To what extent do political cartoonists use popular culture references to make sense of political culture? Seeing images in 2004, depicting Vice President Dick Cheney as Darth Vader from Star Wars, John Edwards as the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, and John Kerry as Frankenstein's monster, it is clear that some editorial cartoonists make connections between our popular culture and our political culture. Why, and with what possible consequences?

There are many issues of ethics and openness in elite interviewing that I have learned how to deal with through the years.Thanks to Beth L. Leech, Rutgers University, for including me in this workshop. I learned a lot listening to my fellow interviewers and gleaning wisdom from their experiences. Thanks also to Jeffrey Berry and the Political Organizations and Parties Section of APSA for putting the workshop on. My work has focused on people who cause trouble: protesters, litigants, defendants, sidewalk counselors, rescuers, and abortion providers, to name a few. Of course, in dealing with people you are studying you must be honest and ethical. It is important to remember that their activism comes from something they deeply feel. Their activism is because of their beliefs, opinions, experiences, and sense of community. They do not exist as activists so that you can add more lines to your vita or finish your dissertation. You must leave them in the same position in which you found them. You must do no harm to them.

This article describes the current debate on the practice of preregistration in political science—that is, publicly releasing a research design before observing outcome data. The case in favor of preregistration maintains that it can restrain four potential causes of publication bias, clearly distinguish deductive and inductive studies, add transparency regarding a researcher’s motivation, and liberate researchers who may be pressured to find specific results. Concerns about preregistration maintain that it is less suitable for the study of historical data, could reduce data exploration, may not allow for contextual problems that emerge in field research, and may increase the difficulty of finding true positive results. This article makes the case that these concerns can be addressed in preregistered studies, and it offers advice to those who would like to pursue study registration in their own work.

We present two simulations designed to convey the strategic nature of terrorism and counterterrorism. The first is a simulated hostage crisis, designed primarily to illustrate the concepts of credible commitment and costly signaling. The second explores high-level decision making of both a terrorist group and the state, and is designed to highlight scarce-resource allocation and organizational dynamics. The simulations should be useful both in a traditional classroom setting as well as to the larger public. We provide a primer on the subject matter, and all the material necessary to run the simulations.

This article presents the results from a survey of political science department chairs regarding the tenure procedures and standards at their colleges or universities. The findings reveal that only a small fraction of the colleges and universities in the United States refuse to offer tenure or are attempting to limit tenure. We also find general agreement regarding the standards for evaluating teaching and service and that research expectations vary according to the highest degree offered by a department.

Political observers have detected a noticeable uptick in American political incivility in recent years, culminating with several moderate senators recently citing the rise of hard-core partisanship as the reason for their retirement. Supporting these accusations of unprecedented incivility with empirical evidence can be difficult, as notions of what constitutes appropriate, civil behavior are subjective and can vary across the political context of different eras. Was it more uncivil, for example, for William Jennings Bryan to accuse his political opponents of crucifying other Americans on a cross of gold than it was for a member of Congress to yell “You lie!” at the president in the nation's Capitol? Assessing the incivility of these statements requires determining the effect each had on political opponents' abilities to maintain a functional relationship despite their disagreement over policy outcomes. Nevertheless, many politicians, political observers, and scholars are truly concerned that current levels of incivility are indeed worse, not only damaging the ability to resolve complex public problems, but threatening the long-term stability of America's governing institutions. Largely focusing on changes in institutional structures and elite behavior, scholars identify numerous explanations for this trend.

Social scientists' initial forays into the field of political socialization were directly linked to goals of creating good citizens beginning in childhood (Merriam 1931, 1934; Sears 1990; Wallas 1908). With the advent of behavioralism, however, researchers began viewing the study of political socialization as an end in itself (Ball 1995). The emphasis on objective, scientific analysis caused researchers to abandon participant observation, in-depth interviews, and classroom experiments, thus precluding the collection of interesting and valuable data that could be used to inform the development of civic education programs. Further, the dominant theoretical model assumed that political orientations are transmitted from family members and teachers to young people. This model led to rather sterile debates about which agent was the most influential, rather than to discussions about how agents might successfully inspire the development of democratic citizenship values in children and adolescents (Torney-Purta 1999).

Problems of theory and method, contradictory research findings, and evidence of the volatility of political orientations over time contributed to declining scholarly interest in the field of political socialization in the 1980s, especially investigations of preadults (Cook 1985; Merelman 1986). However, political socialization research is currently experiencing a renaissance sparked in part by concerns about citizenship education, of which service learning is an important component. Networks such as the APSA Task Force on Civic Education have been formed to unite educators and researchers. These networks allow for an unprecedented exchange of ideas linking academic inquiry and service learning.

