Gordon Tullock (PS: Political Science and Politics, January 2004, 2) states (about the 1960 presidential election) that:

“Illinois went for Kennedy by a margin smaller than the usual number of votes produced by the Chicago machine from graveyards and empty lots. Texas went to Kennedy by fewer votes than are normally cast by cattle in South Texas.”

In his April 2003 PS: Political Science and Politics article “Marbury v. Madison: How John Marshall Changed History by Misquoting the Constitution,” Winfield H. Rose presents an argument in which Chief Justice Marshall knowingly distorted the meaning of the Constitution for strategic gain. The strategic gain was the creation of judicial review (the power of the Court to invalidate acts of other branches of government as violative of the Constitution). The key means to achieve this goal was to intentionally misquote Article III in the Court's most famous of cases, Marbury v. Madison (1803). Rose offers his argument as the product of a new discovery (that of detecting Marshall's misquotation), and this discovery as the product of a fresh reading of the case. The reading is a “fresh” one because Rose looks anew at the actual text of the decision and does not rely on the accepted “textbook wisdom” of the case. He calls us rightly to revisit the case and follow him beyond the “conventional textbook wisdom” regarding the case. However, Rose's analysis fails in the end precisely because it remains so wedded to the textbook wisdom on Marbury and judicial review that he advises against.

In every modern political system, power is shared to a greater or lesser extent between levels of government. These power sharing arrangements are perhaps most explicit in formal federal systems like the United States and Canada, where federal constitutions define the relative powers of central and subnational governments. They may be no less important, however, in unitary democracies and even authoritarian regimes where central governments require local actors to implement policy on the ground and often delegate significant authority to them. Indeed, in any large and complex modern society, effective governance requires some sharing of power between higher levels of government, capable of coordinating many disparate actors and interests, and lower levels of government, capable of responding to local conditions.

Why does one federation succeed while another fails? Federations may fail for exogenous reasons: foreign invasion, collapse of its currency, or global market forces. If we focus on endogenous factors, the possible reasons for failure include diversity, where populations drift apart or clash too often, or jealousy from redistributive asymmetry, with unequal shouldering of costs or dispersion of benefits, and, of course, corruption and insurrection. While potentially significant, these problems are not particular to federalism; they threaten all democracies. There is, however, one threat that afflicts federations in particular. It is the one that perplexed and animated James Madison in the American context: opportunistic authority migration between levels of government.

Contemporary debate over globalization casts its political effects as both revolutionary and contradictory. Globalization, it is claimed, drains political authority from nation-states, long the dominant form of political organization in world politics. The state's monopoly of familiar governance functions erodes as authority migrates down to newly empowered regions, provinces, and municipalities; up to supranational organizations; and laterally to such private firms and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that acquire previously “public” responsibilities.

How do citizens respond to the reallocation of authority across levels of government? This article investigates the relative importance of economic versus identity bases of citizen support for the most far-reaching example of authority migration—European integration.

As human populations and their demands on natural resources continue to grow, citizens and officials from around the world search ever more intensely for effective solutions to environmental problems. Various factors conspire to make natural resources difficult to govern well. First, since many larger scale natural resources can be common pool resources, they pose different—and arguably more difficult—challenges to governance than private or public goods. Second, the use of natural resources can produce significant externalities. Third, the complex spatial and temporal boundaries of natural resources along with their potential externalities rarely conform to existing political institutions. Environmental problems often take decades or even centuries to emerge; their solutions may take equally long.

As authority over public expenditures has shifted from central to provincial and local governments in countries around the world over the last two decades, prevailing approaches to the study of decentralization in welfare economics and public choice from the 1970s and 1980s have given way to new political economy approaches. The first generation of theories envisioned central and lower-level governments as distinct sovereigns within their own spheres of activity. Recognizing a more complex reality, the political economy literature is rethinking the notion of sovereignty in multi-tiered systems. Motivated by recent difficulties with fiscal decentralization and fiscal discipline, this essay rethinks the notion of fiscal sovereignty, viewing it as an evolving set of beliefs in the context of a dynamic game of incomplete information played between central and subnational governments. Provincial or local governments, along with their creditors and voters, attempt to assess the credibility of the central government's commitment to abide by pre-specified intergovernmental fiscal arrangements. When higher-level governments dominate the field of taxation and take on heavy co-financing obligations—as central governments do in virtually all newly decentralizing countries—the central government's commitment not to bail out subnational governments in the event of debt-servicing crises is not credible. In other words, subnational governments without significant tax autonomy will not be viewed as sovereign borrowers, and this has important implications for their fiscal behavior.

Each year political scientists publish many excellent new books, some with an empirical focus on the politics of the United States. Very few of these books, however, offer serious, theoretically engaged analyses of the political foundations of major U.S. public policies. One reason works in this genre are so rare is that such books are extraordinary demanding to write. Their authors must have a policy analyst's command of the technical features of complex government programs together with a political scientist's skill at investigating the value choices and material conflicts that are at the heart of politics.

Policymaking for Social Security is a wonderful book—perhaps the best book ever written on American social policy. Derthick's achievement is all the more remarkable when it is considered as the middle book of a “social policy trilogy,” along with Uncontrollable Spending for Social Services Grants (1975) and Agency Under Stress (1990). Taken together, these books provide as fine an introduction to American social policy as I can imagine; taken together with The Politics of Deregulation (1985), which Derthick wrote with Paul Quirk in this same period, they provide an incomparable overview of American politics.

