This lecture was presented at the University of Sheffield on October 22, 2008, inaugurating the Graduate School of Politics; and at Oxford University on October 16, 2008. I have retained the lecture style for this publication, only making minor changes and additions in the text.

This article empirically examines the “Big Sort hypothesis”—the notion that, in recent years, liberal and conservative Americans have become increasingly spatially isolated from one another. Using block group-, tract-, and county-level party registration data and presidential election returns, I construct two formal indices of segregation for 1992–2010 in California and evaluate those indices for evidence of growth in the segregation of Californians along ideological lines. Evidence of rising geographic segregation between Democrats and Republicans for measures generated from both party registration and presidential vote data is found. This growth is statistically significant for 10 of the 12 segregation measures analyzed. In addition, many of the increases are practically significant, with estimates of growth in segregation during the observation period ranging from 2% to 23%.

As human populations and their demands on natural resources continue to grow, citizens and officials from around the world search ever more intensely for effective solutions to environmental problems. Various factors conspire to make natural resources difficult to govern well. First, since many larger scale natural resources can be common pool resources, they pose different—and arguably more difficult—challenges to governance than private or public goods. Second, the use of natural resources can produce significant externalities. Third, the complex spatial and temporal boundaries of natural resources along with their potential externalities rarely conform to existing political institutions. Environmental problems often take decades or even centuries to emerge; their solutions may take equally long.

I. How the Placement of States Affects Their Policies

Because throughout most of the years since the second World War the United States and the Soviet Union were similarly placed by their power, their external behaviors should have shown striking similarities. Did they? Yes, more than has usually been realized. The behavior of states can be compared on many counts. Their armament policies and their interventions abroad are two of the most revealing. On the former count, the United States in the early 1960s undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military build-up the world has yet seen. We did so even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in the conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States. As one should have expected, the Soviet Union soon followed in America's footsteps, thus restoring the symmetry of great-power behavior. And so it was through most of the years of the Cold War. Advances made by one were quickly followed by the other, with the United States almost always leading the way. Allowing for geographic differences, the overall similarity of their forces was apparent. The ground forces of the Soviet Union were stronger than those of the United States, but in naval forces the balance of advantage was reversed. The Soviet Union's largely coastal navy gradually became more of a blue-water fleet, but one of limited reach. Its navy never had more than half the tonnage of ours.

The statistical modelers are back. The presidential election forecasting errors of 2000 did not repeat themselves in 2004. On the contrary, the forecasts, from at least seven different teams, were generally quite accurate (Campbell 2004; Lewis-Beck 2005). Encouragingly, their prowess is receiving attention from forecasters outside the social sciences, in fields such as engineering and commerce. Noteworthy here is the recent special issue on U.S. presidential election forecasting published in the International Journal of Forecasting, containing some 10 different papers (Campbell and Lewis-Beck 2008). Our contribution in that special issue explored the question of whether our Jobs Model, off by only 1 percentage point in its 2004 forecast, was a simple product of data-mining (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008).

Women know stuff. Yet, all too often, they are underrepresented in political science meetings, syllabi, and editorial boards. To counter the implicit bias that leads to women’s underrepresentation, to ensure that women’s expertise is included and shared, and to improve the visibility of women in political science, in February 2016 we launched the “Women Also Know Stuff” initiative, which features a crowd-sourced website and an active Twitter feed. In this article, we share the origins of our project, the effect we are already having on media utilization of women experts, and plans for how to expand that success within the discipline of political science. We also share our personal reflections on the project.

Healthy adult development commonly includes a desire and intent to form intimate, long-term relationships. For individuals attracted to members of the other sex, these relationships may be formed, socially affirmed, and, by mutual choice, legally recognized by government agencies in the U.S. For individuals attracted to members of the same sex, these relationships may be formed, but social affirmation and legal recognition are only sporadically available. Thus, the normative relational developmental processes for same-sex attracted individuals incur unique challenges that other-sex attracted individuals do not.

In the United States, as in most of the world, lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals are outnumbered and despised. Unlike most other potentially political groups, gay people are further disempowered by virtue of being born as if into a diaspora—probably randomly distributed about the population at birth. Their quest for political power is disadvantaged by barriers to the formation of political community as well as by lack of access to significant power resources. The relative political powerlessness of gay people stands in a contradistinction to their depiction by advocates of “traditional values” as a powerful movement advancing a “gay agenda” in American politics.

Similarly, the attention paid to the occasional electoral victories of openly lesbian and gay candidates distorts the reality that fewer than one tenth of 1% of all elected officials in the United States are openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual. With only two exceptions—Wisconsin and Minnesota—every state that has passed legislation banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is either on the Atlantic Coast or on the Pacific Coast (including Hawaii). Political scientists long have understood that rare local victories—whether they be the enactment of nondiscrimination legislation or the election to office of a member of a group—do not translate into national political power for the group.

In the pages that follow, I will attempt to measure the access gay people have to meaningful political resources and to discuss how differential access to these resources disadvantages gay people in the political process.

Donald Trump dominated the 2016 Republican primary despite the fact that he was not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. Bernie Sanders came just shy of winning the Democratic nomination despite the fact that he switched his party affiliation from Independent to Democrat only three months before the election. Why did two candidates with no formal ties to the political parties fare so well? One possibility is that primary voters are more ideologically extreme and that ideology drives support for these candidates. However, another possibility is that concerns about government process drives support for insurgent candidates. We test the proposition that distrust was the primary motivator of primary voting for these two insurgent candidates using two datasets: a poll of New Hampshire voters fielded a week before their primary and a national poll taken in June 2016. Results confirm the hypothesis that distrust drove intraparty vote choice in the 2016 presidential primaries.

