A large body of research has documented comparative levels of inequality among nations and also the substantial change in inequality across and within nations. Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have used these databases to make a number of claims about changes in inequality and their interrelations with economic and political life, patterns of redistribution, social institutions, and social and individual wellbeing more generally.

Field research on politics in the Middle East poses far less problems for Western female researchers than many Westerners assume. The questions most commonly asked of me by colleagues include whether anyone will speak to an American woman (yes), and whether I need to wear a veil (no, but see below). Female researchers do face many challenges, but most have less to do with gender than with examining sensitive political issues in highly repressive environments. Of those that do concern gender, many vary by degree rather than type from the issues faced by female scholars conducting field research elsewhere. I draw heavily on my own overwhelmingly positive experiences with ethnographic research in Jordan and Yemen—totaling more than four years over the past decade, including nearly a year of research conducted post-September 11—and those of many friends in outlining the following issues facing Western female political scientists conducting field research in the Middle East.I would like to thank Laryssa Chomiak, Janine Astrid Clark, Sam Fayyaz, and Lisa Wedeen for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article.

“Simulation is an umbrella term that covers some interesting active-learning strategies—including role playing, simulation exercise and games and computer models—that allow students to practice and apply their learning” (Meyers and Jones 1993, 89; italics in the original). As this quote indicates, educational exercises, simulations give students the chance to apply theory, develop critical skills, and provide a welcome relief from the everyday tasks of reading and preparing for classes. Students “put on the skin” of another person and participate in the learning process. For the social sciences, where there are few absolutes or certainties, students can investigate the major questions of the discipline experientially. Comparison, analysis, and evaluation by students are the natural outcomes of this learning environment (Bain 2004; Meyers and Jones 1993). Simulations have become increasingly popular in the teaching of social sciences and, when done properly, they are effective. Shifting the focus from the teacher to the student provides more immediate feedback to the student than a lecture and exam some time in the future. Students immersed in the “game world” must actively demonstrate their grasp of the subject. As members of teams, students have increased accountability as well as assistance from their peers in learning (Bain 2004; Wheeler 2006). In addition to engaging students, simulations make complex theories clearer. Active participation in the knowledge experience, as opposed to being a passive observer, allows students to experiment and build their own knowledge base. A number of studies have shown that this approach increases comprehension, builds critical thinking skills, and improves retention (Asal 2005; Krain and Lantis 2006).

In the previous decade, the literature on “relational approach” has burgeoned in the social sciences. Recently, a “relational turn” in political science was called for in a symposium in this journal (McClurg and Young, 2011). The participants perceived a promising path for such a “turn” by introducing social network analysis (SNA) into political science. This call is informed by a conviction that the central concept of political science— that is, power—is relational. Considering this viewpoint, this article argues that there are two different understandings of the connection between the qualifier “relational” and the concept of power, referred to as the “Anglo-American” and the “Continental” perspectives. I contend that symposium participants conceived of the connection from only the Anglo-American perspective and that the Continental understanding would add extra value for political science.

Election forecasters face increasing turbulence in their relevant environments, making predictions more uncertain, or at least apparently so. For US presidential contests, economic performance and candidate profiles are central variables in most statistical models. These variables have exhibited large swings recently. Before the 2008 US presidential election, the economy fell into a Great Recession, and the candidate of one of the two major parties was, for the first time, a black man. These unprecedented conditions were trumpeted in the media, with heightened frenzy over the “horse race” question of who was going to win the White House. In the press, many forecasts appeared, taking different forms—polls, models, markets, pundits, to name some—offering a broader range of possible outcomes than ever before. Just looking at the predictions of the statistical modelers alone, we find that for 2008 many teams offered estimates of the incumbent (Republican) vote, ranging over an 11 percentage point spread. At one extreme, Lockerbie (2008) forecast 41.8% while at the other extreme Campbell (2008) forecast 52.7%. Of course, other methodologists offered their own, different, forecasts. The media, in its various forms, added to the hyperbole, aggressively reporting different forecasts on an almost daily basis.

Evaluations of teaching effectiveness rely heavily on student evaluations of teaching. However, an accumulating body of evidence shows that these evaluations are subject to gender bias. Theories of leadership and role incongruity suggest that this bias should be especially prominent in large courses. This article examines publicly available data from two large political science departments and finds that female instructors receive substantively and significantly lower ratings than male instructors in large courses. The author discusses the implications of apparent gender bias in teaching evaluations for the professional success of female faculty. Findings of gender bias in evaluations in other fields also hold in political science and are particularly problematic in the evaluation of large courses.

