I read Anil G. Jacob's piece in the January 2006 issue of PS (“Asian American Political Participation: Research Challenges for an Emerging Minority,” 103–106) with a mixture of admiration and consternation. He has my admiration for getting published as a graduate student, and that too in PS—a feat that I'm sure will stand him good measure when he is on the job market. However, he has my consternation because he makes slight of a field that has, especially in the last five years, produced a good deal of scholarship on a myriad of questions relating to Asian-American political behavior.

By far the most significant form of gerrymandering is partisan gerrymandering. It is painfully ubiquitous and yet can be covert, hidden in plain view. More importantly the advent of the computer and the growing polarization of the electorate have enhanced its importance. Already the House of Representatives has become virtually safe for most incumbents and in recent elections experienced less turnover than the Senate, which has far fewer members and only one-third of its members up for reelection.

In recent years, a growing chorus of voices in the political science discipline has become concerned with the balance among alternative methodological approaches in empirical research and publications. Accordingly, these scholars have issued a call to further develop and refine rigorous methods for qualitative studies, in contrast to studies that rely on quantitative methods and formal modeling (Bennett, Barth, and Rutherford 2003; Yanow 2003; George and Bennett 2005). My own interest and reason for conducting the following survey is rooted in the observation, even frustration, that the literature on qualitative research methods largely focuses on democratic and not on authoritarian regimes or the Middle East in particular. Research in the Middle East is clearly essential and has received increased attention since the terrorist attacks of 9-11, but given how critical this work is and will continue to be in coming years, what are the challenges? Do qualitative methodological tools need to be adapted for research in the Middle East? And, if so, how?The author would like to thank Anna Szczurk for her help in designing the survey and the contributors to the symposium and Melissa Gabler for their help in the research and writing of the article. The author also is grateful to the survey respondents for the time and effort they devoted to answering the questions.

Field research on politics in the Middle East poses far less problems for Western female researchers than many Westerners assume. The questions most commonly asked of me by colleagues include whether anyone will speak to an American woman (yes), and whether I need to wear a veil (no, but see below). Female researchers do face many challenges, but most have less to do with gender than with examining sensitive political issues in highly repressive environments. Of those that do concern gender, many vary by degree rather than type from the issues faced by female scholars conducting field research elsewhere. I draw heavily on my own overwhelmingly positive experiences with ethnographic research in Jordan and Yemen—totaling more than four years over the past decade, including nearly a year of research conducted post-September 11—and those of many friends in outlining the following issues facing Western female political scientists conducting field research in the Middle East.I would like to thank Laryssa Chomiak, Janine Astrid Clark, Sam Fayyaz, and Lisa Wedeen for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Because it is a slice of one's life as well as a method for gathering data and insights, and because it entails socio-cultural immersion and interpersonal trust, field research confronts political scientists with a special set of normative issues not encountered in libraries, laboratories, or home countries. This essay weighs four plausible yet fallible positions on the ethics of fieldwork overseas, with particular reference to American political science research in the Arabic-speaking world in the 21st century. I am raising questions I cannot really answer: specifically, amidst American military engagement and a good deal of spying by governments all around, can we, or ought we, practice scholarly detachment, reciprocity, activism, or, perhaps, espionage?

This essay describes two very different survey projects that investigate the political attitudes, values, and behavior patterns of ordinary men and women in the Arab world. One is the Arab Democracy Barometer, an American-Arab collaborative project being carried out in five countries. The other is a survey in Palestine conducted as part of the fieldwork for a doctoral dissertation. These projects illustrate the emerging opportunities for political attitude research in the Arab world. The essay begins, however, with a brief reflection on the history of political surveys in the Arab world, which is necessary to appreciate the significance of the opportunities now emerging.

In many people's minds, the Middle East stands out as the world's most dangerous place. I often remark to my colleagues and friends, however, that I feel safer doing field research in most Middle Eastern countries than I would in much of Africa or Latin America. To begin with, few parts of the Middle East suffer from high rates of random crime. Rather, the region's violence is mostly political in nature, and, with the right approach, a researcher can take several steps to minimize risks. I have conducted research in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq (before and after the 2003 war), in Lebanon, and in Israel-Palestine during the first Intifadah. In this article, I discuss various strategies and issues one faces while “in the field” in regions such as these.The author would like to acknowledge research support provided by the Canadian Department of National Defence, the Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle East Studies (ICAMES), and the University of Montreal's Centre d'Études et de Recherches Internationales.

All manner of political observers are fascinated by “gaps” in voting behavior. Whether it is the now-famous gender gap, the newly discovered religion gap, or the once-prominent generation gap, sharp differences in partisanship and voting behavior often emerge around commonplace demographic characteristics such as gender, worship attendance, and age. These gaps are not just intrinsically interesting; they also offer a potent way to understand election results. Like batting averages in baseball, such simple statistics offer the power of language in describing the political world.

