The Socially Mediated Internet Survey (SMIS) method is a cost-effective technique used to obtain web-based, adult samples for experimental research in political science. SMIS engages central figures in online social networks to help recruit participants among visitors to these websites, yielding sizable samples for experimental research. We present data from six samples collected using the SMIS method and compare them to those gathered by other sampling approaches such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk. While not representative of the general adult population, our SMIS samples are significantly more diverse than undergraduate convenience samples, not only demographically but also politically. We discuss the applicability of the method to experimental research and its usefulness for obtaining samples of special, politically relevant subpopulations such as political sophisticates and activists. We argue that the diversity of SMIS samples, along with the ability to capture highly engaged citizens, can circumvent questions about the artificiality of political behavior experiments entirely based on student samples and help to document sources of heterogeneous experimental treatment effects.

This brief essay is written in an attempt to provide a comparison of the reputed quality of political science departments with measures of their productivity. The first study done in the last two decades which purported to assess the “quality” of political science departments was published in 1959 by Hayward Keniston. Keniston's study relied on a survey of the chairpersons of 25 departments and was greatly improved upon by Professors Albert Somit and Joseph Tanenhaus who attempted to measure the strength of political science doctoral programs by drawing a random sample of more than 400 political scientists who were members of the American Political Science Association. In 1966 Professor Allan M. Cartter published the results of his survey of 35 chairpersons, 66 “senior scholars” and 64 “junior scholars” and obtained virtually identical results as the Somit-Tanenhaus study. The results of these studies may be seen in Table 1.

These studies are all valuable additions to the literature; however, the concepts of reputed “quality” or “strength” may suffer from many of the same drawbacks as the concept of reputed “power.”

That is, a department may have a reputation of excellence and yet publish very little. Converse.

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%.

This lecture was presented at the University of Sheffield on October22, 2008, inaugurating the Graduate School of Politics; and atOxford University on October 16, 2008. I have retained the lecturestyle for this publication, only making minor changes and additionsin the text.

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).

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.

Race and gender are intimately intertwined in the lives of Black women in the United States. Race constructs the way Black women experience gender; gender constructs the way Black women experience race. In the Senate hearings that pitted the word of Clarence Thomas against the sexual harassment accusations of Anita Hill, the great majority of Black women did not believe Hill's accusations. Our analysis will set this disbelief against a background of substantial Black unity on political issues in the United States, Black feminism, television coverage of the event, and Black women's reactions to that television coverage.

Contrary to the conclusion one might reasonably form from the primary White composition of all the major feminist organizations, Black women have usually given stronger support to the women's movement than Whites on surveys (see Table for self-identification as “feminist”). Even as early as 1970, 60% of Black women said they supported efforts to strengthen women's status in society, compared to only 37% of White women (Klein 1987: 26), and in 1972 67% said they were sympathetic to women's liberation groups, compared to only 35% of White women (hooks 1981: 148). Also contravening the impression one might form from the composition of feminist organizations, poor women and working class women are as likely as middle-class women to say on these surveys that they consider themselves “feminist.” The survey data are supported by indepth interviews among all classes of Black women.

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.

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.

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.

Although much of what we know about political advertising comes from the study of television advertising alone, online advertising is an increasingly prominent part of political campaigning. Research on other online political communication—especially candidate websites, blogs, and social media—tends to conclude that these communications are aimed primarily at turning existing supporters into campaign donors, activists, and volunteers. Is a similar communication strategy found in online display ads—those ads placed adjacent to website content? In one of the first systematic analyses of the nature, content, and targets of online display advertising, we examined 840 unique online display ads from the 2012 presidential campaign. We show that the policy content, ad location, and interactive elements of the ads varied based on the audience, with persuasive appeals aimed at undecided or persuadable voters and engagement appeals aimed at existing supporters. Comparing ad content across candidates also found that each side focused on those issues for which the candidate had a strategic advantage. As a consequence, and in contrast to the conclusions of previous research that examines television advertising, we found minimal issue engagement in online advertising.

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.

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.