This article explores the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the productivity of male and female academics and whether the ongoing health crisis will exacerbate further the existing gender gap in academia in both the short and long terms. We present early evidence of the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on women’s research productivity using online survey data supplemented by interview data with regional and international female political scientists. The interviews and survey findings reveal gender disparities in perceived research productivity and service workloads during the pandemic. The results also shed initial light on the pandemic’s impact on the research productivity of academics who are parents, especially among women.

In every contested election there are inevitably winners and losers, both among the candidates and among the voters. Some candidates will take their seats as elected officials, and others will not. Some voters will be happy with the outcome, others will not. Here I seek to better understand the relationship between whether a voter casts a ballot for the winning candidate in U.S. House elections and that voter's evaluations of her representative. I build on a burgeoning literature on the relationship between voters and their elected governments to derive and test a theory about this connection. The data will show that voters whose preferred candidate wins a seat in the House of Representatives are systematically happier with their representative than those voters whom did not vote for the winning candidate. While this finding is not especially groundbreaking, the implications for the way in which we draw congressional and state legislative district lines are quite provocative. Specifically, since district lines in the House are necessarily an artificial construct, I argue that map makers ought to “pack” districts with as many like-minded partisans as possible. Trying to draw “competitive districts” effectively cracks ideologically congruent voters into separate districts, which has the effect of increasing the absolute number of voters who will be unhappy with the outcome and dissatisfied with their representative. I discuss the benefits of fundamentally rethinking the way in which we draw congressional and state legislative districts, as well as address likely concerns that might be raised about drawing districts this way.I would like to thank Jim Adams, Valerie Brunell, Bruce Cain, Geoff Evans, Bill Koetzle, Bernie Grofman, Sam Hirsch, Michael D. McDonald, Iain McLean, Sam Merrill, Glenn Phelps, David Rueda, Alec Stone Sweet, Chris Wlezian, and the Politics Group at Nuffield College for their comments.

Both scholars and pundits alike have attributed the Democrats' success in gaining control of the House and Senate in 2006 to their “nationalization” of the election and their success in connecting Republican candidates to both the war in Iraq and the highly unpopular George W. Bush presidency. The “election has been nationalized around two standards that could not be more unfavorable to the GOP: an unpopular war and an unpopular president” (Novak 2006). Many have gone so far as to say that the election results provide evidence that former House Speaker Tip O'Neil's famous aphorism, “all politics are local,” has been “swept aside” (Lambro 2006) and does not apply during wartime. “If one trend emerged this year when 435 House seats and 33 Senate seats were at stake, it was this: All politics are not local” (Israel 2006).We would like to thank Francisco I. Pedraza for his research assistance.

Common to both political folk wisdom and political science is the idea that the mid-term congressional election is a referendum on the performance of the current administration. The more popular a president and the more successful his policies, the better his party does at the midterm. The president's party almost invariably loses some congressional seats in off-year elections (since the Civil War the president's party has added House seats only once—in 1934—though it occasionally picks up Senate seats). But the extent of its losses varies widely (from one to 56 House seats in postwar midterms), depending, so the theory goes, on how the electorate rates the administration's performance.

The 1982 congressional elections will, in this view, be a referendum on President Reagan's administration and in particular on his economic policies, which have been the focus of political attention since inauguration day. If this is true, then economic conditions prevalent through the spring of 1982 (a potentially devastating combination of deep recession, high unemployment, and high interest rates) and Reagan's shaky support in the polls (less than 50 percent approving his performance in all Gallup surveys during the first four months of 1982), portend a Republican disaster of major proportions in the fall.

Remarkably, almost no one is seriously predicting anything of the kind. And it may indeed be a mistake to bet on enormous Republican losses—partly, we will argue, because they are not widely anticipated.

The breadth of material covered in introductory U.S. government and politics survey courses creates a situation in which the textbooks used may serve as the primary source of information students receive about the country's political system. At the same time, their content represents a conscious choice by the authors, editors, and publishers of these textbooks regarding what topics and content are necessary and worthy of publication, which socializes students to accept particular viewpoints of the formation and operation of the U.S. government. Oftentimes, the information presented in textbooks across subdisciplines ignores the political experiences and influence of racial, ethnic, and other minority groups. We test this premise by engaging in a study of 29 introductory U.S. government and politics textbooks to assess the level of coverage and treatment of Latinos/as, the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the country. We find that the discussion of Latinos in these textbooks is incredibly brief and often limited to the civil rights chapters. Furthermore, Latinos are primarily mentioned in the discussion of immigration, while their overall contributions to the political development of the United States are largely ignored.

