Trend plus inaction equals drift. When a trend has external causes and no one can act to intervene, that inaction leads to drift—the unimpeded trajectory of change. Drift in the United States produces the domination of American democracy by business interests. Drift in international decisions produces global warming. Specific institutional designs for government, such as the US separation of powers, can cause the inaction that facilitates drift. More fundamentally, ingrained patterns of thinking can cause inaction. Here I argue that the long and multifaceted resistance tradition in the West contributes to inaction by focusing on stopping, rather than using, coercion.

The title of this lecture refers to organizations, politics, and public purposes to emphasize developments in the analysis of public organizations and their management and the need for that analysis to include politics as an influence on those organizations. The Gaus Award recognizes contributions in the joint tradition of public administration and political science. Organizations serve as essential components of the administrative branch of government and of virtually all other aspects of human life and many other forms of life. Social scientists that I call “organization theorists” have developed theory and research about organizations and the people in them. This body of work provides concepts and insights useful for the analysis of the organizations in government, which I call “public organizations.” Organizations play crucial roles in the pursuit of values and goals shared by large aggregates of people. “Organizations, Politics, and Public Purposes: Analyzing Public Organizations and Public Management” refers to these shared values and goals as public purposes. Organizations are essential to public administration and we cannot effectively analyze organizations in public administration without concepts developed by political scientists; we need to draw on political science.

From World War II to the present, prominent scholars placed their hopes in the presidency to protect the nation from outside threats and deal effectively with domestic crises. Their theories weakened the constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances by reviving an outsized trust in executive power (especially over external affairs) that William Blackstone and others promoted in eighteenth-century England. The American framers of the Constitution studied those models with great care and fully rejected those precedents when they declared their independence from England.

The article examines short-term effects of terror on trust and civic engagement in Norway. Prior to the July 22, 2011 attacks, Norway ranked among the nations with the highest levels of trust and civic engagement in the world. How does a nation of trusters react to terror? Based on two web surveys conducted in March/April 2011 and August 2011 short-term effects on trust, fear, and political interest and participation are analyzed. Two competing hypotheses are explored: first, the “end-of-innocence hypothesis,” which assumes that the attacks have disrupted trust and instilled a new culture of fear, and second, the “remobilization hypothesis,” which assumes that the attacks have led to a reinforcement of trust and of civic values. Our results show increased interpersonal and institutional trust as well as a modest increase in civic engagement, especially among youth. Moreover, there is little increase in experienced fear within the population. Our study therefore supports the remobilization-of-trust hypothesis. Contrary to the intended aims of the attacker, the structures of trust and civic engagement seem to have been reinforced in Norwegian society. This study in part corroborates findings concerning short-term effects after September 11, 2001.

Redistricting received substantial attention in the popular media in 2011, as states redrew state legislative and congressional district boundaries. Many reformers continue to argue for a de-politicization of the redistricting process, claiming that partisan redistricting is responsible for declining electoral competition and increasing legislative polarization. Our analysis of evidence from state legislatures during the last decade suggests that the effects of partisan redistricting on competition and polarization are small, considerably more nuanced than reformers would suggest, and overwhelmed by other aspects of the political environment.

Existing studies imply a model of “thermostatic voting”—a phenomenon characterized by negative feedback from government policy to election outcomes, suggesting that a party's success in setting policy diminishes its electoral prospects. This phenomenon could give politicians an incentive to constrain the fulfillment of public demands, which would conflict with the notion of electoral accountability, which also forms part of the theoretical framework in question. This article addresses this paradox and provides new data that expand an existing time series of American policy liberalism. Employing the new data, the article identifies thermostatic voting in American presidential elections, but in light of the analysis, certain empirical features are also identified that reduce the possible incentive to withhold promised policy changes.

This article examines the presidential nomination process and proposes reform that includes shortening the primary calendar and ordering the states by voter turnout in the previous presidential general election.

The American vice president's most notable constitutional function is that of succession: if the president unexpectedly leaves office, the vice president becomes president. The process of selecting vice-presidential running mates has fallen into fewer hands over time, moving from the electorate, to party bosses and delegates, to a single person: the presidential candidate. The selection process presents challenges for democratic governance: electoral considerations may provide presidential candidates with incentive to choose vice-presidential running mates who differ from themselves politically. In cases of succession, this can lead to undemocratic outcomes and unstable policy.

Why does the war on drugs continue after 40 years? This article combines theories of policy termination and prospect theory to explain the drug war's persistence. After reviewing the case for termination, the article turns to policy termination theory. As previous case studies have demonstrated, rationality and economic reasoning alone fail to persuade politicians to end existing policies. In the case of the drug war, specific characteristics of the drug policy and the current political environment, as well as typical institutional and bureaucratic constraints, create substantial obstacles to end the drug war. Perceptions of the risks and benefits of drug war termination also create difficulties. The article concludes that a number of factors need to shift before drug war policy termination can take place.

Several recent studies noted systematic links between weather conditions and voting turnout amid the mass public. This article extends this logic to the elite level by exploring the relationship between summer heat and abstentions in the US House of Representatives. In controlled multivariate regressions, heat is a significant predictor of abstentions across all votes held between 1991 and 2000. This finding provides new insight into legislative behavior as well as the motivation behind some abstentions, which could inform the understanding of the literature on legislative shirking.

