Survey research has expanded in the Arab world since the 1980s. The Arab Spring marked a watershed when surveying became possible in Tunisia and Libya, and researchers added additional questions needed to answer theoretical and policy questions. Almost every Arab country now is included in the Arab Barometer or World Values Survey. Yet, some scholars express the view that the Arab survey context is more challenging than that of other regions or that respondents will not answer honestly, due to authoritarianism. I argue that this position reflects biases that assume “Arab exceptionalism” more than fair and objective assessments of data quality. Based on cross-national data analysis, I found evidence of systematically missing data in all regions and political regimes globally. These challenges and the increasing openness of some Arab countries to survey research should spur studies on the data-collection process in the Middle East and beyond.

This article provides a foundation for understanding the role of implicit biases in political behavior, particularly implicit racial attitudes and voting behavior. Although racial attitudes have rarely played a major direct role in American presidential politics until 2008, numerous local, state, and federal elections are held every year in the United States that involve minority candidates. As a result, the implications are considerable.

Service learning is typically distinguished from both community service and traditional civic education by the integration of study with hands-on activity outside the classroom, typically through a collaborative effort to address a community problem (Ehrlich 1999, 246). As such, service learning provides opportunities and challenges for increasing the efficacy of both the teaching and practice of democratic politics. To better understand these opportunities and challenges, it is necessary to make explicit the goals of service learning and to consider how these goals intersect those of more traditional approaches to teaching about government and politics. We believe that one place these sometimes competing models could find common ground is in the learning of factual knowledge about politics.

Underlying the pedagogy of service learning are the beliefs that a central mission of civic education is to produce active, engaged citizens and that this mission is more likely to be accomplished by allowing young Americans to directly experience “politics” as part of their education. As noted by Frantzich and Mann, this view is very compatible with the stated mission of the American Political Science Association:

The founding of the [APSA] in 1903 marked the evolution of political science as a distinct academic discipline in colleges and universities. At the time, two educational objectives were claimed for the emerging discipline: citizenship and training for careers in public service…. For the student, direct experience was recommended to supplement formal instruction in government and politics. (1997, 193)

American politics is dominated by two major parties and has been for a century. The duopoly enjoyed by the Democrats and Republicans is largely the result of Duverger's Law: the tendency of a single-member district system to produce two-party competition (Duverger 1963). Minor parties ultimately fail in a single-member district system because (1) the winner-take-all approach does not reward candidates who finish third and (2) citizens vote strategically to avoid “wasting” their votes on hopeless candidates and spoiling the election (Cox 1997; Riker 1982). Because the U.S. two-party system is so dependent on its majoritarian electoral rules, one might suspect that other election regulations would have little effect on the number of parties.A longer version of this paper was presented at the conference, “2008 and Beyond: The Future of Election and Ethics Reform in the States,” Columbus, OH, January 16–17, 2007. I thank Richard Winger of Ballot Access News for comments and information.

Originating in the late nineteenth century, the editorial cartoon began as a mutually beneficial partnership between cartoonists and publishers. Publishers hoped to capitalize on the cartoon's popularity to increase revenue while cartoonists received job security and access to broad audiences. Recently, the future of the editorial cartoon in the United States has been a topic of much debate. Monitoring the decline of employment opportunities, growing editorial controls, and the greater use of syndication gives the impression of a medium in decline. Matt Davies, the head of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), recently stated that in any given interview he is “invariably asked about the demise of the editorial cartoonist” (Nieman 2004, 6).

Both statistical and qualitative interview data confirm the on-going existence of gender inequality within American academia, with women both underrepresented and underpaid compared to their male counterparts. Surprisingly, what is needed to remedy this situation is not a secret. Most of the policies outlined in this article as good workable solutions are programs that have been tested and described in more than one study. Indeed, evidence suggests that when the nine strategies we identify here are fully implemented, as they have been at a few colleges and universities, the number of women on the faculty increases dramatically. The fact that we do not adopt these policies more widely in academia suggests not a lack of knowledge so much as apathy, prejudice, gender stereotypes, and cultural cues that end by depriving society of some of its best talent and energy.

