To establish the scope and level of corruption in the contemporary United States, a collaborative project of political scientists is needed. Such a study should start with explicating the definition of corruption various scholars use. Three are noted here: using public goods for personal gains, deflecting public goods to private groups, and making such moves when these are legal although they are still illicit. To assess corruption on these levels, we must consider that various forms that “capture” takes beyond the corruption of the laws themselves. A study of the major differences in the level of corruption among the three branches of government may improve our understanding of the prevalence and causes of corruption. A study of “rent” may help predict that future course of corruption. Other topics whose study warrants collaborative investigation are listed.

Causality in social science is hard to establish even through the finest comparative research. To ease the task of extracting causes from comparisons, we present the benefits of tracing particularities in any phenomenon under investigation. We introduce three real-world examples from 2011: British riots, worldwide anticapitalist protests, and the highway crash near Taunton in southwestern England. Whereas all of these three examples have broad causes, we embark on the quest after specific factors. The Taunton accident can send a powerful message to social scientists, which is about the danger of making general statements in their explanations. Instead of saying much but explaining little, the merit of singling out the specific is substantial. As social scientists, when we are faced with “smoke” but no “fire,” let us then focus on the part that is distinct.

Unlike the massive literature about US Supreme Court confirmation battles, little has been written about lower federal court confirmation fights. However, in the past 20 years much has been written about the lower federal court confirmation process. Here, we take stock of the political science literature in this area and highlight where scholarly interest appears to be going. Believing a contemporary assessment of the state of the field should be of interest and use to scholars of American politics, we dissect the recent empirical literature and offer suggestions for future research. Most importantly, we offer a one-stop shop for recent literature for scholars interested in this topic.

The social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them; from making do with a small number of sparse data sets to analyzing increasing quantities of diverse, highly informative data; from isolated scholars toiling away on their own to larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams; and from a purely academic pursuit focused inward to having a major impact on public policy, commerce and industry, other academic fields, and some of the major problems that affect individuals and societies. In the midst of all this productive chaos, we have been building the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, a new type of center intended to help foster and respond to these broader developments. We offer here some suggestions from our experiences for the increasing number of other universities that have begun to build similar institutions and for how we might work together to advance social science more generally.

We take advantage of the data set compiled by Masuoka et al. (2007, PS: Political Science and Politics 40 (1): 361–66) on lifetime citation counts of political science faculty at PhD granting institutions in the United States to look for “lucky names,” that is, names parents can give babies that predispose them toward scholarly success in political science. Seeking to test an hypothesis offered by Wuffle (1972, PS: Political Science and Politics (Summer): 290), we also briefly look at the importance of middle initials for citation success in political science.

Drawing on our research and blogging on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we make three claims about the role of scholar-bloggers in the social media age. First, as scholar-bloggers with some degree of ethno-national attachments related to our area of expertise, we contend that we are well positioned to issue the kinds of critiques that may resonate more deeply due to the very subjectivity that some perceive as a liability. Second, through the melding of scholarly arguments with popular writing forms, scholar-bloggers are uniquely poised to be at the forefront of public engagement and political literacy both with social media publics and with students. Third, the subjectivity hazard is an intrinsic part of any type of research and writing, whether that writing is aimed at a scholarly audience or any other, and should not be used as an argument against academic involvement in social media. Ultimately, subjectivities of both consumers and producers can evolve through these highly interactive media, a dynamic that deserves further examination.

This research uses data from a national survey of political science department chairs to explore when tenure protects incompetent faculty. The characteristics of the responding institutions and the procedures and standards they use when evaluating tenure applications were analyzed to determine how they related to the protection of the incompetent. The results reveal that tenure is most likely to shield incompetent faculty when collegiality plays a role in tenure decisions and when departments focus on the quantity of articles an applicant publishes. The findings also show that when departments demand that candidates publish in prestigious journals and when higher authorities at the institution have reversed positive departmental tenure recommendations, the probability that the incompetent are protected declines.

The experience both of being exposed to unfamiliar systems and places and of being an anonymous face in a large class can be not just alienating for undergraduates, but antithetical to effective learning. We propose a number of active learning strategies designed to help students fully master the material presented even in very large classes in comparative politics and international relations, while also improving students' attendance and interest and developing critical thinking, reading, and writing skills, without overburdening the instructor. Among these strategies are Team-Based Learning, interactive approaches such as debates and simulations, and low-stakes assignments such as “minute writing.”

