Micheal Giles and James Garand have done us a great service by revealing many of the complexities involved in using either citational or reputational approaches to ranking journals in political science (October 2007).

Organizations of any duration develop norms of behavior. A few are codified in organizational rules but many remain informal, transmitted to new members through socialization mechanisms. All norms, informal norms in particular, are resilient but not permanent. They change if socialization instruments are no longer effective or if members are aware of established norms but opt to no longer follow them.

In my three decades in the profession I have served on an uncountable number of search committees. In recent years I increasingly encountered an annoying (to me) practice among applicants, multiple vita entries for identically titled, and thus presumably identically written, conference papers. I originally dismissed such practices as vita padding, a not well socialized, nor particularly well accomplished, applicant seeking to make his or her research performance look more impressive than it actually is.

As Nelson Dometrius's opening essay suggests, academic standards, like other occupational standards and practices, change over time. These changes may draw fire from both established and younger scholars trained in the classical tradition. Shifting norms in political science range from different publication standards over time (few would doubt that the number of publications required for tenure has increased in most schools), to changing ideas about journal quality, to different conference practices. In this essay, I argue that the increasingly common practice of presenting identical papers at multiple conferences is not a negative influence on the discipline and does not conflict with any of the commonly offered rationales for conference attendance and participation. In fact, I suggest that making changes to existing papers—presenting future versions of a paper—may produce a more focused research agenda and may battle some potentially negative trends in political science. I also argue that this practice is a rational and predictable outgrowth of the shifting academic incentive structure.Thanks to Nelson Dometrius, Todd Collins, Gibbs Knotts, and Niall Michelsen for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

For many faculty members, particularly those at research institutions, presenting a paper more than once at a conference has long been taboo. Peers evaluating tenure requirements or merit rankings may credit a second presentation less, or not at all. On the other hand, norms in the discipline vary dramatically across institution types. We argue that at universities with considerable teaching loads and substantial service expectations, duplicate research presentations can be an effective way to maintain an active research agenda, absent other institutional incentives to do so. We currently teach international relations and comparative politics courses at an institution where the incentives to research remain modest, and the incentives to teach and spend a considerable amount of time in service related activities are substantial. Our comments are particularly geared toward this environment. We begin by defining what we mean by duplicate research presentations. Next, we outline how the incentive structure at a teaching institution creates different priorities, allowing different norms to develop. We then examine how duplicate research presentations can be an effective tool for overcoming traps common to untenured faculty. We end with an unabashed defense of the increasingly common practice of duplicate research presentations, particularly at teaching and service oriented universities.

When I first was asked to write this piece about “double conferencing,” I immediately went to my vita. Looking at the evidence Nelson Dometrius presented introducing this symposium and placing myself on the degree year list, I found I was in the center of the controversy, having received my degree in 1998. Had I committed the crime of presenting the same paper at two conferences? I skimmed my CV, and yes, there it was: an identically titled paper at both a national and a section conference. Granted, this was the only one I could find on my CV, there was only a month between the two conferences, and we had made some changes based on feedback. However, there was more than enough overlap to place me among the group of violators.

An increase in the number of political science papers that are presented at multiple academic conferences does not, as Nelson Dometrius recognizes, constitute one of the major existential crises of the twenty-first century. Indeed, I doubt that it would even make it onto anyone's list of the top hundred issues currently confronting the discipline of political science. Nonetheless, it does warrant more attention than it has received in the past (which, insofar as I am aware, is approximately none at all).

Like everyone else in the discipline, we have seen multiple appearances of a single paper title on conference programs, within vitas of job applicants, and in tenure/promotion files. Depending upon the context, our reactions have either been amusement, irritation, or (most frequently) indifference. To bring the entire situation home, consider the following: About three weeks ago, both of us submitted (separate) paper proposals to the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. And, sometime within the next five weeks, one of us intends to submit a proposal to the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, while the other plans to submit a proposal to the 2008 State Politics and Policy Meeting. In each case, these will be the same proposals that we sent off earlier to the Midwest Political Science Association.

The 2006 election will best be remembered for returning Democrats to power in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. By almost any metric, November 7 was a bad day for the Republicans. After 12 years of Republican majorities, the Democrats picked up 31 seats in the House and six in the Senate. While significant GOP losses were expected, the results on Election Day were essentially the best case scenario for the Democrats.

