In our article entitled “The Political Science 400: A 20-Year Update” (PS, January 2007, 133–45), we presented the names and total citation counts (1960–2005) of political science faculty employed (ca. 2002) in U.S. Ph.D.-granting institutions who were among the 400 most cited in their cohort or subfield. We recognize the very important nature of our data for individual scholars and the institutions at which they teach, and we apologize to those colleagues whose citation counts were misreported, especially to those few whose counts were off by a very large amount. Yet, given that nearly 4,000 political scientists are employed in a Ph.D.-granting institution in the U.S., and given the numerous data limitations associated with using the Web of Science search engine (as we explained in the lengthy methodological appendix to our article), while we worked as hard as we could to prevent errors, having some errors in our data set was virtually unavoidable.

Professor Judith Hicks Stiehm asked students and political scientists to consider some things about our military in her introduction (453–6) to the July 2007 PS symposium. The deliberations on my end as a student are over. Here are the results.

This forum is a unique opportunity to bring social science research to bear on public policy and the practical effects of election reforms in the American states. It is also an opportunity to study America's election system, building on the research of some of the leading scholars working in this area. The American states offer a natural laboratory (a “laboratory of democracy”), with significant variation in the rules, institutions, and procedures governing elections. This forum empirically evaluates what we have learned about the effects of various election reforms in the 50 states. The papers included in this forum were originally presented at a conference hosted by Kent State University's department of political science and which had a title similar to that of this symposium. The theme is now shared by the conference and this symposium: that the 2008 presidential election will be crucial for American democracy, especially in light of the apparently related phenomena of decreasing (or flattening) voter participation rates, low trust in government and political efficacy, alleged procedural irregularities in recent elections, uncompetitive congressional elections or uncontested state legislative elections, and lapses in ethical judgment by politicians in the past decade.

Political science has a long tradition of research into topics such as campaign finance and redistricting, but these separate efforts have only recently merged into something resembling a recognizable sub-field of political reform. One impetus for this new-found coherence has been the emergence of recent reform concerns regarding such matters as U.S. election administration, primary election procedures, conflict of interest situations, ballot restrictions on minor party candidates, and the need for transparency. The addition of the new on top of the still-unresolved, ongoing problems has yielded plenty of grist for the political science mill.

Early or convenience voting—understood in this context to be relaxed administrative rules and procedures by which citizens can cast a ballot at a time and place other than the precinct on Election Day—is a popular candidate for election reformers. Typically, reformers argue that maximization of turnout is a primary goal, and reducing barriers between voters and the polls is an important method for achieving higher turnout. Arguments in favor of voting by mail, early in-person voting, and relaxed absentee requirements share this characteristic. While there are good theoretical reasons, drawn primarily from the rational choice tradition, to believe that early voting reforms should increase turnout, the empirical literature has found decidedly mixed results. While one prominent study suggests that voting by mail is associated with a 10% increase in turnout, other studies find smaller—but still statistically significant—increases in turnout associated with other convenience voting methods.This work is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the AEI/Brookings Election Reform Project, and the Charles McKinley Fund of Reed College. Thanks to Caroline Tolbert and Daniel Smith for sharing data with us, and to David Magleby for comments on an earlier version of this paper. All responsibility for interpretations lay with the authors.

The aftermath of the 2000 election has been a time of constant learning in regards to election administration in the United States. Both scholars and policy makers initially focused primarily on voting technology and on which voting technologies were best at capturing votes. In early 2001, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project developed the “residual vote” metric; numerous studies have since examined residual vote rates across different voting platforms. Congressional reform of elections—exemplified in the “Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002” (P.L. 107-252)—also focused largely on voting technology, with HAVA imposing new standards for voting equipment and providing states with one-shot funding to aid in its purchase.Authors are listed alphabetically. The data collection in Cuyahoga County, Ohio was funded by the Election Science Institute (ESI) through a contract with the Cuyahoga County Commission. We are grateful to Steven Hertzberg of ESI for his assistance in the data collection. The Utah poll-worker survey was funded by the Institute of Public and International Affairs (IPIA) at the University of Utah. Steven Snell of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy (CSED) at Brigham Young University provided valuable research assistance for this project.

