The article on the seats-votes curve by Kastellec, Gelman, and Chandler (January 2008, 139–45) presents interesting and helpful analysis and data. Especially important is the insight that incumbency necessarily requires a minority party to receive more than 50% of the vote to gain control of the House of Representatives. However the article is misleading in two respects.

We thank Dr. Arrington for his kind words about our article. In this letter we respond to his two main criticisms: that our use of the term bias in describing the situation facing the Democratic Party in 2006 is misleading and that using total vote to assess the results of the election is preferable to using average district vote, as we did in the article.

Reading the results of Lavariega-Monforti and Michelson's study of Latinas and Latinos in the profession in the January issue (“Diagnosing the Leaky Pipeline: Continuing Barriers to the Retention of Latinas and Latinos in Political Science”) made for depressing reading. Sadly, their observations are deadly accurate on the experiences of endemic institutional racism that Latino and Latina political scientists face in American academic institutions. This culture of endemic racism was vibrant in graduate school while I was getting my Ph.D. and appears to have changed little since then. For that reason I am very pessimistic that this situation will change in my generation and, frankly, the APSA has been very slow to act on this problem. In my personal experience, in British universities I have been evaluated on my merits, rather than on my ethnic background. I would urge other Latino and Latina political scientists to consider using their skills in the UK and elsewhere.

In the 1990s I testified before a National Science Foundation (NSF) panel headed by Cora Marrett, then assistant director for the NSF Directorate for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. The subject of the panel's inquiry, and this issue's symposium, was social science research and the federally mandated but decentralized human subjects protection program and its principal actors, institutional review boards (IRBs). My testimony addressed the ways in which the regulatory system ill-fit and ill-served political science research. IRBs had expanded their mission to include all research, not just research funded by the federal government, enhancing their scope of authority while slowing the timeliness of reviews. Similarly, and with the same result, IRBs were evaluating secondary research as well as primary research. Although the federal legislation provided for a nuanced assessment of risk, the distinction between potentially risk-laden research necessitating a full IRB review and research posing minimal or no risk that could be either exempted or given expedited review was disappearing. The length of the review process threatened the beginning or completion of course work and degree programs. IRBs were judging the merits of research projects rather than the risks involved. This trend was especially problematic because representation on many IRBs was skewed toward biological and behavioral scientists often unfamiliar with the methods and fields of political science and the other social sciences. And the list went on.

Social scientists are well aware of the unintended consequences of public policies. The protection of human subjects regulations, which emerged in response to a serious problem in the medical community, provides an ideal example of such unintended consequences; to paraphrase an old aphorism, “the road to bureaucratic hell is paved with well-intentioned public policies.” In this essay I will seek to make three points. First, the protection of human subjects by federal regulation was long overdue. Second, this benefit to society has, in its application, ignored another widely accepted regulatory principle, namely that the costs of regulation should not outweigh its benefits; a combination of “bureaucratic creep” and litigation phobia has resulted in intrusive and counterproductive regulation of social science research, such that the cure has become worse than the disease. Third, ironically, because of institutional review boards' definition of what is and what is not research, the protection of human subjects is denied to subjects who actually could be at risk.

Political science as a discipline has largely ignored research regulatory policies associated with institutional review boards (IRBs). Many political scientists—especially those in the senior ranks—are either oblivious to the existence of IRBs or actively decide to sidestep them by not submitting their proposals for review. Based on research conducted since 2004, we hold that APSA members at all ranks of the profession, along with political scientists worldwide, need to be concerned, not to say alarmed, about IRB policy. Why this sense of urgency, and why now?

The governance of research ethics in Canada, including its research ethics boards (REBs), which correspond to the institutional review boards in the U.S., often is portrayed as an exemplary model of cross-disciplinary cooperation and consultation that is altruistically striving to protect research subjects from abuses in biomedical, social sciences, and humanities research. While there is indeed a great deal of altruism and good intention among those involved in this governance, power and interests also play a role that is of particular concern for political scientists. Governance arrangements have been driven by biomedical research, which is vastly better funded than social sciences and humanities (SSH) research. These arrangements have been imposed on the SSH research community with little sensitivity to the distinctive problems of SSH research, despite concerns about such problems that political scientists and other SSH researchers have expressed for a decade. A recent proposal initiated by major research funders to dramatically strengthen research ethics governance has generated even more alarm.