The correspondence between public preferences and public policy is a critical rationale for representative democratic government. This view has been put forward in the theoretical literature on democracy and representation (e.g., Dahl 1971; Pitkin 1967; Birch 1971) and in “functional” theories of democratic politics (Easton 1965; Deutsch 1963), both of which emphasize the importance of popular control of policymaking institutions. Political science research also shows a good amount of correspondence between opinion and policy, though to varying degrees, across a range of policy domains and political institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere. This is of obvious significance.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2006 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, at the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties specialist group, Nottingham, England, and at the 2007 National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. We thank Vinod Menon for assistance with data collection and Kevin Arceneaux, Suzie DeBoef, Harold Clarke, Peter Enns, Mark Franklin, Martin Gilens, John Griffin, Will Jennings, Rich Joslyn, Benjamin Page, David Sanders, David Weakliem, John Zaller, and the anonymous reviewers for comments.

The quality of representation the citizenry receives from its political leaders is central to evaluating the character of any democratic institution. Moreover, the number of elected members that comprise an institution can be vital in determining whether citizens have access to and can influence the decisions of their representatives (Dahl and Tufte 1973). The United States House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 members for almost a century. This durability of this alignment is astonishing; in its first century of existence, the U.S. House experienced a virtually uninterrupted string of decennial increases in its membership. Despite the magnitude of the effects of this stasis on representation, political scientists have not extensively examined this subject (Squire and Hamm 2005). While the House has remained constant in size for nearly 100 years, the nation's population has grown by more than 200% over this duration. Members of the House on average represent more than 600,000 citizens; a figure that increases with population growth as long as the size of the body remains constant. This development has sparked a debate among some observers about whether it is time to increase the size of the House of Representatives.

It is clear from the presidential primary campaign that 2008 can legitimately be labeled “the year of the spouse as surrogate.” The sheer number of candidates on both sides of the aisle and the heavily front-loaded campaign season have made using the wives—and husband—of the candidates a “must.” Never before has media attention been so heavily focused on the spouses. In fact, they have often been an equal, or in some cases, bigger story than the candidates themselves. The same pattern will characterize the spouses of the vice presidential candidates. The bottom line is that use of presidential and vice presidential spouses has become an integral part of presidential campaigns. In this article, we detail how the Bush and Kerry camps strategically scheduled spouses in the final days of the campaign—from Labor Day until Election Day. We conclude with some thoughts about what to expect in 2008.

If challenged to do so, relatively few Americans could probably find North and South Dakota on a map, let alone correctly name, spell, and pronounce the capitals of the two states. Nor would they be able to recall anything interesting about the Dakotas, whose main tourist attractions, besides Mount Rushmore, are a drug store, a civic arena festooned in corn, and a peace garden. Although one of the Dakotas bills itself as “The Land of Infinite Variety,” its sociocultural diversity consists primarily of different synods of Lutherans who engage in endless disputation with one another because they are so similar. Dakotans prefer their food bland—they consider ketchup daringly spicy—and their politicians low-key. When they encounter something new, they call it “different,” which they rarely mean as a compliment, and they wait for it to go away—which, because there is so little to hold it in the Dakotas, it probably will do. They keep their opinions to themselves (a typical Dakotan being the fellow from Sioux Falls who loved his wife so much that he almost told her), and they do not like it when people make a fuss about themselves or anything else. Thus, when South Dakotans perceived the previously popular Senator George McGovern as having gotten too big for his britches by seeking the presidency in 1972, they saw to it that he would fail to carry his home state, and three decades later they voted long-time Senator Tom Daschle out of office as soon as he repeated McGovern's mistake of seeing a president whenever he gazed into a mirror.

The 11 years from 1994 to 2005 comprised the second-longest period without an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court (Epstein et al. 2003, 353). The nominations of John Roberts in 2005 and Samuel Alito in 2006 were met with enthusiasm by conservatives, foreboding by liberals, and great interest by political scientists concerned with the Court's future and with changes in the appointment process since Stephen Breyer's appointment in 1994.

Almost all economic indicators show that the rise of China is all but inevitable. Many argue that it is already happening. China may rank as the second, or the third, or the fourth largest world economic power, depending on how one does the counting, after enjoying an average annual GDP growth rate of nearly 10% in the past quarter of a century (1983–2007) (National Bureau of Statistics of China). China currently has the largest foreign currency reserve in the world, reaching one trillion U.S. dollars (People's Bank of China) and China became the second largest trade country after the U.S. in 2007 (Wenweipo 2007). In fact, no discussion of world economy is adequate without talking about China. Even though the United States is currently embroiled in Iraq and the war on terror, there is no question that the rise of China is still very much in back of the minds of American foreign policy makers and political elites, especially during the current presidential campaigns. For instance, one survey of American international relations scholars reveals that while 58% of the scholars believe that the greatest strategically important region for the United States is the Middle East right now, 60% of them think it will be China and East Asia in 20 years (Peterson, Tierney, and Maliniak 2005). A public survey shows that a majority of the citizens in many developing countries think it would be a good thing if China were to become as large a military power as the United States (Pew Global Attitudes Project 2005).We would like to acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. We also want express our gratitude to the 132 scholars who participated in our survey.