The 2000 presidential election was a wake-up call to elected leaders, public officials, and election scholars. The electoral fiasco—most prominent in Florida, but also taking place in states like New Mexico and Ohio—revealed many deficiencies in voting equipment (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). In addition to faulty equipment, registration mix-ups and problems with absentee ballots led to the loss of as many as six million votes (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). Confusing ballots, like the butterfly ballot in Florida's Dade County, were found to have led voters to vote incorrectly (Wand et al. 2001). While these problems have, no doubt, existed for a long time, the closeness of the 2000 presidential race and the fact that the number of lost votes had the power to change the election outcome have brought election administration questions to the forefront of policy making.Results were first presented at “The Future of Election Reform and Ethics in the States,” hosted by Kent State University, Department of Political Science, Columbus, Ohio, January 16–17, 2007, and the following paper was presented at the Midwest Political Science Association's Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, April 12–15, 2007. Data were collected by monies generously provided by the University of New Mexico's Research Allocation Committee. We'd like to thank Luciana Zilberman, Lisa Bryant, Alex Adams, David Magleby, and the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University for their assistance with this project. Of course, any errors are our own.

In 2000, Arizona and Maine implemented full public funding for state legislative elections, and Connecticut will do so in 2008. Candidates who opt to accept public funding receive grants that pay for the entire cost of their campaigns. Advocates of these so-called clean elections argue that the programs reduce quid pro quo corruption, increase electoral competitiveness, and open up the process to candidates who lack access to traditional fundraising networks (Phelps 2004). Critics respond that the Maine and Arizona public funding programs have achieved nothing, save for imposing unjust burdens on candidates who refuse to participate (Basham and Zelder 2005).

American politics is dominated by two major parties and has been for a century. The duopoly enjoyed by the Democrats and Republicans is largely the result of Duverger's Law: the tendency of a single-member district system to produce two-party competition (Duverger 1963). Minor parties ultimately fail in a single-member district system because (1) the winner-take-all approach does not reward candidates who finish third and (2) citizens vote strategically to avoid “wasting” their votes on hopeless candidates and spoiling the election (Cox 1997; Riker 1982). Because the U.S. two-party system is so dependent on its majoritarian electoral rules, one might suspect that other election regulations would have little effect on the number of parties.A longer version of this paper was presented at the conference, “2008 and Beyond: The Future of Election and Ethics Reform in the States,” Columbus, OH, January 16–17, 2007. I thank Richard Winger of Ballot Access News for comments and information.

As 2010 nears, state governments are preparing for the decennial political ritual of equalizing legislative district population as revealed by the new census. If the past is a guide, legislatures will grind to a standstill as legislators wrestle with the politically charged task of redistricting. But where legislators, party leaders, staff, consultants, and lawyers spend considerable time, effort, and money on their obsession with district boundaries, political scientists come to mixed conclusions about redistricting's effect on electoral politics. About the only consensus reached is on the electoral effects of racial gerrymandering, where debate has shifted to its normative implications.

Election reforms have attracted substantial attention since the troubled elections of 2000. Some address problems in the administration of elections. Others aim to regulate the conduct of elected officials and lobbyists. A third category affects the structure by which elections are conducted. It is not clear whether the same over-arching problem motivates interest in these reforms. One common theme may be that public confidence in representation suffers as a result of actual or perceived deficiencies in the conduct of elections and elected officials. The failure to count votes accurately, the fact that eligible voters find they are unable to vote, the inability of minor parties to access ballots, revelations of scandalous relations between representatives and lobbyists, the power of wealthy donors, the lack of “civility” in political discourse, the uncompetitive nature of many elections, may all somehow act together to erode public trust, and reduce participation and engagement with representative democracy.

Several of us gathered in 2003 at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association to discuss why, in an association with groups dedicated to Canadian, French, German, Italian, and Churchillian studies (to name but a few), there was no organized group dedicated to the study of politics in Spain and Portugal.

Portugal and Spain have been at the heart of European history and have played a critical role in European (and world) affairs throughout the centuries. Yet decades of relative isolation under authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century left both countries at the margins of Europe, and they did not take part in the early stages of the process of European integration in the 1950s–70s. Fortunately, the success of processes of democratic transition in both countries in the second half of the 1970s paved the way for full membership in the European Community (EC).I would like to thank the participants in the conference “Towards the Completion of Europe” held at the University of Miami on April 2005, and in particular to Dr. Joaquín Roy for all his advice and support. This is an updated version of a paper that I presented at the conference published in Royo 2006. I would like to thank Jeffrey Kopstein, Ramón de Miguel, Kalypso Nicolaidis, George Ross, and Francisco Seixas da Costa for their valuable comments during the last roundtable of the conference From Isolation to Europe: 15 Years of Spanish and Portuguese Membership in the European Union at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, November 2–3, 2001. See also Royo 2003.