Trend plus inaction equals drift. When a trend has external causes and no one can act to intervene, that inaction leads to drift—the unimpeded trajectory of change. Drift in the United States produces the domination of American democracy by business interests. Drift in international decisions produces global warming. Specific institutional designs for government, such as the US separation of powers, can cause the inaction that facilitates drift. More fundamentally, ingrained patterns of thinking can cause inaction. Here I argue that the long and multifaceted resistance tradition in the West contributes to inaction by focusing on stopping, rather than using, coercion.

Despite the increasing urgency of many environmental problems, environmental politics remains at the margins of the discipline. Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project, this article identifies a puzzle: the majority of international relations (IR) scholars find climate change among the top three most important policy issues today, yet fewer than 4% identify the environment as their primary area of research. Moreover, environmental research is rarely published in top IR journals, although there has been a recent surge in work focused on climate change. The authors argue that greater attention to environmental issues—including those beyond climate change—in IR can bring significant benefits to the discipline, and they discuss three lines of research to correct this imbalance.

Community service is widely advocated as a method for advancing civic awareness and citizen responsibility in both secondary schools and colleges. Use of service learning in higher education has been promoted nationwide by academic, political, professional, and business leaders through such organizations as Campus Compact, American Association for Higher Education, Commission on Civic Renewal, and Corporation for National and Community Service (Bringle, Games, and Malloy 1999). In some cases, service has been institutionalized in colleges. Tufts University, for example, has added a College of Citizenship and Public Service through which students from various departments can complete a certificate program that integrates active service and citizenship studies into their major course of study (Zernike 2000). A recent report estimates that nearly two million students participate in service learning at four-year public and private institutions of higher education, and almost half of all community colleges offer service learning courses (Shumer and Cook 1999). Service learning has been applied in college courses as diverse as freshman composition, education, sociology, anthropology, business, and public policy.

But does service learning—and community service more generally—help students learn about politics and government? And, what research is needed to determine whether service, in fact, contributes to students' civic education? Having recently completed an analysis of national survey data on secondary school students' participation in community service and its relationship to civic education (see Niemi, Hepburn, and Chapman 2000), we now turn to examining the implications of service learning for college political science teaching and research.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The aptness of Orwell's observation is not confined to the community of Animal Farm, but extends to the “community of scholars” which constitutes the “learned discipline” of political science as well. In fact, as conceptualized by Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus in their seminal study of American Political Science, a “gallery of great men” is one of the characteristics of such a discipline, serving (inter alia) “… both as a sign of professional kinship and as a means of cementing these bonds.”

As an organized human activity, political science possesses a number of formal and informal stratification systems. The former reflect the decentralized nature of the discipline and include the various departmental structures as well as the hierarchies of the specialized and regional associations and of APSA. The informal stratification systems—essentially the considered assessment of the significance of individual contributions to the discipline—are substantially more subjective. These diverge along idiosyncratic as well as along the institutional, geographic, and subfield dimensions of the formal stratification systems. Moreover, the formal and informal systems will depart to some extent, since they are based upon different and sometimes contradictory criteria. Frequently, a particularly prominent contributor to the discipline will be elevated to the Association's presidency in recognition of these activities. In other cases, however, the nature of the contribution precludes such formal acknowledgment.

This article conceptualizes the relative absence of youth in legislatures, a feature we perceive as a democratic deficit with detrimental consequences. It introduces a new operationalization: the Youth Representation Index. Rather than calculating youths’ representation by the percentage of Members of Parliament 35 or 40 years old and younger or legislatures’ median age, we argue that scholars should assess youths’ parliamentary presence relative to their proportion of the voting-age population. We contribute by assessing the magnitude of youths’ underrepresentation across countries, finding that adults 35 years old and younger are generally underrepresented in legislatures by a factor of three and those 40 years old and younger by a factor of two. We illustrate that youths’ presence increases under proportional representation electoral systems and with candidate age requirements set at 18 years. Finally, our results illustrate that countries with a younger population display a stronger discrepancy in youth representation.

Despite the widespread use of paired comparisons, we lack clear guidance about how to use this research strategy in practice, particularly in case selection. The literature tends to assume that cases are systematically selected from a known population, a major assumption for many topics of interest to political scientists. This article speaks to this gap. It describes three distinct logics of paired comparison relevant to theory development, presents a simple way of considering and comparing them, and explores how this approach can inform more intentional research design, with particular attention to low information settings where substantial research is needed to ascertain the values of independent or dependent variables. The discussion underscores inter alia the need to be aware and explicit about the implications of case selection for the ability to test and build theory, and the need to reconsider the well-cited “rule” of not selecting on the dependent variable.

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).

The current condition of Army manpower, like the situation in Iraq, is grave and deteriorating. The January 2007 decision by the George W. Bush administration to send additional ground combat and support troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has thrown the Army's manpower shortages into stark relief. This latest escalation, however, not only runs the risk of breaking the all-volunteer Army but also undermines our national security. Several questions must therefore be addressed: Is an all-volunteer Army desirable? What are the current difficulties facing Army recruitment and retention? What consequences have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had on the service? Before engaging a more substantive discussion which includes the present demographics of the force and the recruitment process, one point should be made clear. We believe the all-volunteer model is the right one and should be maintained if at all possible.