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.

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.

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.

During the 2016 US presidential election, Americans were exposed to an onslaught of disinformation on social media. Many of the most viral posts originated from Veles, a small town in central Macedonia. During fieldwork in Veles, where we interviewed several residents and disinformation creators, we found that the epicenter of this viral phenomenon was Mirko Ceselkoski, an autodidact social media expert, teacher, and mentor to Veles’ fake news operators. We interviewed Ceselkoski and registered and attended his online course—the same course numerous Veles residents took offline. Our research confirms (1) the pivotal role Ceselkoski had in the creation of this industry; (2) the economic motivation driving the fake news disseminators; and (3) the manner in which the mostly young people in their early twenties with little English fluency were able to generate so much traffic and disseminate so much disinformation.

In President Obama's words, the Democratic Party experienced a “shellacking” in the 2010 elections. In particular, the net loss of 63 House seats was the biggest midterm loss suffered by a party since 1938—the largest in the lifetimes of approximately 93% of the American population.

“Clinton Eclipses Obama and Edwards on Leadership” a Gallup Poll report headlined in January 2007. Gallup chose eight characteristics to determine this assessment, including being most qualified to be president, is the strongest leader, would be the best in a crisis, would manage the government most effectively, and would work the best with Congress. In a summary of its findings, the report concludes: “Among the characteristics and qualities tested, Clinton's strong points are almost uniformly related to presidential leadership. She holds a formidable lead on many items in this category, including being qualified to be president and being a strong leader” (Saad 2007).

Letters to the editor are an important but poorly understood form ofvoluntary political participation. To learn more about the contentof letters to the editor and the characteristics of the people whowrite them we conducted a content analysis of 1,415 randomlyselected printed letters from eight newspapers from 2002 to 2005. Wealso matched the letter writers from our sample to demographic andpolitical information contained in a state voterfile.

In this article, we examine the impact of syllabi wording on how students assess a hypothetical instructor for an introductory political science course at a medium-sized state institution. Student participants were recruited from political science classes at this institution and randomly assigned to two groups. The groups were asked to review a sample syllabus from an introductory political science class and answer a number of questions regarding the instructor, as well as a few demographic questions. The syllabi were identical except for the wording of the requirements. For one group, the requirements were expressed in “rewarding” terms; for the other, the requirements were expressed in “punishing” terms.

In 2000, Arizona and Maine implemented full public funding for state legislative elections, and Connecticut will do so in 2008. Candidates who opt to accept public funding receive grants that pay for the entire cost of their campaigns. Advocates of these so-called clean elections argue that the programs reduce quid pro quo corruption, increase electoral competitiveness, and open up the process to candidates who lack access to traditional fundraising networks (Phelps 2004). Critics respond that the Maine and Arizona public funding programs have achieved nothing, save for imposing unjust burdens on candidates who refuse to participate (Basham and Zelder 2005).

We constructed a co-authorship network of the global political science community. Two scientists are connected if they have co-authored a paper. We drew on more than 67,000 papers published from 1990 to 2013 in one of today’s 96 core journals. The network consists of more than 40,000 authors located worldwide. We found that the community forms a single, interconnected component as well as numerous unconnected authors. Whereas some are highly productive in terms of publications, the majority of authors published only a single paper, which suggests significant turnover in the community. Using information from the papers (e.g., title, journal, and abstract), we investigated how different subcommunities organize and interconnect, how journals reach out into the community, and how individual scientists cooperate. We also investigated how the network has evolved in the last two decades. Our analysis is supplemented by a bibliographic analysis that describes major changes in publication patterns.

In November 2000, exit poll interviews with voters in Florida indicated that Al Gore won the state. As a result, many television networks declared Gore the winner of Florida, a pivotal state to winning the presidency in 2000. Only a few hours later, the first vote tallies from the Florida Secretary of State's office revealed that George W. Bush was in fact leading in Florida. After 45 days of recounts and lawsuits, it was clear that the exit polls were wrong; Bush had won the state by the narrowest of margins. As a result of the flawed exit poll the media and pollsters scoured and reanalyzed the methodology used in 2000 to prepare and correct for the 2004 presidential election. The old system, Voter News Service (VNS) was scrapped entirely, and Edison-Mitofsky Research was chosen to implement a new and more accurate national exit poll in 2004 by a consortium of news organizations retained by the Associated Press called the National Election Pool (NEP). What happened? Exit poll results from Edison-Mitofsky showed John Kerry ahead in Ohio, Florida, and New Mexico—all states which he lost to Bush in 2004.Author names are listed alphabetically. The co-authors were also the co-principal investigators of the Loyola Marymount University 2005 Los Angeles Mayoral Exit Poll. Thanks to Salvador Paniagua and Haven Perez for their tremendous research assistance in implementing this project and to the more than 120 student researchers who participated in the exit polling and data entry. Robert Aguinaga and Antonio Gonzalez of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project also provided valuable assistance in implementing the poll. Mark Blumenthal, of mysterypollster.com was instrumental in tracking down exit poll archives.

With the 2000 census showing very large increases in Latino urban populations, the issues of minority incorporation and interracial coalition are becoming more complicated than politics in black and white. Will Latino participation resemble the patterns of African Americans, in which minority mobilization relied in part on the support of ideological liberals? Or will the path taken by Latinos be qualitatively different from that of African Americans?

Movies have a long and distinguished history in the political science and international relations classrooms; they provide connections between abstract theories and concepts and concrete everyday practices. However, traditional approaches to teaching movies in the political science and international relations classrooms allow for passive student learning, where students watch the movie and then react. We propose using insights from simulations to help resolve these problems with using movies in the classroom. In this article, we outline the learning methods and approaches of simulations, and then apply them to movies in the international relations classroom.

LGBTQ activists and academics advocate the use of non-binary gender categories to include individuals who identify as neither rigidly male nor rigidly female to reflect the increasing number of people who do not place themselves in these two conventional classes. Although some general-population surveys have begun using non-binary gender questions, research has not examined the consequences of using (or not) a question with non-binary gender categories in surveys and censuses. Our study addresses this gap using a survey experiment in which respondents in the United States, Canada, and Sweden randomly received a binary or a non-binary gender question. We find no evidence of negative reactions to the non-binary question. Moreover, when there is a statistical difference, the reactions are positive. We thus conclude that general-population surveys could use a non-binary question without facing significant adverse reactions from respondents.