Martha Derthick has long been my favorite bread-and-butter political scientist. If you want to know how the U.S. federal government really works, you can't do better than read her work. But re-reading Policymaking for Social Security in 2003, I discovered a Derthick I'd never known: Derthick the Paradoxical Postmodernist.

Martha Derthick's Policymaking for Social Security is a great work of political analysis—one of the best studies of the politics of public policy ever produced. Written a quarter-century ago, the argument remains fresh and compelling today—fresher, in fact, than most policy work produced more recently. Indeed, what is striking in revisiting this wonderful book is how Derthick beautifully explores some themes that are only now reasserting themselves in the discipline and commanding the attention of political scientists.

The contributors to this symposium have skillfully imparted theoretical content to a work that did not have much, as critics observed when Policymaking for Social Security was published. By family background and childhood experience, I have always been more journalist than social scientist, and what I did in the book was try to construct the reality of policymaking in response to a central question: how did so formidable an institution arise and develop with so little contention?

Democracy in rural China has attracted much attention in recent years. During President Bill Clinton's visit to China in 1998, he made a public stop at a village outside Xian to chat with a few Chinese villagers about village elections in China. In fact, village democracy has become one of the rare subject matters that the Chinese government is eager to publicize and the Western academia and media are interested to investigate. The Chinese government, often through the Ministry of Civil Affairs, has organized and allowed foreign journalists, social scientists, dignitaries, diplomats, and political, academic, and social organizations (such as the U.S. International Republican Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Carter Center, and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations) to go to Chinese rural areas to observe village selfgovernment and elections. There is no doubt that the Chinese government intends to showcase its village selfgovernment to the outside world, hoping to improve its tarnished image from the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Western media and governments are interested in this new development in China in the hope that this will be the beginning of the long-delayed democratic transition in the most populous country in the world.

Anyone who has ever graded a term paper knows that students seem to forget most everything they learned in freshman composition class when it comes time to write an analytical essay in another course. “Writing across the curriculum” has become almost a mantra that schools have adopted to counter this problem. Yet it is unclear exactly what “writing across the curriculum” means, and it is more uncertain how to implement the concept. This paper grows out of an effort to put “writing across the curriculum” into practice through collaborative teaching at Hampden-Sydney College.

Educators often use role-playing exercises that involve problem based learning in their courses to improve their students' critical and analytical skills, introduce them to new ways of thinking, increase interaction with their fellow students, and to enhance student interest in course lessons and materials (Greening 1998; Albanese 1993; Hensley 1993).A popular role playing simulation is moot court (Deardoff and Aliotta 2003; Guiliuzza 1991). Moot courts are academic simulations of appellate advocacy that educate students about the law and the judicial process. Students, acting as lawyers or judges, “try” a case before an appellate court.2 In addition to acting as lawyers or judges, students are assigned to serve as “law clerks, reporters, or amicus brief writers” (Knerr and Sommerman 2001, 4). Moot court is an extremely fluid pedagogical tool which can be used for more than learning about the law or the judicial process. It has been used in a variety of disciplines including political science, media, history, journalism, sociology, art, economics, business, and the life sciences to educate students about a variety of subjects such as history, journalistic rights, anti-trust laws, or professional ethics (Carlson and Skaggs 2000; Dhooge 1999; Bentley 1996).

This paper describes misconceptions about the physical sciences that are widely held by college students and that pose notable hurdles for appreciating the social sciences as legitimate scientific enterprises. My purpose here is pedagogical, too. In particular, I respond to the persuasive, specific argument in prior scholarship that students must overcome various negative or unconstructive stereotypes about the physical sciences to achieve scientific literacy.

I recently began a classroom discussion on U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East by asking a question concerning the likely actions of the administration toward Iraq. I was immediately greeted with this response from most of the class: “Do you mean in the simulation or in real-life?” This response only amplifies the reactions of other students—“der Deutsche Weg” was constantly advocated by the student representing Germany, the student representing Argentina sought the commitment of “funds” from U.S. officials before and after every class, and most students claimed that the Iraqi representative had been co-opted by his role and called him “Saddam.”

There has been a great deal of discussion in PS: Political Science & Politics concerning the development, use, and evaluation of distance education courses delivered via the Internet (Young 1998; Botsch and Botsch 2001; Pollock and Wilson 2002). While the literature in this new area of teaching instruction varies in terms of its focus and recommendations, one common assumption is that the delivery of the distance education course is accomplished while the faculty member is on campus. For example, Young (1998) does an excellent job of describing how university resources can be utilized in the gradual process of incorporating technology to develop a “cyberclass.” The analysis of Botsch and Botsch (2001) concerning outcomes in online and traditional courses was based on online courses offered during the regular semester as part of the normal teaching load.

In March, 2004, I received a U.S. Speaker and Specialist grant from the Department of State to travel to Africa and present several lectures on civil liberties and the rule of law. During my two weeks in Eritrea, I visited with undergraduate and law students at the University of Asmara. The impetus for the visit was the result of a new initiative by the Department of State entitled “Rights of the People”; the following essay highlights aspects of this initiative and also explains my experiences teaching civil liberties in Africa.