This short article outlines why the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for the final 71 years of the twentieth century, not only lost the 2006 presidential election, but posted a miserable third place finish by taking only 22.7% of the national vote versus 36.7% for the winner, Felipe Calderón of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) and 36.1% for the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). It also explains why, despite its recent electoral results, the once-hegemonic party will continue to play an important, but reduced political role: as a coalition partner with the governing PAN to create majorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

Will President Obama lose votes in 2012 because of racial prejudice? For 2008, we estimated, via a carefully controlled, national survey-based study, that on balance he lost about five percentage points in popular vote share due to intolerance for his race on the part of some voters. What about 2012? There are at least three possibilities: (1) the presidency has become postracial, and the vote will register no racial cost; (2) intolerance has increased, and the vote will register an increased racial cost; and (3) intolerance has decreased, and the vote will register a decreased racial cost. Our evidence, drawn from an analysis comparable to that carried out for 2008, suggests Obama will pay a racial cost of three percentage points in popular vote share. In other words, his candidacy will experience a decrease in racial cost, if a small one. In 2008, this racial cost denied Obama a landslide victory. In the context of a closer election in 2012, this persistent racial cost, even smaller in size, could perhaps cost him his reelection.

Has the pandemic exacerbated gender inequality in academia? We provide real- time evidence by analyzing 1.8 million tweets from approximately 3,000 political scientists, leveraging their use of social media for career advancement. Using automated text analysis and difference-in-differences estimation, we find that although faculty members of both genders were affected by the pandemic, the shift to remote work caused women to tweet less often than their male colleagues about professional accomplishments. We argue that these effects are driven by the increased familial obligations placed on women, as demonstrated by the increase in family-related tweets and the more pronounced effects among junior academics. Our evidence demonstrating the gendered shift in professional visibility during the pandemic provides the opportunity for proactive efforts to address disparities that otherwise may take years to manifest.

Political scientists have devoted vastly more attention to general presidential elections than to party nominations for president. This emphasis might be reasonable if parties could be counted on to nominate generic representatives of their traditions. But it is clear that they cannot. Since the party reforms of the 1970s, regulars like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Al Gore have sometimes won fairly easy nominations, but outsider candidates like Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean have made strong runs or even won. 2016 has produced extremes of both types: ultimate regular Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side and far outsider Donald Trump on the Republican side. It seems, moreover, that party regulars are having more difficulty in recent cycles than they did in the 1980s and 1990s. There is therefore some urgency to the question: when and why do party regulars tend to win nominations?

We examine this question from the point of view of two well-known studies, Nelson Polsby’s Consequences of Party Reform and our own, The Party Decides. The former explains why incentives built into the reformed system of presidential nominations make outsider and factional candidates like Trump likely. The latter argues that, following the factional nominations of the 1970s, party leaders learned to steer nominations to insider favorites. This article uses the logic of these studies to argue that major trends over the past two decades – the rise of new political media, the flood of early money into presidential nominations, and the conflict among party factions – have made it easier for factional candidates and outsiders to challenge elite control of nominations.

The special Senate election in Oregon, held during January 1996, was the first time in which a federal election was held using a vote-by-mail format. The purpose of this survey was to address most of the relevant issues and concerns involving vote-by-mail elections and to provide an assessment of this electoral method at a crucial time in the political process.

The trial-heat forecasting equation grew out of an examination of Gallup's trial-heat polls (“if the election were held today, who would you vote for?”) at various points in election years as predictors of the November vote (Campbell and Wink 1990). My co-author Ken Wink and I found, not surprisingly, that polls as literal forecasts were not very accurate until just before the election, that taking the historical relationship between the polls and votes into account through a bivariate regression significantly increased their accuracy, and that taking the contemporary context of the election as measured by economic growth in the election year into account increased their accuracy even further. Corroborating Lewis-Beck and Rice's earlier finding (Lewis-Beck 1985, 58), we found that an equation combining the Labor Day trial-heat poll standing of the in-party candidate and the second-quarter growth rate in the economy produced the most accurate forecast of the national two-party popular vote.

There often exists a problematic gap between more theoretical works on war-to-peace transitions, and the practical challenges that peacebuilding operations face in the field. This article describes the use of classroom simulation to highlight the complexity of contemporary multilateral peace operations. It describes the content and mechanics of the simulation, the issues that can arise in its operation, and strategies for most effectively integrating such a simulation into overall course objectives.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

In summer 2008, our Jobs Model forecast a Democratic presidential candidate two-party popular vote share of 56.6%, which would deliver the incumbent party the biggest defeat of any post-World War II contest (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008). However, we argued, from our analysis of different experimental and observational evidence, that this unprecedented victory would be prevented by racially intolerant voters. We estimated the net racial cost of being a black candidate and corrected our overall forecast downward to 50.1% for Barack Obama. The unparalleled economic crisis, initiated after the release of our summer forecasts, prompted a reconsideration; the unique shock to the economy was no ordinary campaign perturbation. We calculated that the ensuing boost to anti-incumbent economic voting would add approximately two percentage points to the opposition; therefore, we issued a public revision of our forecast to 52.0 % for Obama (Lewis-Beck 2008). We are pleased that this final forecast fell so close to the actual result of 53.5%. Nevertheless, we contend the actual result should have been much closer to our original forecast. Given the dismal state of the polity and the economy prior to the election, the Obama victory should have been much bigger, as we show below.