This symposium presents 10 articles forecasting the 2008 U.S. national elections. The core of this collection is the seven presidential-vote forecasting models that were presented in this space before the 2004 election. Added to that group are one additional presidential forecasting model, one state-level elections forecasting model, and one model forecasting the relationship between congressional votes and seats won by the parties. Some of the articles that are focused on the presidential race have also taken the opportunity to forecast the congressional elections as well.

As others have done before me, I am honored to receive the APSA John Gaus Award. As I prepared this lecture, I realized that the Gaus award has been given by APSA 26 times; mine is the 27th. The first was awarded to Herbert Kaufman whose work set a very high standard for this honor. Reviewing the list of the other Gaus award recipients provides a picture of the development of our field. It includes a variety of individuals who represent different approaches to the intersection of public administration and political science. Among the recipients are seven individuals who had a major and personal influence on my work: Aaron Wildavsky, Frank Rourke, George Frederickson, Martha Derthick, Lou Gawthrop, Larry Lynn, and David Rosenbloom. Others are people who have been important to my own intellectual development.

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.

The objective of this article is to report differences we have found in teaching “American National Government” via the web and in a traditional lecture/discussion format. Since beginning this quasiexperimental field study in late 1997, we have gathered a variety of comparative data concerning students' characteristics and their changes in political knowledge and attitudes—things that are important to all of us who labor teaching American government in hopes of nurturing healthy citizens.

Even before the 2006 presidential election dissolved into a nasty street battle, it was widely perceived as strongly polarized. The two leading candidates, Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), staked out starkly different positions on key economic issues. Calderón promised continuity with Mexico's free-market reforms, focusing on investment as the engine of growth. López Obrador, in contrast, argued that the neoliberal strategy would benefit only a few and he instead promised to alleviate poverty through state spending on infrastructure and social welfare. Unlike in prior presidential elections where the PAN and PRD candidates downplayed their differences to challenge the authoritarian dominant PRI with broad pro-democracy appeals, in this first post-transition election, the candidates made their differences clear.

This paper discusses an arms control simulation that formed a central part of the course, Controlling Chemical and Biological Weapons. Based on the experiential learning approach this simulation sought to (a) provide an active learning context for students to acquire an in-depth understanding of central aspects of biological arms control, and (b) gain an appreciation for the complexities of multilateral diplomacy in general and arms control negotiations in particular. I taught this course in spring 2006 to a group of 16 final-year undergraduate students. The arms control simulation complemented the weekly one-hour lectures and replaced the standard one-hour student-led seminar sessions. At the beginning of the simulation I supplied students with a set of confidential country instructions to approach the simulation, which was subdivided into two negotiating rounds of three sessions each and a drafting exercise towards the end of the semester.

Despite the general narrative that the world is in a period of democratic decline, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies that assess whether this is systematically true. Most existing studies of global backsliding are based largely if not entirely on subjective indicators that rely on expert coder judgment. Our study surveys objective indicators of democracy (e.g., incumbent performance in elections) and finds little evidence of global democratic decline during the past decade. To explain the discrepancy in trends between expert-coded and objective indicators, we consider the role of coder bias and leaders strategically using more subtle undemocratic action. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that the world is becoming less democratic exclusively in ways that require subjective judgment to detect, this claim is not justified by existing evidence.

Many Americans hold distorted views of elected officials and, as our study shows, the blame is due partly to our ideological biases and partly to mass media. Analyzing a nationally representative online survey, we corroborate recent research that found that one in five Americans still believe president Barack Obama is a Muslim and that almost seven in ten mistakenly think Sarah Palin, and not Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey, was the first to say “I can see Russia from my house.” Although race, political ideology, and “born-again” or evangelical Christian status were the primary drivers of misperceptions about Obama’s faith, media use had a more crucial role in predicting the more widespread misperception about Palin. Misattribution of the Fey quote to Palin was greatest among heavy viewers of traditional news media and late-night TV comedy, which is suggestive of the “lamestream media” effect often espoused by prominent Republican figures.