Interest in the links between corruption and politics has increased significantly since the early 1990s. Although the public widely sees corruption as a phenomenon that particularly afflicts the developing world—as reflected in the growing emphasis placed on anti-corruption initiatives by such international agencies as the World Bank, IMF, OECD, and Transparency International—the issue is also attracting significant attention in established democracies. Politicians, civil society activists, and media commentators have expressed concerns about a host of high-profile scandals contributing to a decline of trust in the political class, whilst a perceived “culture of corruption” in several of the post-communist countries of east-central Europe is seen as an obstacle to their full integration into the European Union. Indeed, corruption has started to become a powerful policy narrative in many countries, blamed for a host of shortcomings in democracies and non-democracies alike (Heywood and Krastev 2006).

On June 15, 2007, Spain celebrated 30 years since the 1977 elections inaugurated the current democratic political system. These were the first democratic elections in 40 years—the last were held during Spain's first experience with mass democracy during the Second Republic (1931–1936). This essay explores why and how to incorporate the Spanish case into syllabi on comparative democratization. I suggest a few interesting topics to explore and more fully develop how the Spanish case can be used to illustrate explanations of democratization, namely modernization theory and elite pact making.

What can undergraduate students of comparative politics learn from studying Spain? Clearly, many professors do not see any good reasons to integrate Spain in introductory courses on comparative politics or European politics. Spain is often considered as a country on the periphery of western Europe—geographically, economically, and politically—and thus not worth spending time discussing in introductory courses on comparative politics or even western European politics. Given the time constraints of short semesters, instructors have to make choices about which topics and countries to cover when choosing European case studies for their syllabus, and often settle for a mix of the “classic” cases such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, and “newer” cases, such as new democracies in eastern and central Europe. Spain fits neither the established, advanced industrialized democracies category nor is it of much obvious interest for studying the latest developments in EU expansion. Spain re-democratized in the latter half of the 1970s and is currently celebrating 30 years of electoral democracy. The country joined the EU, then the European Communities, in 1986, together with Portugal and Greece. Thus, the newness of Spanish democracy and its EU membership has long since passed as a point of interest for college instruction, giving way to the new democracies in central and eastern Europe and the more recent waves of EU expansion. At the same time, Spanish democracy is too young to present a classic case of advanced industrialized democracies. In short, Spain does not appear to have much inherent appeal for undergraduate comparative politics courses.I gratefully acknowledge research assistance from Wendy Whitman in collecting information on textbooks and syllabi.

Although the study of regional and local politics has been largely conducted in the context of the United States (Loughlin 2001), in recent decades, researchers have studied sub-state transformations and multilevel governance in Europe (see, for example, Marks 1993; Bukowski et al. 2003; Weatherill 2005). In this article, I urge professors to incorporate this literature in undergraduate, comparative politics classrooms and I suggest how to do so using the case of Spain. I argue that Spain, and more generally southern Europe, provides an exciting context in which to discuss subnational themes. The article is structured in four sections. First, I explain the Comparative European Politics course in which I discuss the Spanish sub-state. The second section demonstrates Spain's comparative appeal by summarizing its State of Autonomies and situating it within the European context. The third section raises theoretical debates about democracy, subnational institutions, and the European Union. The final section offers accessible lecture examples for European politics courses.

Spain occupies a prominent position in the teaching of comparative politics. It is a paradigmatic example of a successful transition to and consolidation of democracy, as well as an intriguing study in constitutional development, federalism, and a host of other topics. I have found that it is particularly useful when discussing electoral systems and representation.

A century and a half ago, casting a vote in the United States was an engaging social experience, as voters at the polls talked with friends, threw down shots of free whiskey, listened to lively entertainment, and generally had a good time (McGerr 1986). According to Altschuler and Blumin (2000, 75)We are grateful to Pam Lamonaca and Nicole Batdorf, who played a key role in organizing Election Day festivals, and Timothy Ryan and Marcos Luis, who helped in all phases of this project. We also thank Dan Winslow, whose ideas about raising turnout were an impetus for this project, and Dan Bergan and Beth Weinberger, who commented on earlier drafts. The studies described here were funded by generous grants from the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale, the Tufts Summer Scholars Program, and Working Assets, none of which bear responsibility for the content of this report.

Social scientists have long been interested in how academic disciplines are organized (Ben-David and Collins 1966; Kuhn 1970; Lipset 1994; Rojas 2003; Somit and Tanenhaus 1964; 1967). One important element of this organization is the network of Ph.D. placements among Ph.D.-granting institutions. Various authors have linked the structure of placements to prestige rankings of departments (for sociology departments see e.g., Hanneman 2001; and Burris 2004; for political science departments see Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007c), or have used various features of the structure of academic exchange networks to examine the shaping of disciplinary careers and practices (Feld, Bisciglia, and Ynalvez 2003; Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007b). There is also a more general literature on status and market exchange (see e.g., Podolny 2005).We are indebted to Clover Behrend-Gethard for bibliographic assistance.