Recent discussions of teaching research methods have focused on understanding the relationship between methods courses and the broader discipline, including the need to integrate qualitative methods and other approaches beyond the traditional statistical approaches still common in the majority of undergraduate research methods courses. This article contributes to this conversation by arguing that the basic elements of research design and qualitative techniques should be integrated into substantive (or “non-methods”) courses across the discipline. To accomplish this aim, I offer a brief outline of methodological benchmark skills—drawn from the pool of skills necessary for a successful thesis—that can be taught in various courses across the discipline through a traditional assignment: the semester research paper.

Process tracing is a fundamental tool of qualitative analysis. This method is often invoked by scholars who carry out within-case analysis based on qualitative data, yet frequently it is neither adequately understood nor rigorously applied. This deficit motivates this article, which offers a new framework for carrying out process tracing. The reformulation integrates discussions of process tracing and causal-process observations, gives greater attention to description as a key contribution, and emphasizes the causal sequence in which process-tracing observations can be situated. In the current period of major innovation in quantitative tools for causal inference, this reformulation is part of a wider, parallel effort to achieve greater systematization of qualitative methods. A key point here is that these methods can add inferential leverage that is often lacking in quantitative analysis. This article is accompanied by online teaching exercises, focused on four examples from American politics, two from comparative politics, three from international relations, and one from public health/epidemiology.

A PSA is pleased to recognize the recipients of campus-wide and departmental awards for teaching excellence during the 2010–11 academic year. Pi Sigma Alpha hosts these recipients each year at the Reception Honoring Teaching at the APSA Annual Meeting.

Tyson D. King-Meadows was recently promoted to associate professor with tenure in the department of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research interests include Congress, African American political behavior and attitudes, representation, and public opinion. He is author of Devolution and Black State Legislators: Challenges and Choices in the Twenty-first Century (2006, with Thomas F. Schaller) and When the Letter Betrays the Spirit: Voting Rights Enforcement and African American Participation from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama (2011).

Books by our readers.

Aage Clausen, professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University, died in January 2011 at the age of 78. He was an extraordinary person who made major contributions as a scholar and teacher and he was a remarkable individual who was much beloved as a colleague and friend.

The political science discipline lost one of its sharpest intellects and many of us lost a cherished dear friend when George Rabinowitz passed away, on March 18, 2011. George's death was entirely unexpected. He suffered a sudden cardiac arrest in Trondheim, Norway, where he was on leave from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill with a research fellowship.

Robert E. Hawkinson died May 22, 2011 of an apparent heart attack at the age of 68. At the time of his death Prof. Hawkinson was Emeritus Dean of Campus Life/Associate Professor of Politics at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. He was also Kaneko Faculty Commons Mentor, a position created as part of the Residential Commons system initiated by Prof. Hawkinson during his tenure as Campus Life Dean at Willamette. During his nearly thirty years at Willamette, Bob Hawkinson was a fixture on campus and one of the most revered educators, advisors, and mentors, reaching out to generations of students through his inspired teaching and committed dedication to the intellectual life of the university community. Although Bob was rewarded with emeritus status in 2009, he continued to teach in the Politics Department at Willamette for the remaining two years of his life.

Dr. Peter Mair, Professor of Comparative Politics and Government at the EUI (Florence) has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, 15 August 2011, at the age of 60. He leaves behind his wife and 3 children. The political science community in Europe and beyond grieves this loss of an outstanding academic, journal editor and teacher. Peter Mair, born 3 March 1951, was a native of Ireland, a graduate of University College Dublin and enjoyed a distinguished academic career and was the author of a large number of books, chapters and articles on comparative and European politics and on party democracy in particular. It is a sad loss to European political science. He graduated in 1974 and began his career as an assistant professor at the University of Limerick. He subsequently lectured at the universities of Strathclyde and Manchester before moving to the European University Institute of Florence in 1979. He moved to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in 1987 and was appointed professor of comparative politics in 1992. In 2005 he returned to Florence and was appointed head of the department of political and social sciences in 2007. Prof Mair specialised in the study of party and party systems and has written a number of books on the subject. He was co-author of Representative Government in Modern Europe, the fifth edition of which was published this year. He was also co-author of Identity, Competition and Electoral Availability, which was awarded the prestigious Stein Rokkan prize. Peter Mair served the comparative political science community by editorships of the internationally reputed European Journal of Political Science and of West European Politics. Peter was a person of great charm, a congenial colleague and always encouraging students. We grieve over his loss and sympathize with his family he left behind too early and too soon.