Political science, as we currently understand the label, was born, in Western Europe, in the early Fifties. One may say that it was “reborn”; but that would be inaccurate, for in the nineteenth century and until World War Two the label indicated a captive discipline largely dominated by juridical or historical approaches (as in the case, e.g., of Gaetano Mosca). So political science had a new start and became a field of inquiry in its own right about half a century ago. I was, at the time, one of its founders (with Stein Rokkan, Juan Linz, Mattei Dogan, Hans Daalder, Erik Allardt, S. N. Eisenstadt, and others. See: Comparative European Politics: The Story of a Profession, edited by H. Daalder, 1997). I am thus one of the witnesses of what the “young turks” of the time had in mind, of how we conceived and promoted political science. I am now an “ancient sage” and it now pleases me to reflect, some fifty years later, on where political science has gone and on whether it has taken the right course, the course that I had wished for and expected. Thus to ask today, in the middle of Mitteleuropa, where political science has been heading is also to ask whether the new beginnings of the discipline in Eastern Europe should or should not follow the path entered by our “big brother,” I mean, by American-type political science. I too have been somewhat swallowed by our big brother (to be sure, a benevolent and well meaning one) in the sense that I have been teaching in the United States for some thirty years. Let me add that I have largely benefited from my American exposure. Yet I have always resisted and still resist the American influence. And I take this occasion to say why I am unhappy about the American molding of present day political science.

It is a great honor to have been invited to deliver the Ithiel de Sola Pool lecture. Professor de Sola Pool had a tremendous influence on scholarship and practice. His work describes the ways in which evolving technologies fundamentally alter communicative expectations and social outcomes. Years after their publication, works such as Technologies of Freedom (1984) continue to provide insight about how the networked communications are changing the world. Professor de Sola Pool's work is of great public value. In what follows, I want to focus our attention on the value of social science today.

Research on political conflict can benefit immensely from fieldwork. However, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process is elaborate and daunting that discourages rather than encourages this type of research. Existing policies often are insensitive to the many uncertainties related to field research abroad, especially in conflict zones. Three reasons for this are identified in this article. First, the federal regulations to protect human subjects of social science research are most suitable for biomedical sciences. Second, there is huge gap between “procedural ethics” and “ethics in practice.” Third, there is a lack of communication or dialogue between researchers and IRBs. After discussing these reasons, I offer the following suggestions: bridging the gap between the researcher and the IRB; reducing delays in the IRB approval and revision process; encouraging collaboration and dialogue among researchers; and advocating a proactive stance by academic associations.

Scoring lawmakers based upon the votes they cast while serving in Congress is both commonplace and politically consequential. However, scoring legislators' voting records is not without its problems—even when performed by organizations without a specific policy agenda. A telling illustration of the impact that these scores have on political debate recently arose in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries.

This article examines a mock trial I have developed and used in teaching the history of political thought. Mock trials have been underused but have great potential to become an effective and exciting tool for student learning in this area. In this mock trial, the plaintiff, defendant, attorneys, and witnesses are eminent political or economic thinkers or political leaders of the past. Active engagement in this mock trial helped my students immensely in gaining deeper insight into and a more nuanced understanding of the ideas of the thinker they represented, as well as enhancing their critical and analytical abilities and improving their research skills. As a teaching tool that is amenable to creative adaptation, a mock trial can be an engaging and effective exercise for delving into the history of political thought and making it more relevant.

The theory of minority political incorporation (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984; 2001) addressed the rise of African Americans and Latinos in urban politics through coalitions that combined the mobilization of African-American communities and White liberals (Sonenshein 1993) and, at times, Hispanics. While Hispanics were important to the theory of political incorporation, their role was neither consistent nor central in coalitions for minority advancement during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. However, Latinos; impressive demographic strength is now translating into major voter registration and turnout gains, and Latinos increasingly are taking the lead in minority incorporation in some cities and states. There is, perhaps, no better example of Latinos; increasing political clout than City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa's smashing electoral victory to become the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles in more than 130 years. Villaraigosa's election attracted national and international attention, and energized Latino activists around the country.

“Nobody listens to us. There is not a single person in Washington who will get us…anything but shit and more shit. I'm sorry. This is where we are now. Nowhere.”

It all started with a scheduling conflict. Because of a Model United Nations conference, one student let me know that she would need to miss our research methods class the coming week. As hands popped up around the room I realized I would be missing almost a third of my class. Unfortunately they were going to miss crucial lectures on measures of significance and measures of association, without which they could be considerably lost when it came to the semester research paper.