The challenges of teaching introductory-level U.S. politics to reluctant audiences are well known and widely lamented. This article investigates the pedagogical potential of political satire, specifically The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in engaging students in this tough-to-teach course. Based on a review of available literature and student survey data from the fall 2008 term, I argue that using this popular program in the classroom can enhance an introductory U.S. politics course. A review of both these survey data and student papers based on the program suggests promising possibilities for encouraging students' political engagement and critical-thinking skills. This preliminary examination demonstrates that further study on the program's potential both for student engagement and student learning outcomes is warranted.

Recent events have led to a renewed conversation surrounding the relevance and potential removal of Confederate monuments around the country, and several monuments have already been removed. However, we have little insight to explain why some monuments have been removed while others remain. This article seeks to understand the social and political determinants that can better explain the recent removal of Confederate monuments throughout the United States. Analyzing results from an original dataset of Confederate monuments, we identify which local government structures and racial and civic characteristics best predict the removal of these monuments. Ultimately, although we find that other factors contribute to monument removal, the size of the black population, the presence of a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter, and the percentage of Democrats in a county in which a monument exists—as well as whether the monument exists in a state that constrains removal by legislative decree—best predict whether a Confederate monument will be taken down. This project elucidates the interplay of race, partisanship, and local and statewide politics as it relates to the dismantling of Confederate monuments.

Despite comprising a large and increasing proportion of the United States population—about 14.7%, according to March 2006 Census Bureau estimates—Latinos continue to be severely underrepresented in political science, and today comprise less than 2% of the academy (Census Bureau 2006; Michelson 2007). Increased recent attention to the issues of recruitment and retention of Latino political scientists by professional associations such as the American Political Science Association (APSA) notwithstanding, the number of Latino scholars in the field continues to lag behind that of other racial and ethnic groups. But just where in the pipeline does the problem exist? Are not enough Latinos being recruited for graduate study? Are Latinos being successfully recruited but then not finishing their degrees? Or is the leak occurring later in scholars' careers, perhaps between graduation and tenure? Avalos (1991) noted that Latinas were particularly underrepresented, with few women entering or completing Ph.D. programs. More than 16 years later, does a gender gap persist among Latino political scientists? Do leaks in the pipeline differ for Latinos and Latinas? These are the questions that drive this research.An earlier version of this research was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. We would like to thank Maria Chavez, Patricia Jamarillo, Lisa García Bedolla, Celeste Montoya, Luis Fraga, Anna Sampaio, and Juan Carlos Huerta for their helpful comments, as well as Michael Jackson and Lilly Montalvo for their research assistance. We are also indebted to all of the respondents for their cooperation. All errors, of course, remain our own.

Protest Is Not Enough is partly a report on the politics of black and Hispanic mobilization in ten northern California cities and partly an effort to formulate a theory useful for the study of minority mobilization and its significance in cities generally. The cities are San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento, Stockton, Berkeley, Richmond, Hayward, Vallejo, and Daly City. We did not expect to generalize the particulars of our ten cities to others, but we did try to cast our concepts and fundamental relationships at a sufficiently general level to encompass a wide variety of cities, and we hoped that the application of our framework to other cities would suggest ways in which it should be extended or altered.

The Theory

We wanted a conception of minority political action and position that linked mobilization to policy, that demonstrated the connection between the passions, interests, and actions of mobilization and the governmental response—if any. It was apparent that blacks and Hispanics achieved a much stronger and more positive response to their interests in some cities than in others. It was apparent also that minority representation in elective offices, the customary way of describing their political position, did not capture the strength of the minority position in the more responsive city governments. The key to the higher levels of responsiveness was not representation but coalition: minority inclusion in a coalition that was able to dominate a city council produced a much more positive governmental response than the election of minority council-members who were not part of the dominant coalition.

