I was very much impressed by Andrew Stark's profound structural interpretation of the question of “Why Political Scientists aren't Public Intellectuals” (PS&P, September 2002). I do not want to rehearse or respond to his particular argument which I find quite persuasive. But, it seems to me, there is more to the story, and Stark himself provides the clue in a single sentence: “Yet if the problem is structural, the solution must be the individual.” It is this thought I want to address.

The interesting symposium, “Shaking Things Up? Thoughts about the Future of Political Science,” that appeared in the June 2002 issue shows a division among political scientists regarding the extent to which political science should be considered a “hard” or “soft” science. Those who believe that political science can and/or must become a hard science insist that we attempt to quantify political words, separate independent from dependent variables, isolate variables, develop testable hypotheses, and make predictions that can be verified. In dismissing the possibility of political science ever being a hard science, Welden (l953) long ago showed that political words are by their nature imprecise, subjective, and appraisive (ascriptive as well as descriptive). For example, we can describe President Clinton as being “tall” and “liberal.” While his tallness can be easily quantified, his liberalness, much less so. Therefore, as we attempt to quantify how liberal he was as president, we inevitable end up trivializing the subject (see Werlin 2001).

In an article otherwise lamenting political scientists' inability to influence public policy (“Politics, Political Science, and Specialization,” June 2002, pp. 187–190), Robert Jervis takes issue with recent research on school vouchers, to which we have contributed (2002). Jervis argues that voucher experiments “are largely irrelevant, or at best a first step.” Comparisons of students in private and public schools are of little value as long as most students remain in public school. Jervis therefore directs analysts to look for “large-scale improvements [that] can only come through the impact of the possibilities of choice on the bulk of the public school system.”

I was distressed by the factual distortion and ad hominem attacks by Stephen Bennett on my scholarship and the professional competence of David Brunori and Gregory Kasza in the June 2002 issue of PS. In Bennett's eagerness to discredit the “Perestroika movement” he made inaccurate and personally disparaging comments about particular scholars and writers. There are several examples of this. The first is his remark that “(Ronald) Libby and “many midcareer political scientists have given up on research and writing” (204)”

My assertion that the “Perestroikans” offend some who might favor disciplinary change has upset some folks.

Stephen Earl Bennett, a self-described empiricist and “quantoid,” has stepped out from behind the numbers to speak, not as a measuring stick, but as a human being engaged in defending the worth of his studies to the human mind. His article has an element of the personal as is fitting for someone making a case for his own self-respect and educating others about what does and does not deserve admiration and esteem. Loyal to the empirical study of politics, Bennett argues that the attempt to make political philosophy the core of the discipline “should fail.”

The following essays are based on presentations given by the authors during a short course on elite interviewing, held at the 2001 APSA meeting in San Francisco. The short course, sponsored by the Political Organizations and Parties organized section of the APSA, drew nearly 100 participants.

In an interview, what you already know is as important as what you want to know. What you want to know determines which questions you will ask. What you already know will determine how you ask them.

Many factors are important when it comes to conducting high quality elite interviews. As my colleagues have noted in their presentations in San Francisco and in their essays in this issue, gaining valid and reliable data from elite interviews demands that researchers be well prepared, construct sound questions, establish a rapport with respondents, know how to write up their notes, and code responses accurately and consistently. Improving these skills will certainly reduce the amount of measurement error contained in interview data. Unfortunately, none of these skills matter if you do not get the interview. In other words, everything that my colleagues have talked about depends on getting in the door, getting access to your subject. A well-prepared personable researcher who would be able to control an open-ended and wide-ranging interview, while establishing a strong informal rapport with an elite respondent will never get to demonstrate his or her interviewing skills—or ability to decrease measurement error—if the meeting never takes place. Furthermore and fundamentally, systematic error will also be introduced if researchers only get access to certain types of respondents.

In real estate the maxim for picking a piece of property is “location, location, location.” In elite interviewing, as in social science generally, the maxim for the best way to design and conduct a study is “purpose, purpose, purpose.” It's elementary that the primary question one must ask before designing a study is, “What do I want to learn?” Appropriate methods flow from the answer. Interviewing is often important if one needs to know what a set of people think, or how they interpret an event or series of events, or what they have done or are planning to do. (Interviews are not always necessary. Written records, for example, may be more than adequate.) In a case study, respondents are selected on the basis of what they might know to help the investigator fill in pieces of a puzzle or confirm the proper alignment of pieces already in place. If one aims to make inferences about a larger population, then one must draw a systematic sample. For some kinds of information, highly structured interviews using mainly or exclusively close-ended questions may be an excellent way to proceed. If one needs to probe for information and to give respondents maximum flexibility in structuring their responses, then open-ended questions are the way to go.

