almost always greater than the potential benefits, which are dependent on the unlikely occurrence of casting the winning or tie vote in an election” (Knack 1992, 133). Green and Shapiro (1994), whose scathing critique of the rational choice field centers on the work of Anthony Downs (1957), trenchantly put it: “Rational choice theorists have trotted out an astonishing variety of conjectures about the costs and benefits of voting, in the process generating an enormous literature, possibly larger in terms of academic citations and sheer bibliographic length than any other rational choice literature in American politics” (47–48), yet they still have no answer as to why people vote when, according to their arguments, reason says they ought not. Grofman (1993), paraphrasing Morris Fiorina, has referred to the failure of rational choice theory to explain turnout as the “paradox that ate rational choice.”We are indebted to Clover Behrend-Gethard for bibliographic assistance.

In recent years, arriving on the job market with published work has shifted from a desirable condition to a necessity. Even middling universities can afford to ignore applications from job applicants without peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals. Thus, it is important for graduate students to focus as early as possible on publishing their work.I wish to thank Brian Brox, Jonathan Hartlyn, and Nancy Maveety for comments on an earlier draft.

As part of its mission to address issues of recruitment, retention,and integration of women and people of color in the profession, theAPSA Task Force on Mentoring periodically publishes articles on someaspect of mentoring that will help political scientists movesuccessfully through the profession. This brief symposium on“Publishing Your First Book” is just one such example of thisinitiative. For more information about the Task Force and itsongoing projects, contact Linda Lopez, APSA Director of Educationand Professional Development Programs, at [email protected].

Making a realistic assessment of your goals in publishing a book, andmatching a publisher with the text and with your goals is the firststep in bringing your research effort to completion. Socialscientists write books hoping to influence an election, change thepolitical debate, shift an academic focus, get tenure, or get a job.A good book, well-published, can help achieve someof these goals—but there are other ways to work toward them. Authorsand publishers will be happiest, and readers best served, if authorstake stock of the possible, and then market their books topublishers who are best suited to help with the goals they'vechosen. Beyond writing the book, the author has three clear tasks:deciding on realistic goals for the book; executing due diligence infinding the right publishing house; and making the gist of the bookaccessible to an educated, but not necessarily expert, reader bywriting a good proposal. Matching expectations to the book will helpidentify the most appropriate presses.

As part of its mission to address issues of recruitment, retention,and integration of women and people of color in the profession, theAPSA Task Force on Mentoring periodically publishes articles on someaspect of mentoring that will help political scientists movesuccessfully through the profession. This brief symposium on“Publishing Your First Book” is just one such example of thisinitiative. For more information about the Task Force and itsongoing projects, contact Linda Lopez, APSA Director of Educationand Professional Development Programs, at [email protected].

The right contract can make or break tenure and promotion. Thefollowing article presents pearls of wisdom from David Meyer, ClydeWilcox, Susan Clarke, Terri Givens, Carol Swain, Robert Spitzer, andPeter Labella. We divide these suggestions into two parts—those onobtaining and those on negotiating a contract.

As part of its mission to address issues of recruitment, retention,and integration of women and people of color in the profession, theAPSA Task Force on Mentoring periodically publishes articles on someaspect of mentoring that will help political scientists movesuccessfully through the profession. This brief symposium on“Publishing Your First Book” is just one such example of thisinitiative. For more information about the Task Force and itsongoing projects, contact Linda Lopez, APSA Director of Educationand Professional Development Programs, at [email protected].

Getting a book published represents the intersection of mutualself-interest between author and publisher. I have a few suggestionson how to combine these.

As part of its mission to address issues of recruitment, retention,and integration of women and people of color in the profession, theAPSA Task Force on Mentoring periodically publishes articles on someaspect of mentoring that will help political scientists movesuccessfully through the profession. This brief symposium on“Publishing Your First Book” is just one such example of thisinitiative. For more information about the Task Force and itsongoing projects, contact Linda Lopez, APSA Director of Educationand Professional Development Programs, at [email protected].

I am an acquiring editor for the Higher Education group within OxfordUniversity Press—that is, the books I am most likely to sign areexplicitly intended to be used in courses. Nevertheless, most of thefollowing nostrums are applicable in many different publishingsituations.

APSA is pleased to recognize political science faculty members who received campus-wide and department awards for teaching excellence during the 2004–2005 academic year. APSA, Rowman Littlefield Publishers, and Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society, recognize award-winning faculty members each year at the Reception Honoring Teaching at the APSA Annual Meeting. Recognized faculty members receive a certificate noting their accomplishment and their awards are announced in PS and on the APSA web site.

What does it take to be an effective teaching assistant in political science? This is a subject of interest not only to first time graduate teaching assistants, but also to the professors who make use of them, the directors of undergraduate studies who must live with their results, and the directors of graduate studies who must help prepare them for their first teaching jobs. But while the subject of training graduate students to teach is of live interest to numerous people, comparatively little direct attention has been accorded it. While 83% of graduate students say that “enjoyment of teaching” was one of the factors that lead them to enroll in graduate school, a significantly smaller percentage believe that their departments adequately prepare them to serve as teaching assistants, much less to take up the responsibilities of full-time college professors (Golde and Dore 2001). And while research on teaching has exploded since 1998, the chief focus of this research and publication has tended to be on civic education, curriculum development, and the use of technology in the classroom (Kehl 2002). Indeed, no article in PS since its inception in 1968 has ever directly taken up the topic of what sort of characteristics and practices, in general, contribute to making an effective teaching assistant.The author would like to thank the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Notre Dame for providing the initial spark to this article by inviting him to participate in a panel discussion on becoming an effective teaching assistant. He would also like to thank Walter Nicgorski for encouraging him to turn his presentation into an article and for reading and commenting upon several drafts. Finally, he would like to thank Steve Yoder of PS and the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions have considerably strengthened the final product.