Evidence suggesting that the growth of civic roots in adolescence may be crucial to the long-term development of citizenship has stimulated research into factors that might influence civic development during this time. One interesting finding to emerge from that exploration is the apparent importance of discussion to the development of civic competence. Adolescents who discuss politics and current events with their parents, peers, or teachers tend to score higher than other youth on measures of civic behaviors, attitudes, and skills. They develop higher levels of political knowledge, show greater intention to vote in the future, and do better on a range of civic outcomes from petitioning and boycotting to raising money for charities and participating in community meetings (Torney-Purta et al. 2001; Andolina et al. 2003).

During the past thirty-five years many commentators have expressed concern about declining support for the American political system, noting familiar evidence of the steady erosion in electoral turnout (Stanley and Niemi 1995, 78; Teixeira 1992), falling participation in political parties (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993), plummeting levels of political trust (Lipset and Schneider 1987), and weakening civic engagement (Putnam 1995a). Evidence for declining confidence in American government is well-established. The standard National Election Study measures show that in 1954 three-quarters of the American public trusted government in Washington to do what was right ‘just about always or most of the time’. By 1994, a quarter of the public proved as trusting. Moreover how far Americans trust each other—or social trust—has also fallen by more than a third since the early sixties (Uslaner 1995; Putnam 1995a).

Not all the evidence points in the same direction, and some alternative forms of political activity may have risen over time (Verba et al. 1995, 70–71). Moreover comparative research (Klingemann and Fuchs 1995) provides no evidence for a uniform secular decline in electoral turnout and confidence in government across advanced democracies, as sometimes assumed by observers. Nevertheless it is widely believed that American democracy has been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, with angry voters disillusioned by Washington politics as usual.

This article explores publication patterns across 10 prominent political science journals, documenting a significant gender gap in publication rates for men and women. We present three broad findings. First, we find no evidence that the low percentage of female authors simply mirrors an overall low share of women in the profession. Instead, we find continued underrepresentation of women in many of the discipline’s top journals. Second, we find that women are not benefiting equally in a broad trend across the discipline toward coauthorship. Most published collaborative research in these journals emerges from all-male teams. Third, it appears that the methodological proclivities of the top journals do not fully reflect the kind of work that female scholars are more likely than men to publish in these journals. The underrepresentation of qualitative work in many journals is associated as well with an underrepresentation of female authors.

In a recent article in PS, Soroka and Wlezien (2008) argue that the policy preferences of low- and high-income Americans rarely differ, and therefore that “regardless of whose preferences policymakers follow … policy will end up in essentially the same place” (325). In this article, I analyze a much larger and more diverse set of policies than those examined by Soroka and Wlezien and show that income-based preference gaps are much larger and more widespread than their data suggest. In terms of federal government policy, the affluent are far better represented than the poor; the findings in this paper indicate that this representational inequality has substantial repercussions across a wide range of policy issues.

Research continues to accumulate showing that in instructor evaluations students are biased against women. This article extends these analyses by examining the dynamics between evaluations and gender and race/ethnicity. In a quasi-experimental design, faculty members teaching identical online courses recorded welcome videos that were presented to students at the course onset, constituting the sole exposure to perceived gender and race/ethnicity. This enables exploration of whether and to what degree the instructors’ characteristics influenced student evaluations, even after holding all other course factors constant. Findings show that instructors who are female and persons of color receive lower scores on ordinal student evaluations than those who are white males. Overall, we add further evidence to a growing literature calling for student evaluations of teaching (SETs) reform and extend it to encompass the effects on racial/ethnic minorities in addition to women.

The diversity of political spaces, availability of cheap labor, ease of access to powerful figures, and safety net of a foreign passport attract researchers to the developing world. However, environments of extreme state weakness and ongoing conflict permit research behavior that would be frowned on in the global north. We suggest that weak regulatory authority in conflict-affected states offers foreign academics opportunities that are not available when states have greater reach or capacity. Qualitative researchers may find requests to interview victims or perpetrators of wartime violence granted with ease. Experimenters can coerce under-resourced NGOs to pursue interventions at odds with their organizational mandates. We posit that conflict contexts can constitute permissive environments in which researchers can engage in conduct that would be considered deeply problematic at home. Because studying political violence can require firsthand research on aspects of political life not easily observed elsewhere, this article offers a set of guidelines to foster more ethical and responsible research practices.

Early or convenience voting—understood in this context to be relaxed administrative rules and procedures by which citizens can cast a ballot at a time and place other than the precinct on Election Day—is a popular candidate for election reformers. Typically, reformers argue that maximization of turnout is a primary goal, and reducing barriers between voters and the polls is an important method for achieving higher turnout. Arguments in favor of voting by mail, early in-person voting, and relaxed absentee requirements share this characteristic. While there are good theoretical reasons, drawn primarily from the rational choice tradition, to believe that early voting reforms should increase turnout, the empirical literature has found decidedly mixed results. While one prominent study suggests that voting by mail is associated with a 10% increase in turnout, other studies find smaller—but still statistically significant—increases in turnout associated with other convenience voting methods.This work is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the AEI/Brookings Election Reform Project, and the Charles McKinley Fund of Reed College. Thanks to Caroline Tolbert and Daniel Smith for sharing data with us, and to David Magleby for comments on an earlier version of this paper. All responsibility for interpretations lay with the authors.