Gender differences in political behavior are a source of ongoing interest for political pundits, campaign advisors, and students of American politics. In a closely divided nation, even small shifts in the political choices of men and women can have significant electoral consequences. In politics, the gender gap refers to male-female differences in party identification and voting behavior. As a practical matter, the contemporary gender gap (with women more aligned with the Democratic Party) emerged in 1964 with the election of Lyndon B. Johnson. The gender divide has grown incrementally over time, hitting a contemporary high of 14 percentage points in 1996 (see Figure 1). Since then, the size of the political difference between men and women has declined somewhat; the 2004 gender gap in party identification and voting fell to 9.5 and 7 points, respectively. The 2004 vote gap was half of what it was at its apex in 1996, and while one hesitates to make too much of a single point on this larger time series, a sustained contraction of the gender gap could pose rather dire circumstances for the Democratic Party, or, conversely, great fortune for the Republicans.

As the 2004 presidential election approached, journalists discovered an apparently new political phenomenon: the “religion gap,” or the tendency of the most religious Americans to espouse conservative political beliefs and prefer Republican candidates. As a typical news story put it, “Want to know how Americans will vote next Election Day? Watch what they do the weekend before. If they attend religious services regularly, they probably will vote Republican by a 2-1 margin. If they never go, they likely will vote Democratic by a 2-1 margin” (Thomma 2003). The religion gap was illustrated frequently and clearly by public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center (2003) study, for example, found the American public sharply divided between the Republicans and Democrats on the eve of the 2004 campaign, with frequency of worship attendance emerging as a powerful predictor of party preference. In fact, most evidence of the religion gap was linked to differences in worship attendance.

Political divisions based on class would seem to be central to contemporary American politics. Inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth have grown steadily over the last 30 years, creating greater differences in opportunity and challenging the longstanding American belief in equality of opportunity (Hochschild 1995). The two major parties differ sharply in their concern for class issues, making class political divisions all the more likely.

The time does seem to be ripe for revisiting the urban-rural divide, with an eye toward understanding what lies beneath it. The last two presidential elections have revealed an urban-rural cleavage that is hard to ignore. Most observers now recognize that the “red” vs. “blue” Election Night maps really mask an urban-rural divide within states—a gap that has increased in recent years according to a range of definitions. In 2004, the difference in Democratic support between the most and least populous counties in the nation exceeded 25 points (see Figure 1). Survey marginals are comparable, although rural populations are not well represented in most national polls. Tabulations from the 2004 American National Election Studies (ANES) indicate a 20-point gap in presidential preference between inhabitants of counties with more than a million people and those in non-metro counties of less than 25,000.

Weighting survey data based on social background characteristics such as age, education, gender, and race is a standard practice in public opinion polling. By adjusting the composition of their samples to conform to known demographic characteristics of the population, pollsters greatly increase the accuracy of their results. However, with the exception of the Zogby Poll, most major polling organizations, including the Gallup Poll, have strongly opposed weighting their data based on party identification. This opposition is understandable. Party identification is not a fixed characteristic of the electorate. It is a political attitude that can vary over time. As a result, most pollsters believe that there is no way of accurately determining the underlying distribution of party identification in the population for weighting purposes.

In November 2000, exit poll interviews with voters in Florida indicated that Al Gore won the state. As a result, many television networks declared Gore the winner of Florida, a pivotal state to winning the presidency in 2000. Only a few hours later, the first vote tallies from the Florida Secretary of State's office revealed that George W. Bush was in fact leading in Florida. After 45 days of recounts and lawsuits, it was clear that the exit polls were wrong; Bush had won the state by the narrowest of margins. As a result of the flawed exit poll the media and pollsters scoured and reanalyzed the methodology used in 2000 to prepare and correct for the 2004 presidential election. The old system, Voter News Service (VNS) was scrapped entirely, and Edison-Mitofsky Research was chosen to implement a new and more accurate national exit poll in 2004 by a consortium of news organizations retained by the Associated Press called the National Election Pool (NEP). What happened? Exit poll results from Edison-Mitofsky showed John Kerry ahead in Ohio, Florida, and New Mexico—all states which he lost to Bush in 2004.Author names are listed alphabetically. The co-authors were also the co-principal investigators of the Loyola Marymount University 2005 Los Angeles Mayoral Exit Poll. Thanks to Salvador Paniagua and Haven Perez for their tremendous research assistance in implementing this project and to the more than 120 student researchers who participated in the exit polling and data entry. Robert Aguinaga and Antonio Gonzalez of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project also provided valuable assistance in implementing the poll. Mark Blumenthal, of mysterypollster.com was instrumental in tracking down exit poll archives.

