Travel, stump speeches, and pressing-the-flesh make up a large part of any presidential electoral campaign. Obviously, candidates feel that their appearances are important, as they make hundreds of appearances between Labor Day and Election Day. But are they right? Well over 100 million people cast ballots in November, but only the tiniest fraction of voters meets or catches a glimpse of either of the candidates. Do candidate appearances and contact sway voters in some way? In this article, we use changes in weekly state tracking polls to determine the impact of candidate appearances in battleground and non-battleground states. Using polling data from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections, we find that campaign appearances can change a candidate's polling percentages, and that the impact varies by candidate and location (battleground state, safe Democratic state, or safe Republican state). We also find that the selection of a vice-presidential candidate is important, because of this candidate's ability to campaign effectively.

Studies of mass political attitudes and behavior before the 1950s have been limited by a lack of high-quality, individual-level data. Fortunately, data from public opinion polls conducted during the late New Deal and World War II periods are available, although the many difficulties of working with these data have left them largely untouched for over 60 years. We compiled and produced readily usable computer files for over 400 public opinion polls undertaken between 1936 and 1945 by the four major survey organizations active during that period. We also developed a series of weights to ameliorate the problems introduced by the quota-sampling procedures employed at the time. The corrected data files and weights were released in May 2011. In this article, we briefly discuss the data and weighting procedures and then present selected time series determined using questions that were repeated on 10 or more surveys. The time series provide considerable leverage for understanding the dynamics of public opinion in one of the most volatile—and pivotal—eras in American history.

To paraphrase slightly, I have been asked to focus on the apparent tensions between making genuinely scientific contributions by advancing knowledge in rigorous ways within specialized subfields, on the one hand, and addressing substantive political issues of general interest in accessible fashion, on the other. My view is that, though we should try to do both things, we should give priority to the latter—to helping both disciplinary and general public understandings of important substantive political issues become better informed and reasoned. To adopt this priority is still, I believe, to pursue the main tasks of political science as scientifically as possible; but it is true that this course involves significant tradeoffs.

Drawing on more than 500 elections from around the world, this article presents five empirical laws of politics. Four of these laws span democracies and dictatorships, and one sets a boundary between the two. In both regimes the governing party or coalition represents a minority of the electorate. In democracies this minority usually represents a plurality that amounts to about one third of the electorate. Judging by the outcome of the first free elections in regimes undergoing a transition, there is reason to believe that in dictatorships the minority is much smaller. Even as they have an advantage over the opposition, the incumbents experience an erosion of support over time. In democracies this leads to alternation in office, which in turn ensures that across many elections about two-thirds of the electorate gets to see its favorite party or coalition in government from time to time. In dictatorships, during long periods in office, support for the ruling party shrinks to insignificance. Also in democracies, it is rare for incumbents to receive more than 60 percent of the vote, and it never happens twice within the same spell in government. This appears to be a reliable indicator that differentiates all democracies from most dictatorships. The conclusion is inescapable—the dictatorial “passion for unanimity” and illusion of “organic unity” notwithstanding, the state is a plurality. The will of the electorate emerges as a result of competition among political parties.

Joseph Schumpeter, a great economist and social scientist of the last generation, whose career was almost equally divided between Central European and American universities, and who lived close to the crises of the 1930s and '40s, published a book in 1942 under the title, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The book has had great influence, and can be read today with profit. It was written in the aftergloom of the great depression, during the early triumphs of Fascism and Nazism in 1940 and 1941, when the future of capitalism, socialism, and democracy all were in doubt. Schumpeter projected a future of declining capitalism, and rising socialism. He thought that democracy under socialism might be no more impaired and problematic than it was under capitalism.

He wrote a concluding chapter in the second edition which appeared in 1946, and which took into account the political-economic situation at the end of the war, with the Soviet Union then astride a devastated Europe. In this last chapter he argues that we should not identify the future of socialism with that of the Soviet Union, that what we had observed and were observing in the first three decades of Soviet existence was not a necessary expression of socialism. There was a lot of Czarist Russia in the mix. If Schumpeter were writing today, I don't believe he would argue that socialism has a brighter future than capitalism. The relationship between the two has turned out to be a good deal more complex and intertwined than Schumpeter anticipated.

Researchers have long recognized that higher education is dominated by professors whose politics are well to the left of the American political center. The cause and implications of this ideological imbalance have been intensely debated since the 1960s. Although critics of higher education, such as David Horowitz, argue that the political imbalance in academia is largely the result of ideological discrimination, emerging research on the views, values, and experiences of the professoriate tells a more complex story. Despite the relatively small numbers in the academy, the findings suggest that many conservative scholars can succeed in a predominantly liberal environment. Drawing on the latest research, as well as their own personal experience, the authors outline steps that conservative faculty can take to avoid needless political conflict and work happily in a profession largely dominated by the Left.

The relationship between reputational rankings of political science departments and their scholarly productivity remains a source of discussion and controversy. After the National Research Council (1995) published its ranking of 98 political science departments, Katz and Eagles (1996), Jackman and Siverson (1996), and Lowry and Silver (1996) analyzed the factors that seemingly influenced those rankings. Miller, Tien, and Peebler (1996) offered an alternate approach to ranking departments, based both upon the number of faculty (and their graduates) who published in the American Political Science Review and upon the number of citations that faculty members received. More recently, two studies have examined departmental rankings in other ways. Ballard and Mitchell (1998) assessed political science departments by evaluating the level of productivity in nine important disciplinary and subfield journals, and Garand and Graddy (1999) evaluated the impact of journal publications (and other variables) on the rankings of political science departments. In general, Miller, Tien, and Peebler found a high level of correspondence between reputation rankings and productivity, Ballard and Mitchell did not, and Garand and Graddy found that publications in “high impact” journals were important for departmental rankings.