Rivalry is pervasive in politics and beyond. Drawing on unique survey data, this article examines how instructors can draw on students' perceptions of rivalry to explore different aspects of the rivalry concept. The data show that different ways in which students tend to think about rivalry tend to reflect differences in scholarly conceptualizations of interstate rivalry. The data also suggest that referencing sports rivalries may be useful to introduce the concept of rivalry, drawing on parallels between sports rivalries and interstate rivalries and students' greater interest in and familiarity with sports than international affairs. This article provides an understanding of how students tend to think about rival relations to help instructors effectively lead classroom discussions on interstate rivalry.

Although professors may be aware that rubrics shorten grading time and improve grading consistency, many are not aware that rubrics offer a powerful analytical punch. Given the demands for active learning in today's college classroom, rubrics allow instructors to focus on analytical quality while engaging students in a variety of assignments. Rubrics are useful not only in more traditional applications—for example, papers and oral presentations—but also for more creative purposes. Using rubrics in both self and peer assessment engages students more in assignments, allowing them to reflect on their own performance and their peers. Going one step further, instructors can engage students in the construction of rubrics that will be used to grade their own work. Finally, rubrics force instructors to be clear about their own purposes for an assignment, and over time, instructors can become more attuned to the analytical possibilities in even traditional “busywork” assignments.

This article highlights a number of different pedagogical practices that can be used with study abroad programs, both classroom methods and out-of-class techniques. In this particular class—which focused on Estonia's Singing Revolution and included a 10-day trip abroad to Estonia—social media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr were frequently used to create collaboration among students. In addition, Estonian music and pop culture were studied, giving students a unique insight into a culture very foreign from their own. Although Estonia was the focus of this particular class, the results of these methods are generalizable to help others who lead study abroad programs and develop creative ways to foster interaction. This article also demonstrates why social media platforms are helpful to political scientists and the political science discipline more generally.

In its eighty-ninth annual competition for the United States and Canada, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Fellowships to a diverse group of 175 scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. PS included two awardees in our July issue, but overlooked the award in history to political scientist Jacqueline Stevens.

The American Political Science Association is meeting in Washington, DC, the epicenter of American government, for the 2014 Annual Meeting and Exhibition. Washington, DC, is always an exciting meeting for the association, bringing together academics and practicing political scientists.

This essay is my first report as executive director of APSA. I am honored to be succeeding Michael Brintnall. APSA is one of the leading academic associations in the world. It is more than 110 years old with more than 13,000 members, representing a wide variety of universities and nonacademic settings including think tanks, research institutions, advocacy organizations, and government agencies. Our membership is increasingly international from many different countries. In conjunction with our partner, Cambridge University Press, we publish three highly respected journals, the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and PS: Political Science and Politics.

The purpose of this report is to inform APSA's membership about the association's financial health for the 2012–2013 fiscal year. This report provides an overview of APSA's assets and current financial operations.

The following council members and officers were approved at the APSA All-Member Business Meeting at the APSA Annual Meeting in Chicago, August 2013. APSA welcomes the new council members and other officers to APSA leadership.

APSA is looking forward to the 2014 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference (TLC). Registration opened in November 2013, including a new graduate student rate. The theme of the meeting is “Teaching Inclusively: Integrating Multiple Approaches into the Curriculum.” The meeting will be held on February 7–9, 2014 in Philadelphia. This will be the 11th annual meeting of the teaching conference.

With assistance of the APSA, the political science members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) held their standing meeting at the annual APSA convention in Chicago. The purposes of these meetings are two-fold: First, as required, to discuss ways that political science can fulfill the NAS mission in providing scientific evidence to address consequential public issues that come from queries posed by various agencies of government; and second, to increase the presence of political scientists in the Academy, where membership from our discipline is, in our view, much lower than political scientists' contributions to the scientific community, and does not adequately recognize the many political scientists who merit election. While we have made some progress toward this second goal, it is a complicated battle: 2,179 members and 437 foreign associates across scientific disciplines have been elected to and currently serve in the NAS, but only 21 are political scientists. Although the science-based mission of NAS does not seek to represent all of the highly pluralistic discipline of political science, far more research relying on methods that are recognized in the natural sciences is produced in our field than is presently represented in the NAS.