In recent years, there has been increased discussion and even debate about how to reconcile a commitment to the ethical conduct of research in the social and behavioral sciences with a regulatory apparatus for the protection of human subjects that seems too often to fall short of its own aspirations and ideals. The gap between regulations and their implementation whether at the federal, state, or local levels is typically grist for the mill in political science. When, however, the issues are more in our own backyard—in our academic and research institutions—insight, interventions, and even empirical study are harder to come by. The purpose of this essay is neither to applaud what is right nor to decry what is wrong with the current system for the protection of human subjects as practiced. Our goal is to help further catalyze through this PS symposium a conversation about the need to produce system reform, illustrate some readily doable steps for doing so, and entice social science colleagues to work at their own institutions and at a national level for system change.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon who began creating vivid word paintings of the performance of the American health care system in The New Yorker's pages while he was still a resident. Those of us who are immersed in, and charged with measuring, that system—as I have been for the last decade—find his “Annals of Medicine” column's evocations of heroic system successes and frightening system failures true to the processes we more prosaically try to analyze and evaluate. In December 2007 Gawande published a New Yorker essay called “The Checklist,” followed just days later by an op-ed piece in the New York Times (Gawande 2007a; 2007b).

On the morning of October 30, 2007, Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama, her closest challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, by a comfortable margin in every significant national poll. That night, however, Senator Clinton, debating in Philadelphia, wandered into an ambush. Asked for her opinion of then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's plan to allow illegal immigrants to apply for driver's licenses, she first seemed to support the idea and then, under withering attack from Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, almost immediately backed away from her tepid endorsement. Writing shortly after the debate, Mark Halperin (2007) of Time magazine opined that “[i]f [Clinton] loses the nomination, tonight will go down in history as the first step to her defeat.”

For years voters and political pundits have grumbled about the lack of real choice between Republicans and Democrats. Scholars have examined party behavior and suggested reasons for concern. Determining whether there is a real ideological and policy difference between U.S. political parties, and the nature of that difference, is important for political science and for democratic politics generally. Ultimately, democracy is about choices, and where choices are few, democracy is degraded. One way to examine the choices that political parties offer voters is by assessing their political platforms. Even in an era of candidate-centric politics, political party platforms spell out the general programs offered by the parties, and the platforms are heavily influenced by the policy positions of the candidates themselves. In addition, the political platform is the one document that spells out the entire program of the party. Individual candidate speeches capture only snippets (at best) of the policy choices offered to voters. Recent innovations in computerized content analysis make it possible to analyze large bodies of text such as party platforms in a systematic way by treating words as data, then analyzing them statistically.

Since public election financing was first implemented during the wave of post-Watergate reforms, the burning question has been, “does it work?” Evaluations of public financing have focused on its primary objectives, which are designed to address familiar grievances: Elections are too expensive and not competitive enough. Corporate PACs and other “special interests” contribute disproportionately to incumbents because they are interested in purchasing influence. Candidates must devote so much time to fundraising that little is left for other campaign tasks. Lost in these considerations, however, is the fact that mandated financial parity changes the strategic environment candidates function in, altering their decision making and potentially changing the nature of elections. As fully subsidized elections gain increasing ubiquity in the United States, reformers must decide whether this is a cost worth bearing.

Stephen Colbert hosts a comedy television program called The Colbert Report (the t at the end is silent—both of them!) in which he parodies personality-based news shows like The O'Reilly Factor that have become popular during the last 10 years. In an effort to make fun of these (usually conservative) personalities who engage in non-stop self-promotion, Colbert frequently trades outlandish claims for laughs. Among these is the claim that anyone who comes on the Report receives the “Colbert bump,” immediately vaulting the guest to stardom, fame, and fortune. Like Midas turning everything he touches to gold, Stephen Colbert can turn losers into winners, just by interviewing them on his show (but, ahem, he would never actually interview a loser now would he?).

In the 2004 presidential election, perhaps 54% of the nation's youngest cohort—dubbed “Generation Next” by some pollsters—cast a vote. This was a substantial increase over the 42% of eligible 18–25-year-olds who voted in the 2000 election (U.S. Census Bureau 2005; Pew Center 2007). Still, youth voting rates lagged behind the voting rates of those citizens older than 25–66% made their way to the polls on Election Day in 2004 (Lopez, Kirby, and Sagoff 2005). It is likely that voting rates will increase in the current youth cohort as they age, as has happened in both the Baby Boomer and Generation X cohorts. But transforming more of the large Generation Next cohort into voters earlier in adulthood could substantially increase democratic participation in upcoming elections and for decades to come, as habits of civic participation developed in youth often last a lifetime (Miller and Shanks 1996). Two-thirds of young people now enroll in some form of higher education. Colleges and universities of all types would therefore seem to be natural sites to mount efforts to improve youth voter turnout. And because interest in voting among the youngest adult cohort seems to be on the rise, this would seem to be the time to encourage more of such behavior. But how can institutions of higher learning best promote democratic participation, especially voting?