This article reports on an Internet-based quasi-experiment that took place during the French 2012 presidential election. We designed a website where French voters could vote under different voting rules. Based on the observation of more than 8,000 participants, we find that a substantial minority (10% to 15%) vote differently under the different systems, with 17% of the voters not voting for their preferred candidate in the one-round election, this percentage dropped to 12% in the alternative vote (first choice). Compared to the two-rounds election, at the aggregate level, the top two candidates get slightly more votes under one round, while the minor candidates obtain more first choices under the alternative vote. These findings are consistent with what the literature suggests about the impact of these voting systems on voters' choice.

We explicate the precise role that one specific emotion, disgust, plays in generating political acrimony. We do this by identifying the link between the different dimensions along which moral judgments are made by those espousing different political ideologies and the different emotions which undergird these evaluations. These assessments reliably track along liberal and conservative dimensions and are linked to the way values associated with purity and sanctity elicit greater degrees of disgust among conservatives. Here, we review a growing literature showing how disgust affects the psychology of politics through its influence on the cognitive and emotional processes that govern judgments of morality, as well as its direct impact on specific policy preferences. We then apply these findings to the nature and tenor of political discourse and suggest some ways that disgust might affect the character and function of democratic debate and tolerance. Finally, we discuss what these findings mean for public policy.

Do researchers share their quantitative data and are the quantitative results that are published in political science journals replicable? We attempt to answer these questions by analyzing all articles published in the 2015 issues of three political behaviorist journals (i.e., Electoral Studies, Party Politics, and Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties)—all of which did not have a binding data-sharing and replication policy as of 2015. We found that authors are still reluctant to share their data; only slightly more than half of the authors in these journals do so. For those who share their data, we mainly confirmed the initial results reported in the respective articles in roughly 70% of the times. Only roughly 5% of the articles yielded significantly different results from those reported in the publication. However, we also found that roughly 25% of the articles organized the data and/or code so poorly that replication was impossible.

We know little about the amount of career preparation offered to students in political science departments. This lack of information is particularly troubling given the state of the current job market and the growth of applied degree programs on university campuses. To address this issue, this article presents the results of a December 2010 survey of 279 political science department chairs that asked questions about the level of career preparation in their respective departments. Based on our empirical findings, we believe that political science departments are not doing enough to address their students' career preparation. Our results demonstrate that most departments rely on voluntary internships and faculty advisers to address career-related issues for political science majors. Only a few departments use required internships, required resumes, specific classes related to career preparation, and social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to support career preparation. We also found substantial differences in career preparation across department type (BA, MA, and PhD) and between public and private universities, urban and rural universities, and universities with different average SAT scores. Our findings should interest faculty and administrators who are concerned with different approaches to career preparation on college campuses.

Community engagement through service learning has become well institutionalized in American education, yet there has been considerable debate over its effectiveness, especially with regard to its impact on explicitly political engagement. While participation in community service and volunteerism clearly has a positive impact on the propensity of young people to dedicate themselves to further service, the evidence of the effects of service on political engagement is, at best, mixed.

I spent the 2004–2005 academic year in France, culminating with the May 29th referendum on the European Union constitutional treaty. Fifty-five percent of voters rejected it. Three days later, 62% of Dutch voters followed suit. These were unexpected results, especially in France, a country where 80% declare themselves in favor of European integration. In other member states, a simple rule generally applies: those whose priority is to strengthen the EU are on the “yes” side, while the “no” is identified with those who emphasize national interests. In the Netherlands, though the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic radical was a factor, the “no” forces won essentially because they persuaded enough people that the direction the Constitution would take the Netherlands went against Dutch interests. To do so, they played on the resentment that Brussels took their money but ignored Dutch concerns—“the same people who fooled you with the euro are fooling you now with this constitution.”

This study used a sample of 467 middle and high school students (Mage = 15.26) from a mid-Atlantic state. Structural equation models controlling for demographic variables (age, gender, and parents’ education) examined associations between three developing sociopolitical values (spiritualty, patriotism, and authoritarianism) and adolescents’ social and moral judgments (obligation and social praise) concerning four civic activities (community service, standard political involvement, social movement, and community gathering). Spirituality was associated with judgments for community service and community gathering involvement while authoritarian values were associated with the prioritization of all forms of civic activity. Multigroup analyses indicated that associations between authoritarianism and both community service and social movement judgments were stronger for younger adolescents while spirituality was more strongly associated with community service judgments for older adolescents. Patriotic beliefs were associated with civic judgments for children of college-educated parents, but not children of noncollege-educated parents.

In every modern political system, power is shared to a greater or lesser extent between levels of government. These power sharing arrangements are perhaps most explicit in formal federal systems like the United States and Canada, where federal constitutions define the relative powers of central and subnational governments. They may be no less important, however, in unitary democracies and even authoritarian regimes where central governments require local actors to implement policy on the ground and often delegate significant authority to them. Indeed, in any large and complex modern society, effective governance requires some sharing of power between higher levels of government, capable of coordinating many disparate actors and interests, and lower levels of government, capable of responding to local conditions.