Political science is a community enterprise; the community of empirical political scientists needs access to the body of data necessary to replicate existing studies to understand, evaluate, and especially build on this work. Unfortunately, the norms we have in place now do not encourage, or in some cases even permit, this aim. Following are suggestions that would facilitate replication and are easy to implement—by teachers, students, dissertation writers, graduate programs, authors, reviewers, funding agencies, and journal and book editors.

Qualitative political science, the use of textual evidence to reconstruct causal mechanisms across a limited number of cases, is currently undergoing a methodological revolution. Many qualitative scholars—whether they use traditional case-study analysis, analytic narrative, structured focused comparison, counterfactual analysis, process tracing, ethnographic and participant-observation, or other methods—now believe that the richness, rigor, and transparency of qualitative research ought to be fundamentally improved.

The 2000 presidential election was a wake-up call to elected leaders, public officials, and election scholars. The electoral fiasco—most prominent in Florida, but also taking place in states like New Mexico and Ohio—revealed many deficiencies in voting equipment (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). In addition to faulty equipment, registration mix-ups and problems with absentee ballots led to the loss of as many as six million votes (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). Confusing ballots, like the butterfly ballot in Florida's Dade County, were found to have led voters to vote incorrectly (Wand et al. 2001). While these problems have, no doubt, existed for a long time, the closeness of the 2000 presidential race and the fact that the number of lost votes had the power to change the election outcome have brought election administration questions to the forefront of policy making.Results were first presented at “The Future of Election Reform and Ethics in the States,” hosted by Kent State University, Department of Political Science, Columbus, Ohio, January 16–17, 2007, and the following paper was presented at the Midwest Political Science Association's Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, April 12–15, 2007. Data were collected by monies generously provided by the University of New Mexico's Research Allocation Committee. We'd like to thank Luciana Zilberman, Lisa Bryant, Alex Adams, David Magleby, and the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University for their assistance with this project. Of course, any errors are our own.

Students entering a graduate program often encounter a new type of assignment that differs from the papers they had to write in high school or as college undergraduates: the literature review (also known as a critical review essay). Put briefly, a literature review summarizes and evaluates a body of writings about a specific topic. The need to conduct such reviews is by no means limited to graduate students; scholarly researchers generally carry out literature reviews throughout their research careers. In a world where the Internet has broadened the range of potentially relevant sources, however, doing a literature review can pose challenges even to an experienced researcher.In drafting this overview, I have incorporated some points made by Paul Pitman in a lecture delivered to students at the Naval Postgraduate School. I have also incorporated some suggestions contained in a handout prepared by John Odell for students in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California.

The correspondence between public preferences and public policy is a critical rationale for representative democratic government. This view has been put forward in the theoretical literature on democracy and representation (e.g., Dahl 1971; Pitkin 1967; Birch 1971) and in “functional” theories of democratic politics (Easton 1965; Deutsch 1963), both of which emphasize the importance of popular control of policymaking institutions. Political science research also shows a good amount of correspondence between opinion and policy, though to varying degrees, across a range of policy domains and political institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere. This is of obvious significance.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2006 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, at the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties specialist group, Nottingham, England, and at the 2007 National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago. We thank Vinod Menon for assistance with data collection and Kevin Arceneaux, Suzie DeBoef, Harold Clarke, Peter Enns, Mark Franklin, Martin Gilens, John Griffin, Will Jennings, Rich Joslyn, Benjamin Page, David Sanders, David Weakliem, John Zaller, and the anonymous reviewers for comments.

Any theory of the manner in which governmental policies get formulated and implemented, as well as the effects of those actions on the world, requires an understanding of the behavior of major types of governmental institutions (legislatures, courts, administrative agencies, chief executives), as well as the behavior of interest groups, the general public, and the media. The dominant paradigm of the policy process, the stages heuristic popularized by Jones (1970), Anderson (1975), and Peters (1986), has outlived its usefulness and must be replaced, in large part because it is not a causal theory. In the course of their empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena that need to be incorporated into theories of the policy process. The development of such theories requires an integration ‘of both political scientists’ knowledge of specific institutions and behavior and policy scholars' attention to policy communities, substantive policy information, etc.

Innovations by Policy Scholars in Understanding the Policy Process

At least since World War II, most political scientists have tended to focus on either a specific type of institution (legislatures, the presidency, courts, interest groups, administrative agencies, local governments, political parties) or on specific types of political behavior outside those institutions (public opinion, voting, political socialization). These have become the standard subfields within the discipline.

In contrast, scholars interested in public policy have not been able to stay within these subfields because the policy process spans all of them. In the course of empirical work, policy scholars have highlighted a number of phenomena often neglected by political scientists without a policy focus:

a) The importance of policy communities/networks/subsystems involving actors from numerous public and private institutions and from multiple levels of government;

b) The importance of substantive policy information;

c) The critical role of policy elites vis-a-vis the general public;

d) The desirability of longitudinal studies of a decade or more;

e) Differences in political behavior across policy types.

Several countries have conducted Internet voting trials in binding public elections over the past decade, including Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, Estonia—a former Soviet republic and now a full member of the European Union—has advanced the farthest in deploying Internet voting. In this article, we focus on how the Estonians have systematically addressed the legal and technical considerations required to make Internet voting a functioning voting platform, as well as the political and cultural framework that promoted this innovation. Using data from our own qualitative and quantitative studies of the Estonian experience, we consider who voted over the Internet in these elections, and the political implications of the voting platform.

“President Bush's victory, the approval of every anti-gay marriage amendment on statewide ballots and an emphasis on ‘moral values’ among voters showed the power of churchgoing Americans in this election and threw the nation's religious divide into stark relief.” Associated Press, November 4, 2004