In recent years, evolving communication technologies have produced dramatic changes in how scholars communicate. Through mechanisms such as e-mail, wireless networks, and mobile communication networks, the volume of information that scholars can send—and the range of people to whom information can be sent—are radically different today than they were for previous generations. These changes in communicative capacity raise expectations of what scholars can accomplish. One source of raised expectations is the possibility for dynamic, large-scale, geographically dispersed collaboratories that evolving communication technologies allow. The promise is that large groups of researchers, working together, can generate insights more effectively and efficiently than they would if they worked alone or only with people in their own geographic proximity.

The lack of enthusiasm for the European Union and its proposed constitution among the European people surprised the political elite of Europe. Codifying common beliefs and values seemed to be a good way to represent the European identity in written form. The signing of the constitutional treaty should have become an important symbolic act, demonstrating the willingness of the people to bond together. Instead, a so-called Reform Treaty was passed in Lisbon in 2007 (to be ratified by all member states by 2009) that specifically abandoned any allusion to symbolic forms of European representation such as the term constitution, the flag, or a European anthem.

Legislative scholars have a history of stepping back occasionally to examine the development and state of the sub-discipline (Budge 1973; Gamm and Huber 2002; Loewenberg, Patterson, and Jewell 1985; Mezey 1993; Morris-Jones 1983; Pasquino 1973; Patterson 1989). Many of these existing reviews, although valuable, are predominantly of a qualitative and subjective nature and are, in most cases, now dated. This paper provides a bibliometrical analysis of the state of legislative studies in the United States and Europe by exploring the content of eight political science journals. I looked at six general political science journals, three originating in the United States and three in Europe, as well as the content of two legislative studies journals—the American-based Legislative Studies Quarterly and the British-based Journal of Legislative Studies.

The American Political Science Association (APSA) has roughly 14,000 members. In fall 2002, APSA appointed a “Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy” (TFIAD). The group's 15 members represented various prestigious American universities, including, for example, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. TFIAD was tasked with assessing the relationship between economic inequality in America and changes in political participation rates in our representative democracy.

The December 2006 APSA report, “Trends in the Political Science Profession” (Sedowski and Brintnall 2006; Brintnall 2005), noted that the number of political science jobs posted on eJobs reached an all-time high for the academic year. Thirty-six percent of those jobs were in B.A.-granting institutions, institutions most likely to include a focus on liberal arts teaching. Similarly, results from the most recently available department chairs' survey show that almost one-third of all graduates in 2002, including those in non-academic employment, obtained jobs in B.A. institutions (Lopez 2003). In response to these circumstances, the Political Science Education Section has, at recent APSA annual meetings, including 2007's meeting, sponsored a short course titled, “Getting a Job at a Teaching Institution—and Then Succeeding!” For this article we have drawn on our experiences in the short course—and in interviewing, hiring, mentoring, and evaluating colleagues at a range of liberal arts colleges—to compile a list of frequently asked questions and their answers. B.A.-granting institutions are highly diversified, as evidenced by the authors' own affiliations. Still, after much discussion, we are confident that the advice offered here is broadly applicable to colleges focusing upon the liberal arts and undergraduate education. However, applicants should always research the mission and the corresponding commitments of the institutions at which they are seeking employment.

Recent research shows that the Internet, by sharply reducing the real costs of sharing information, has profoundly impacted collaboration between faculty in different departments. Using information on spatial-temporal Bitnet connections, Agrawal and Goldfarb (2006) find that Internet connectivity increased collaboration between those connected universities by 85%. Extensively analyzing faculty productivity at the top 25 universities during the last three decades, Kim, Morse, and Zingales (2006) report that the Internet has significantly lowered department-specific research externalities in economics and finance by giving those outside of top schools access to productive research colleagues within top schools. Concomitant with this decline in location-specific externalities, they also report that salaries at those top universities have increased since the universities are less able to appropriate any rent based on research productivity created by physically being located at that university. One of the reasons that physical location is less important is e-mail. Walsh and Maloney (2003), using information from four fields (experimental biology, mathematics, physics, and sociology), find that e-mail has significantly reduced coordination problems in research collaboration.