There are many issues of ethics and openness in elite interviewing that I have learned how to deal with through the years.Thanks to Beth L. Leech, Rutgers University, for including me in this workshop. I learned a lot listening to my fellow interviewers and gleaning wisdom from their experiences. Thanks also to Jeffrey Berry and the Political Organizations and Parties Section of APSA for putting the workshop on. My work has focused on people who cause trouble: protesters, litigants, defendants, sidewalk counselors, rescuers, and abortion providers, to name a few. Of course, in dealing with people you are studying you must be honest and ethical. It is important to remember that their activism comes from something they deeply feel. Their activism is because of their beliefs, opinions, experiences, and sense of community. They do not exist as activists so that you can add more lines to your vita or finish your dissertation. You must leave them in the same position in which you found them. You must do no harm to them.

Many of the early important empirical works on policymaking in Washington were built around elite interviews. We first learned about how Congress really operates from pioneers in elite interviewing such as Lewis Anthony Dexter (1969), Ralph Huitt (1969), and Donald Matthews (1960). No less revered is the scholarship of Richard Fenno (1978), John Kingdon (1995), and Robert Salisbury (1993), who have produced enduring and respected work from elite interviewing. Yet there are few other contemporary political scientists working on public policymaking who have built reputations for their methodological skills as interviewers. Elite interviewing is still widely used as the basis for collecting data, but most interviewing depends on a few trusted templates. Most commonly, elites in a particular institution are chosen at random and subjected to the same interview protocol composed of structured or semistructured questions. For example, state legislators are asked a series of questions about their attitudes on particular issues or institutional practices. Or policymakers involved in certain issues are selected and then quizzed about those matters. Some confident and skilled interviewers, like William Browne (1988) and Richard Hall (1996), combine different interview approaches in their work but they are the exceptions and not the rule.

The past decade has opened up unprecedented opportunities for scholars of post-communist countries. Throughout much of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, scholars can now engage policymakers and other elites directly through interviews—probing their decision calculi and obtaining unpublished information and data. Yet there are gaps in the scholarly literature that would prepare researchers for interviewing highly placed individuals in these countries.

A lifetime award can be a mixed blessing. As my daughter Ashley has observed, a lifetime award means you must really be getting old. I think she has decided it means entering the mode that my computer calls, “stand-by, energy saver.” Then again, last week at dinner my wife Beverley said, “I don't mean this to sound morbid, but I don't know a lot of what you've done to get this award. Don't you think it would be a good idea to write out your obituary?” As always, I am grateful for Beverley's advice, but I told her the first thing I had to do was write this talk for tonight. And the first thing I must do tonight is to thank all of you for coming to hear it. I know there are many other things you could have chosen to do after a hard day of conferencing. You are here voluntarily. That is a strange thing for me, since I am used to lecturing to people who are there only because the material is going to be on an exam. So I thank you and hope there will not be too many who are thinking after the lecture (as my departed co-author Aaron Wildavsky might have put it), “better he should have written the obituary.”

Fatherhood is rapidly becoming the number one social policy issue in America. President Bill Clinton stated in 1995 that “the single biggest social problem in our society may be the growing absence of fathers from their children's homes, because it contributes to so many other social problems.” In 1997, Congress created task forces to promote fatherhood, and in 1998 the governors' and mayors' conferences followed. President George W. Bush recently unveiled a $315 million dollar package for “responsible fatherhood.” Nonprofit organizations such as the National Fatherhood Initiative were formed in the mid-1990s. Fatherhood was seen as the most serious social problem by almost 80% of respondents to a 1996 Gallup poll (NFI 1996, 1).

“It is no accident that the president's travels this year have followed the map of states that top the Bush target list for winning in 2004, particularly Florida and Pennsylvania. That also helps explain why his advisers sometimes seem more focused on electing Republican governors rather than members of Congress in states like Florida, Illinois, and Michigan: they could help him immensely in 2004.”Richard L. Berke, “Is What's Good for Bush Also Good for the G.O.P.?” New York Times, February 10, 2002, section 4, p. 5.

APSA is pleased to recognize political science faculty who received campus-wide awards for teaching excellence during the 2001–02 academic year. APSA and Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society, recognize award winning faculty each year by inviting

So here we are; you at the end of the course, me at the end of 34 years of teaching at UCSC and 20 years of teaching Political Freedom. This seems an appropriate enough occasion for us to reflect together on teaching and being taught.

From PowerPoint presentations to web-based quizzes to entire classes taught online, technological changes have had a strong influence on pedagogical practices. The initial research into the pedagogical effectiveness of these emerging technologies suggests there are many ways in which they might be useful (Boschmann 1995; Hiltz 1994; Palloff and Pratt 2001). In this paper, we examine student participation on a structured online discussion group that spanned three universities and address two research questions: what explains student participation in online discussion groups and how effective are these groups as pedagogical tools? To address these topics, we draw upon our use of online discussions as a class assignment during the fall semester of 2000. First, we examine previous research and generate several expectations about student behavior and attitudes.

The symposium presents the experiences of the political science faculty and doctoral students who led and participated in the Preparing Future Faculty Project, “Shaping the Preparation of Future Social Sciences and Humanities Faculty” through a grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies to the Council of Graduate Schools.