Conferences are an integral part of academic life. They generate focal points for intellectual exchange and encourage professional socialization. They help scholars working on similar issues to identify others who might be part of their specialist community while also creating opportunities to learn about research that colleagues are doing in different areas of the discipline. In other words, conferences provide an opportunity for scholars to present their work in progress, to see what others are working on, and to network with their peers.The authors would like to thank PS's anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

No—this is not what it seems. This is not a discourse on statistics, but it is a discussion of a type of methodology—that of how, when they are writing, political scientists can better approach their audience. Put differently, this article is related to the more general proposition that scholars need to demonstrate not only that they can conduct research but also that they can communicate it effectively to a wide audience. And, although critical of some social science writing, it carries a suggestion for increasing your range of publication options.

In recent years, a number of prominent political commentators have raised concerns about the lack of ideological diversity on college campuses (Shapiro 2004; Black 2004; Kors and Silvergate 1999; Kimball 1998). Among other accusations, they claim that liberal college professors may actually penalize students for expressing conservative opinions by assigning them lower marks on exams and assignments (Horowitz 2003; Hebel 2004). Their concern is not without merit. Researchers have found that, when evaluating a colleague's research, college professors are more critical of work that contradicts their own views (Mahoney 1977). It is logical to assume that the same bias influences professors' evaluations of students' arguments. It is also reasonable to expect that students, charged with the important task of evaluating their professors, are vulnerable to their own ideological biases.We thank Markus Kemmelmeier and Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier for their helpful suggestions and valuable guidance. We also acknowledge the valuable support of research assistants Jessica Defenderfer, Cristina Ciocirlan, and Kathleen Winters. Finally, we would like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the dozens of political science faculty throughout the country who took the time to distribute our survey to their undergraduate students. This project would not have been possible without their generous assistance. This research was funded through a Faculty Research Grant from Elizabethtown College.

Beginning in March 1942, three months following the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, and lasting until as many as 16 months following the end of World War II, slightly more than 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were excluded, detained, and held in “relocation centers” by the United States government, ostensibly because they were considered a threat to national security. Nearly 70% were American citizens by birth; the rest were Japanese nationals who were legally barred from naturalization because of the de jure racist policies of the time (Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano 1991). Despite this treatment, over 1,200 individuals volunteered to serve in the U.S. armed forces while several thousand others were drafted from the relocation centers. Most served in a segregated unit in the European Theater, while others served as interpreters in the Pacific Theater, all while their families remained behind barbed wire in relocation centers. These individuals served with great distinction within some of the most highly decorated units of the U.S. Army (Crost 1994).

Requiring a short research paper in introductory political science courses can prove challenging for instructors, in part because of the diversity of student grade levels and majors in such courses. This is particularly the case with Introduction to Comparative Politics, as, at most universities, this course is not only required for the political science major, but often also fulfills multicultural requirements and can be used to complete lower division social science requirements. In deciding whether to include a research paper assignment in this course, one must weigh the benefit of catching majors early in order to begin building strong research skills, as well as the benefit of immersing students in key issues affecting the larger world, against the challenge of underdeveloped writing and research skills among the typical student in such a course. Another factor to consider is the grading load of reading large numbers of papers, given that most introductory courses have high enrollments. When choosing to require a research paper under these circumstances, then, one must also commit to working with students to hone their research and writing skills. In a collaborative, mutually beneficial partnership, college and library faculty can work together to identify ways to integrate information literacy concepts into course content and to design effective learning assignments addressing these important skills. This approach was undertaken by the authors, who revised a significant portion of the Introduction to Comparative Politics course at the University of West Florida to integrate information literacy activities in support of a semester-long, content-based research and writing assignment. This article explores using information literacy exercises as a tool to produce higher quality research papers in lower division political science courses.

Undergraduate classroom presentations of the scientific method in the social sciences usually involve a lecture on the nature of the scientific enterprise: the discovery of the “truth” (if such a thing even exists) about the relationship between some set of concepts, events, or phenomena by means of generating falsifiable hypotheses and testing them against data. The tendency of faculty, however understandable, to convert the presentation into an abstract discussion of the philosophy of science often obscures the basic issues for students. I present here a simple, active learning classroom exercise which sensitizes students to the difficulties of hypothesizing about and testing unobservable phenomena by appealing to students' intuitive understanding of the nature of knowledge and reality. I first describe the purposes and objectives of the activity in more detail, then discuss implementing this specific activity. Suggestions for activity adaptation and development by other instructors follow, and a brief discussion of sources and resources concludes.