G Bingham Powell's core intellectual contribution to the study of politics has been to help us understand fundamental normative tradeoffs that are inherent to institutional choice in democratic political systems. The tradeoffs involve dimensions of political performance of central concern in the discipline, including political violence, political participation, political representation, political accountability, and political stability. In offering innovative insights about these substantive topics, Powell's research has played a crucial role in shaping the subfield of comparative politics by offering important lessons about how to advance the study of democratic systems.

A preview of some of the articles in the January 2012 issue.

During the annual APSA All Member Business Meeting on September 3, 2011, APSA Council Committee on Election chair, Julie Novkov, certified additional nominees for seats on the APSA council. An all-member electronic election is being held to determine the eight council members who will serve on the 2011–13 council, in addition to the officers who were declared elected without contest. The election began on October 3 and ends on November 2, 2011.

On July 27, the Democratic minority on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee (SST), Ranking Member Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), released a staff report, Out of Focus: A Critical Assessment of the Senate Report, “The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope.”

The Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs is an invaluable resource to political and social scientists. Since its opening in September 2003, the Center has housed more than 100 scholars. The center, located in the APSA headquarters near Dupont Circle, provides a great base of operations for scholars researching in the DC metro area. The Center offers visiting scholars furnished work space, telephone, fax, computers, Internet access, conference space, a reference library, and access to George Washington University's Gelman Library. Visiting scholar stays range from a few days to 12 months. Space is limited to APSA members and is available for faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students from the United States and abroad. Scholars are expected to cover their own expenses and a modest facilities fee for the use of the center. Prospective visiting scholars may apply at any time. Positions are awarded on a space-available basis.

Founded in 1953, the APSA Congressional Fellows Program is the nation's oldest and most prestigious congressional fellowship. The program remains devoted to its original objective of expanding knowledge and awareness of Congress. For nine months, select political scientists, journalists, doctors, federal executives, and international scholars gain “hands on” understanding of the legislative process by serving on congressional staffs. Through this opportunity, the association enhances public understanding of policymaking and improves the quality of scholarship, teaching, and reporting on American national politics. For more information, please visit http://apasnet.org/content_3031.cfm. Individuals selected for the proram for 2011-12 are listed below.

As a tenured, full professor in an endowed peace studies chair at my home institution, I chose to spend my 2009–10 sabbatical year as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Why? As I saw it, my colleagues who teach chemistry need to work with electron spectrometers; my colleagues who teach ethnomusicology need to perform with Javanese gamelans. In an analogous way, I believed that my own work with Congress would energize and refocus my research and teaching. All subfields of intellectual inquiry have their blind spots, and within the subfield of peace studies the largest blind spot may be the perspective that I thought might be gained from being a foreign policy insider. Again and again, my courses began and ended with students asking me to explain how or why the United States behaved and behaves in ways that baffle the rest of the world. I found myself saying something about “political will” and believed that if I were to answer that question in a way that felt remotely satisfying, I needed to spend some time on the ground observing how the “sausage” was made.

The annual APSA Africa Workshop, Representation Reconsidered: Ethnic Politics and Africa's Governance Institutions in Comparative Perspective was held in partnership with the Institute for Development Studies at University of Nairobi in Kenya, from July 23 to August 6. It was the fourth residential workshop of a multi-year initiative that APSA will convene in sub-Saharan Africa from 2008 though 2014 (previous workshops were held in Senegal, Ghana, and Tanzania).

For the first time in its history, the American Political Science Association held its annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, bringing together more than 6,000 political scientists from all over the world for a variety of programmatic, networking, and social events. From September 1 to September 4, scholars gathered in the beautiful Pacific Northwest to explore an exciting program focused on the theme The Politics of Rights. The 2011 Annual Meeting Program Chairs Frances Hagopian, Harvard University, and Bonnie Honig, Northwestern University, developed a theme that asked “the discipline bring its empirical and normative lenses to reflect on the domestic, comparative, and international dimensions of the complex politics of rights.”

Representation is ubiquitous to modern politics. In democratic and non-democratic settings alike, power is delegated to—or appropriated by—some to act in the name of others. Yet relationships of representation often go awry and are always and everywhere subject to skepticism, disillusionment, and calls for fundamental reform. Despite periodic calls for new modes of direct participation in decision-making, however, representation is inseparable from politics on a mass scale. For the 2012 meetings, we ask political scientists to reconsider the normative ideals we attach to representation, the factors that impede the realization of those ideals in practice, and the potential for representative relationships—whether preserved, reformed, or radically overhauled—to translate citizens' collective aspirations into effective public initiatives. We issue this call with an eye on renewal—of cities, economies, institutions, and relationships between the governed and those who govern.