In presidential elections over the last several decades, observers have noticed two patterns involving Latinos. The first, according to DeSipio and de la Garza (2002, 398), is that “With each presidential election, the media and the punditocracy discover Latinos anew.” As Jorge Ramos (2004) pointed out, “Without fail every four years, many politicians in the United States rediscover Latinos, only to forget them all over again for the next three years…It is a phenomenon so predictable that I have dubbed it the ‘Christopher Columbus Syndrome.”’

Area studies in the United States is under siege. Government and foundations are turning their attention and funds elsewhere. Although they operate from very diffrent quarters, critics are taking area studies harshly to task for both alleged errors of commission and omission. Yet mine is an optimistic message. These difficulties must be seen within the context of a change in the demographic composition of graduate studies in the U.S. An infusion of intellectual energy from foreign graduate students and post-docs is leading to a reinvention of traditional area studies as global networks of scholarly engagement. Over the longer term these networks, and the scholarship they will create and sustain, bode well for the continued intellectual vitality of this field of scholarship.

Predictions of the United States presidential election vote outcome have been growing in scope and popularity in the academic realm. Traditional election forecasting models predict the United States presidential popular vote outcome on a national level based primarily on economic indicators (e.g., real income growth, unemployment), public approval ratings, and incumbency advantage. Many of these forecasting models are rooted in retrospective voting theory (Downs 1957; Fiorina 1981), essentially rewarding the party in office if times are good, punishing it if times are bad. These models have successfully predicted election results by modeling economic performance and incumbent approval ratings (Campbell 2012; Fair 1992; Fair 1996; Klarner 2012). For example, Abramowitz's (2004; 2005) “time for a change model” predicts election results using economic performance during the first half of the election year, the number of years the incumbent party has been in office, and presidential approval. For a full review of 13 presidential forecasts for the US 2012 election, see PS: Political Science and Politics October 2012 (45 (4): 610–75). Although national models are the most common, researchers have also started to use state-level predictions for presidential and congressional outcomes, with mostly positive success (Berry and Bickers 2012; Jerome and Jerome-Speziari 2012; Klarner 2012; Silver 2012). These models use similar predictors, such as incumbency, economic conditions, and home-state advantage, and predict the per-candidate percentage of popular vote. Unfortunately, with state-level models, many of the economic variables used in predicting national models are unavailable beyond 10–15 election cycles (compounded also by 1959 additions of Alaska and Hawaii), so state-level models naturally have a shorter period of analysis than do national models.

Recent years have witnessed a rapid proliferation of radical Islamist activity in western Europe, from MI5's claim in 2006 of 30 incipient “terror plots” and 1,600 individuals under surveillance, to actual terrorist atrocities in European cities, the most infamous and deadly of which included the transport network bombings in Madrid in 2003 and in London in 2005. Concomitantly, both the media and the wider social discourse have been rife with self-appointed punditry and a plethora of commentators pontificating on European radical Islam's putative causal factors and remedies. This paper will attempt to address the complex issues by providing a fuller, more nuanced understanding of some of the causes and antecedents of Islamic political radicalism among western European Muslims.

Many Americans were shocked and shamed by the televised images of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Scenes of physical devastation were juxtaposed with even more disturbing scenes of human devastation. Thousands of residents, mostly Black and poor, seemed to be trapped in a Hobbesian state of nature, abandoned by government and civilized society. An untold number starved to death; for days their corpses floated in the streets.

The importance of the economy in US presidential elections is well established. Voters reward or punish incumbent party candidates based on the state of the economy. The electorate focuses particularly on economic change, not the level of the economy per se, and pays more attention to late-arriving change than earlier change. On these points there is a good amount of scholarly agreement (see e.g., Erikson and Wlezien 1996; Hibbs 1987). There is less agreement, however, on what specific indicators matter to voters. Some scholars rely on income growth, others on GDP growth, and yet others on subjective perceptions (see Abramowitz 2008; Campbell 2008; Holbrook 1996b; also see Campbell and Garand 2000). In our work, we have used the index of leading economic indicators, a composite of ten variables, including the University of Michigan's index of consumer expectations, stock prices, and eight other objective indicators.