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.

Political science has witnessed a renaissance in qualitative research methods (Bennett and Elman 2006). Over the last 15 years, the canon has been reworked to systematize and expand the repertoire of qualitative methods, ground them more firmly in contemporary philosophy of science, and illuminate their strengths relative to quantitative and formal methods (Bennett and Elman 2007). A rapidly expanding body of political science research now employs qualitative and multi-method analysis, and institutions dedicated to qualitative and multi-method research have flourished.

This study surveys recent editions of circulating introductory texts for teaching American government/politics courses. Most of the major textbooks used for these courses utilize the traditional institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American government, which have historically treated the African American political experience as separate from mainstream American politics; thus, relegating its discussions to a separate chapter on “civil rights” or “equal rights.” Modeling our textbook reviews after the APSA Standing Committee on the Status of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Transgendered in the Profession (Novkov and Gossett 2007) and the non-published 2006 report to the APSA Standing Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession, we analyze 27 circulating introductory American government/politics textbooks to examine to what extent African Americans are integrated into the study of American politics.This report was commissioned and supported by the American Political Science Association's Standing Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession. The Committee reviewed earlier drafts and accepted the final report for publication and distribution. The Committee members include James Jennings, co-chair (Tufts University); Angela K. Lewis, co-chair (University of Alabama, Birmingham); Kerry L. Haynie (Duke University); Alice Jackson (Morgan State University); Mark Q. Sawyer (University of California, Berkley); Rogers M. Smith (University of Pennsylvania); Robert Starks (Northeastern Illinois University); and Toni-Michelle Travis (George Mason University).

If it is assessed against an objective of reducing the number of Muslims recruited or inspired to commit terrorist acts in the name of al-Qaeda, then the U.S.-led, UK-backed war on terror launched in the aftermath of 9/11 has failed demonstrably. This performance-related assessment, as William Tupman and Carina O'Reilly argue, favors examining counterterrorism experience and the consistency of government conduct during the war on terror (Tupman and O'Reilly 2004). Such an approach, however, tends to expose the disregard the architects of the war on terror had for counterterrorism experience and policy-makers in the U.S. or UK have not adopted it in the six years since 9/11. Performance measurement may be routine in other areas of government-sponsored activity, but the war on terror has always been presented as a separate and exceptional activity dealing with an extraordinary enemy where familiar rules of engagement and conventional government behavior do not apply. However, in writing this introduction on 9/11 in 2007, it is apparent that the failure of the response to the world's most dramatic terrorist attack has finally become clear to many who supported it for the major part of its duration. Not that there is a consensus about the nature and extent of the failure. Nor is there a willingness to look to prior counterterrorism experience that might have been used to promote a measured, effective, and counterintuitive response to 9/11. Rather, notwithstanding moves to re-brand the war on terror in softer tones with particular emphasis on counterinsurgency “hearts and minds” approaches (Kilcullen 2006), the sixth anniversary of 9/11 marks the culmination of a poorly targeted military led response that has unintentionally boosted al-Qaeda credibility and recruitment.

The analysis and discussion in this article are based on the preliminary results from a study of a redesigned American National Government course funded by a $200,000 grant from the Pew Program in Course Redesign. One of the central goals of this grant is to evaluate the effectiveness of the partial replacement of face-to-face classroom time with web-based interactive assignments. (We refer to the redesigned courses as “reduced seat-time” or RST.) The grant supported the development of pedagogically appropriate uses of the Internet for an introductory general education program (GEP) course, and it funded the evaluation of the impact of the redesigned course on student attitudes and learning outcomes.

Although Latinos have grown substantially as a percent of the American population to now comprise the largest ethnic-racial minority group in the U.S., whether or not this national population growth can translate into direct political influence in presidential elections has always been unclear (DeSipio 1996; Fraga and Ramírez 2003–04). At least since the 1988 election, however, scholars of Latino politics have argued that Latino voters could serve as key swing voters if certain contextual and strategic conditions existed in specific contests (Guerra 1992). Among these are: a competitive election in states where Latinos are a determinative segment of the electorate; strategic mobilization of Latino voters; active engagement in the election by Latino elected officials, related organizational leaders, and Latino campaign strategists; a viable Latino candidate; and issues of specific relevance to Latino voters (Guerra and Fraga 1996).