There is a passage in Richardson Dilworth's “Privatization, the World Water Crisis, and the Social Contract” (PS, January 2007, 49) that requires careful attention.

I'm happy to report that I agree wholeheartedly with Roger Masters that we humans have a biological rather than a socially constructed need for water. In fact, Prof. Masters and I are so much in agreement on this point that I don't feel it necessary to consult “the literature on mammalian biological needs” as he suggests. As a mammal myself, I firmly believe that I would die were I denied water for a sufficient length of time, though I plan on keeping this an untested hypothesis.

The October, 2006 issue of PS (923–4) published a quiz on the U.S. Military alongside a call for submissions on what we should be teaching students about our military. The essays here represent a fraction of the response. Other proposals have been incorporated in several panels that will be presented at the APSA Annual Meeting in Chicago this fall. Still others have been incorporated in a volume contracted to Palgrave Press and provisionally titled Inside Defense.

Symposium authors' bios.

When the U.S. deploys its forces around the world, an increasingly important part of its operations is no longer managed by the U.S. military, per se, but rather by what some call contractors, others call private military and security companies, and still others call mercenaries. In this essay, I will briefly describe the private security industry and the larger global market for force that it is a part of and how the U.S. military's increasing reliance on private forces brings both benefit and risk.

The conduct of war is among the most important acts of the state. In the last century alone, failure in this undertaking has toppled governments and imposed hostile occupation under a conqueror's rule for hundreds of millions from Paris to Warsaw and Tokyo to Jakarta. Military failure in World War I destroyed the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires and created a host of new states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in their stead. Allied military victory in World War II made global superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, and split Germany into two countries; the success of Soviet arms ended Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian independence, and resulted in a generation of subjugation under Soviet satellite rule for the peoples of Eastern Europe. Pyrrhic victory in two world wars exhausted Britain and brought an end to its global economic hegemony. Failure in internal war has toppled governments from Afghanistan to Vietnam; variations in the conduct of such wars can mean the difference between decades of misery in grinding stalemates as in Lebanon or in a rapid, decisive conclusion as in Rwanda's.

The current condition of Army manpower, like the situation in Iraq, is grave and deteriorating. The January 2007 decision by the George W. Bush administration to send additional ground combat and support troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has thrown the Army's manpower shortages into stark relief. This latest escalation, however, not only runs the risk of breaking the all-volunteer Army but also undermines our national security. Several questions must therefore be addressed: Is an all-volunteer Army desirable? What are the current difficulties facing Army recruitment and retention? What consequences have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had on the service? Before engaging a more substantive discussion which includes the present demographics of the force and the recruitment process, one point should be made clear. We believe the all-volunteer model is the right one and should be maintained if at all possible.

“What Kinds of Guns Are They Buying for Your Butter” was the subtitle of a 1982 “People's Guide to National Defense.” It needs updating 25 years later. This essay cannot offer a comprehensive catalogue of U.S. weaponry; its goal is to outline what every citizen should know about the range and capabilities of our arsenal.

On many campuses, the sight of a student in a military uniform is common. On other campuses, the military is a distant institution with few visible affiliations. Why are some students in uniform, what are they doing, what are the costs and benefits to the individual, and what are the implications for the nation? This article will discuss these questions, along with a brief history of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program and its relationship to the often-discussed civil-military gap.

From the time of the conflict in Vietnam until the end of the Cold War, NGOs and the military rarely thought of themselves as having anything in common. In fact, people like ourselves—a career naval officer and a career pacifist—almost never met.The positions presented in this article do not represent either those of the Defense Department or Search for Common Ground.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) is one of the most important—if not the most important—public policies developed over the last half century to increase access to the U.S. political system for people of color. The VRA also provides an important context for understanding the ascension of nonwhite groups into the elected leadership of the nation (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984; Davidson and Grofman 1994; Menifield 2001; McClain and Stewart 2002; Segura and Bowler 2005; Bositis 2006). This essay assesses the present-day significance of the VRA for the political representation of communities of color by examining the implications of majority-minority districts and other key provisions in the VRA for the election of nonwhite officials in the beginning years of the twenty-first century.

Evidence suggesting that the growth of civic roots in adolescence may be crucial to the long-term development of citizenship has stimulated research into factors that might influence civic development during this time. One interesting finding to emerge from that exploration is the apparent importance of discussion to the development of civic competence. Adolescents who discuss politics and current events with their parents, peers, or teachers tend to score higher than other youth on measures of civic behaviors, attitudes, and skills. They develop higher levels of political knowledge, show greater intention to vote in the future, and do better on a range of civic outcomes from petitioning and boycotting to raising money for charities and participating in community meetings (Torney-Purta et al. 2001; Andolina et al. 2003).

On January 5, 1975, Ronald Reagan completed two terms as governor of California, and soon thereafter he began taping his nationally syndicated radio program. Between January 1975 and October 1979, with the exception of a brief interlude to compete for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, the former governor delivered three-minute commentaries that were broadcast every week by approximately 300 U.S. radio stations, reaching an audience of between 20–30 million listeners.