We consider the neglected importance of temperature as an explanatory variable. We show that: (1) colder states have turnout that is high relative to the national average; (2) the coldest states in the United States were more likely to adopt Election Day Registration (EDR) than other states, and very hot states never did so; and (3) those who live in colder states live longer.

In 2007, University of Oklahoma political science professor Cindy Simon Rosenthal was elected mayor of Norman, Oklahoma, after having served as a member of its city council. Was her activity unique within the political science profession among female political scientists? Her election stimulated the curiosity of some of us in the women-and-politics-research community. To what extent had female political scientists attempted to move from the “Ivory Tower” to the “Public Square” as elective office holders? What had their experiences been like? We explore those questions with particular interest in a number of theoretical propositions from women and politics studies. For example, how did they decide to seek elective office? Were they self-starters or had they been recruited? What role did their families play in their campaigns? To what extent was gender perceived as a factor, and in what ways in their various campaigns? How successful were they, and what role did their academic credentials play in their campaigns? Did their quests for public office affect their academic careers? Did they use the findings from the women and politics literature to inform their quests? Perhaps, too, we thought, their campaigns might provide distinctive insights about running for and serving in public office and inform discussion about the role of gender in political life.

We know little about the amount of career preparation offered to students in political science departments. This lack of information is particularly troubling given the state of the current job market and the growth of applied degree programs on university campuses. To address this issue, this article presents the results of a December 2010 survey of 279 political science department chairs that asked questions about the level of career preparation in their respective departments. Based on our empirical findings, we believe that political science departments are not doing enough to address their students' career preparation. Our results demonstrate that most departments rely on voluntary internships and faculty advisers to address career-related issues for political science majors. Only a few departments use required internships, required resumes, specific classes related to career preparation, and social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to support career preparation. We also found substantial differences in career preparation across department type (BA, MA, and PhD) and between public and private universities, urban and rural universities, and universities with different average SAT scores. Our findings should interest faculty and administrators who are concerned with different approaches to career preparation on college campuses.

A common complaint from political scientists involved in the study of religion is that religious issues have been largely overlooked by political science. Through a content analysis of leading political science and sociology journals from 2000 to 2010, this article considers the extent of this claim. The results show that political science publications involving religious topics have been significantly fewer than those engaging with subjects typically regarded as being more central to the discipline, and markedly less numerous than religious articles in leading sociology publications. Where political science publications have engaged with religious issues, these articles have also focused on a limited number of subject areas and been concentrated in specific disciplinary subfields. The proportion of articles covering religion has shown no real increase since the turn of the century. These findings underpin calls for political scientists to take religious issues more seriously.

This article discusses my approach to teaching a course on Islam and human rights. I begin by examining the attention Islam has received in the media and classroom. Then, I discuss how I structure lectures on Islam and human rights, the various readings associated with the lectures, as well as common themes discussed in class that include but are not limited to Islamic law, women's rights, and minority rights. From there, I discuss a range of different approaches to the Islam and human rights discourse. I then describe how I test the students' knowledge of the material.

This article examines the extent to which service-learning courses affect students' attitudes and opinions. Elsewhere, we used a pre/postsurvey field experiment to demonstrate that volunteering with a homeless person tends to erode the stereotypes held by the domiciled—a confirmation of the venerable contact hypothesis. Here we use the same research design to assess whether students in service-learning courses exhibit a similar type of opinion change after spending a day with a homeless person. We find that even with limited contact a significant number of service-learning students came away from their time with homeless individuals holding fewer stereotypes and with a more nuanced perspective on the causes and consequences of homelessness. Nevertheless, working with a homeless person did have a negative effect on some students and contact generally failed to change students' views on public policy.

As undergraduate students increasingly rely on the Internet as their primary method for gathering sources, they often overlook the rich and varied resources available to them in library collections. Furthermore, students often lack the sophistication to effectively seek out and use information, an ability generally referred to as information literacy. Political scientists and librarians at one institution sought to address the gap in student information literacy skills by creating and implementing a semester-long library lab component integrated into the required research methods course within the political science department. This article presents the steps taken to implement the lab component, including the student learning outcomes we sought to address. We also focus on the measures we used to assess the impact of the lab component. Students who participated in the lab component demonstrate markedly improved information literacy skills compared to those who did not.

Robert Entman, J.B. and M.C. Shapiro Professor of Media and Public Affairs and professor of international affairs at the George Washington University, has won the prestigious international Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for his field-changing contributions to political communication. Entman is the world's first political communication scholar and the first from the George Washington University to receive this award, and he will work at the Free University of Berlin for the majority of 2012. While in Germany, he will conduct comparative research in order to better understand how inequality has grown faster in the United States than in Western Europe.

The Political Science Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) announces it awards for basic research support and dissertation improvement grants for fiscal year 2011. The Program funded 25 new projects and 44 doctoral dissertation improvement proposals. The Political Science Program spent $5,234,470 on these research, training and workshop projects and $483,822 on dissertation training grants for political science students. The program holds two grant competitions annually —Regular Research, August and January 15; Dissertation Improvement, September 16 and January 15— and constitutes a major source of political science research funding as part of fulfilling NSF's mission to encourage theoretically focused empirical investigations aimed at improving the explanation of fundamental social and political processes and structures.

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