Graduate students suffer from many pressures when writing a dissertation. Deadlines loom, jobs are highly competitive, publishing is always a bonus, and these are often combined with outside research, teaching fellowships, or other occupations. In order to finish a quality dissertation without too much wasted time or effort it is useful for students to begin early and to think hard about their projects in a variety of ways. Students may have a broad conceptual interest or field interest without a focused and tractable project. In addition to the normal practice of discussing potential projects with advisors and mentors, there are several ways to evaluate potential projects that may be overlooked. This essay helps bring a good dissertation project to the front of several potential ideas a student might have by describing several characteristics for comparison across topics. In addition, this essay provides a rubric by which students can develop and discuss a project with faculty and colleagues. Without a doubt, one of the most important aspects of preparing a dissertation project is to discuss that project with faculty mentors and potential committee members (Banesh 2001). Between these discussions, or before the first discussion of potential projects, students can spend considerable time thinking about various ideas for their thesis or dissertation. Students approaching their project systematically may have many projects they are considering and wish to narrow down those projects to a manageable few before discussing them with advisors. As a first time dissertation writer, however, most graduate students are unaware of criteria that can be used to evaluate and compare their ideas objectively so they can compare several project ideas and narrow down the field. The criteria described here combine and extend other criteria previously developed, such as developing questions that are important in the real world and those that contribute to scholarly literature (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). The criteria described below were developed specifically for dissertation projects, but are also very useful for students writing theses for other purposes such as undergraduate senior projects. The guide provided here should enable students to compare several potential ideas objectively to begin to find a viable project. Although the initial development of a thesis project based on a student's theoretical or empirical interests is mostly idiosyncratic and personal (See King, Keohane, and Verba 1994; Van Evera 1997), once a student's interests emerge there are some common ways to objectively evaluate several dissertation projects. This essay helps students develop several ways to think about their dissertation projects and create a rubric so that several projects can be evaluated on comparable terms.Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers and Ronald B Mitchell who made instrumental suggestions on improving the text.

If you could start a political science program from scratch, how would you do it? Given no institutional history, how would you design graduate and undergraduate programs? How would you grow your faculty? How would you attempt to build a reputation in the absence of a reputation at time t-1? In an interdisciplinary environment, with which disciplines would you work most closely? For most political science professors, these might be interesting hypothetical questions to consider. For the two of us, these questions are very real and have dominated our recent work lives as we have just finished our first year as the founding political science faculty at the brand new University of California campus, UC Merced.We thank Carissa Hansford, Shawn Kantor, and Jennifer Nicholson for helpful comments and suggestions.

Intellectual exchange is central to progress in any discipline, including political science. The transfer of knowledge, ideas, and techniques takes place in many forums (e.g., advisor-student meetings, conferences, department lounges) and it is no simple task to systematically identify or quantify this interchange. In general though, the fruition of a successful or insightful idea is a published journal article or book. The way in which the author(s) of a published piece of work acknowledges previous or contemporary work that contributed to its development is via references or citations. Thus, while we cannot easily keep track of the entire process of intellectual exchange that leads to publication, citations inform us of other (usually published) work that influenced and contributed to the articles and books that make up the research output of the field.We thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments on content and structure.

This paper discusses an arms control simulation that formed a central part of the course, Controlling Chemical and Biological Weapons. Based on the experiential learning approach this simulation sought to (a) provide an active learning context for students to acquire an in-depth understanding of central aspects of biological arms control, and (b) gain an appreciation for the complexities of multilateral diplomacy in general and arms control negotiations in particular. I taught this course in spring 2006 to a group of 16 final-year undergraduate students. The arms control simulation complemented the weekly one-hour lectures and replaced the standard one-hour student-led seminar sessions. At the beginning of the simulation I supplied students with a set of confidential country instructions to approach the simulation, which was subdivided into two negotiating rounds of three sessions each and a drafting exercise towards the end of the semester.

For many faculty members, the move by universities toward greater reliance on online and hybrid courses raises questions of course content and quality. Many faculty, socialized to deliver information to students in a manner described as “chalk and talk,” wonder whether moving courses out into the online environment somehow compromises the education students receive. In fact, there is a small but growing body of information in political science and other cognate disciplines that addresses these questions and offers evidence that online courses, while different from more traditional face-to-face classes, can offer rich learning opportunities in their own right. This article seeks to contribute to that body of knowledge by reporting the results of a quasi-experiment comparing student success and satisfaction in online and face-to-face courses.The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the UWM Center for Instructional and Professional Development and the assistance of Anthony Ciccone, Connie Schroeder, and the anonymous reviewers.