As political scientists, many of us encourage our students to get involved in community activities and local politics; and in fact many of our political science colleagues have run for state and local (and, less frequently, national) office. While the literature on parties, elections, and voting behavior may help provide us with some context when we (or our students) enter the political arena, there is a striking dearth of literature on voting behavior (and candidate behavior) in local elections. What Herson (1957) referred to as “the lost world of municipal government” can still be so characterized today, though a few recent studies have attempted to predict winners of municipal races (for example, McGleneghan and Ragland 2002; Lieske 1989). This article analyzes my own education in local politics, which resulted from my candidacy for the Town Council of Cazenovia, New York in November, 2005. I came to the experience of participating in a local campaign with expectations shaped by my teaching and research in American politics at the national level, and found that these expectations often gave way to the specifics of context. Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist running for Congress in 2006, expressed this sentiment as: “Political science is all generalities. Politics is all individual circumstances” (Fischer 2006).

This list celebrates the generous contributions of our members in giving to one or more of the following programs from 1996 through 2006: APSA awards, programs, the Congressional Fellowship Program, and the Centennial Campaign. APSA thanks these donors for ensuring that the benefits of membership and the influence of the profession will extend far into the future. APSA will update and print this list annually in the January issue of PS.

While many bemoan the increasingly large role rankings play in American higher education, their prominence and importance are indisputable. Such rankings have many different audiences, ranging from prospective undergraduates or graduate students, to foundations and government funders, to university administrators identifying strengths and weaknesses of their school. This diverse audience necessarily has varying hopes for what “quality” is measured in school rankings, and different uses for the rankings themselves. But although there are currently a wide variety of ways to assess graduate school quality, most existing surveys have recognized failings that compromise their usefulness to at least one of these different constituencies.The authors extend their thanks to William Bowen, Derek Bruff, Jonathan Cole, Philip Katz, Gary King, Robert Townsend, Harriet Zuckerman, and two anonymous PS reviewers for their valuable comments on and criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.

There are many different ways to develop rankings of Ph.D.-granting academic departments. Perhaps the most common method is reputational: we simply ask knowledgeable scholars in the discipline to provide their rankings and aggregate these in some fashion. Other ways involve more “objective indicators.” But, of course, departments have multiple attributes, e.g., we might be interested in how good a department is as a place to get a Ph.D., or we might be interested simply in the research record of its faculty, etc. Thus, we might want to use different indicators to measure different aspects of the department.

“Publish or perish.” Every graduate student has heard the phrase. Many junior scholars understand that it reflects the cold reality of professional survival in any political science department that bases tenure and promotion decisions, in whole or in part, on a record of demonstrated scholarly achievement. Despite occasional pronouncements by college presidents or faculty committees that teaching should be given greater weight in personnel decisions, the pressure to publish will not soon subside. If anything, it may be becoming more acute, as graduate students entering the job market struggle to publish some portion of their dissertation in a respected scholarly journal so as to distinguish themselves from the pack of applicants presenting otherwise similar credentials.I wish to thank Jack Jacobs, Lenny Markovitz, Michael Hiscox, and the graduate students at the CUNY Graduate Center and Harvard University for many useful suggestions and comments on the presentations that served as the basis for this article. I have incorporated ideas offered by Jim Jackson, Marianne Stewart, and John Geer at an editors' roundtable in which we participated at the 2006 Midwest Political Science Association meeting. Bob Lineberry and two anonymous referees helped me to clarify certain points in the manuscript. I am responsible for any errors that remain.

Just as there was a boom in the establishment of Master's of Business Administration programs over the past 30 or more years, today there is an equivalent boom in graduate programs in the field of public policy. This is so for the transition states of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union where the dynamics of globalization and “Europeanization” are apparent and the pressures for reform pronounced (Verheijen and Connaughton 2003, 843). Appointing personnel with the educational prerequisites necessary for managing reform and meeting the challenges of globalization has been problematic for both official actors such as national education ministries, international organizations, and bilateral development agencies, as well as for non-state actors such as the business sector, philanthropic foundations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The need for graduates who can function in international and cross-cultural contexts is prompting institutions to create new courses and professional degree programs (Mallea 1998, 16).

Tom Mann is, well, beaming. Five months ago he wrote a Sunday Outlook piece for the Washington Post arguing that “the prevailing view in Washington today”—namely, that “there's probably no way congressional Republicans can lose this fall”—is “wrong.” Tom was vindicated on Election Day when the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress, and here at the “America Votes 2006” conference in Little Rock, co-sponsored by the Clinton School of Public Service and the State Legislative Leaders Foundation, he is accepting the congratulations of, among others, me. Other elections prognosticators at the conference, such as Charlie Cook and the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, have already moved on to speculating about what's going to happen in 2008, but Tom is rightly enjoying the moment.