What motivates people to vote strategically? Although a broad literature addresses this question, few studies capture the point at which individuals shift from sincere to strategic voters. Furthermore, the influence of polling information remains debated. The analysis in this article tackles strategic voting with an original embedded experiment in a web survey. Empirical analysis finds that respondents who were told of the margin of error in preelection polls were more likely to vote strategically. This analysis also suggests the limits to strategic voting even in ideal settings.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel is animated by a pragmatic strain that views external sanctions as effective pressure against a small democratic state and by a moralistic Manichean strain that portrays Israelis as oppressors. Both strains hearken back to the earlier campaign against apartheid in South Africa. We argue that doing so misreads the lessons of South Africa. Sanctions may have contributed to ending apartheid, but they operated in conjunction with improved security and interpersonal trust among negotiators. Key contenders moved from a discourse of oppression to one that humanized one another as partners with legitimate concerns. These conditions are missing from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Both sides consider their security to be precarious and they are locked in competing narratives of victimization, which further erode mutual trust and security. Measures to improve the parties’ security and trust would contribute to mutual concessions and greater justification for sanctions if the Israeli government is intransigent.

This essay encourages associate professors to wait to initiate their candidacy for promotion until they have established a clearly sufficient, unchallengeable record of research and publication. To guarantee faculty productivity and intellectual vibrancy, and to provide consistent incentives and rewards, university departments should apply reasonably demanding promotion standards that are equivalent to their tenure criteria. Associate professors have a strong interest in comfortably clearing this promotion hurdle to enhance their professional reputation in the eyes of their departmental colleagues, the university leadership, and external referees. Therefore, they are well advised to bid for the rank of professor only after accumulating a strong record that makes a smooth promotion likely.

Charges are frequently leveled that the peer-review system is broken, and reviewers are overburdened with requests. But this specific charge has been made in the absence of data about the actual reviewing loads of political scientists. I report the results of a recent survey asking a random sample of about 600 APSA members with PhDs what their reviewing loads are like and what their beliefs are about the value of peer reviewing to them and others. Article reviewing loads correspond to rank, institution, and scholarly productivity in predictable ways. At PhD-granting institutions, assistant professors averaged 5.5, associate professors averaged 7.0, and full professors averaged 8.3 in the past year; everyone else averaged just under 3 reviews a year. To recognize the value we place on peer reviewing, we need a system that collects data on who reviews and presents them in a format usable by scholars and their relevant evaluation bodies.

A central topic in the comparative-politics subdiscipline is the study of democratic transitions. Despite a growing role-playing literature, there are currently no simulations that illustrate the dynamics of democratic transitions. This article proposes a role-playing simulation that demonstrates to students why it is difficult for countries to transition to democracy and why protests are a necessary but not sufficient condition to topple a dictatorship. As surveys and teaching evaluations subsequently showed, this exercise succeeded in clarifying the more difficult theoretical concepts as well as in making a potentially dry subject more accessible.