Not surprisingly, the ratings of doctoral programs in the United States by the National Research Council (NRC 1995) are controversial. Some interpret the ratings as an indicator of relative program quality; others view them as little more than a gauge of the size and age of graduate programs, and still others deem them to be simply a popularity barometer.

Employing data assembled in the NRC report, we examine whether the political science program ratings reflect two general sets of characteristics—the size and the productivity of faculty.

All other things equal, program quality should vary directly with faculty size, and indeed size is emphasized as a key explanatory factor in the NRC report. The logic is straightforward. Very small departments lack the means to field a range of graduate courses of sufficient breadth to form the basis of a serious program. Larger departments enjoy the increased resources that allow for greater program depth and breadth. In addition, holding quality concerns constant, larger programs should on average receive higher ratings simply because they include more faculty.

This paper is the second of a three-part series dealing with quantitative indicators of impact and prominence in the political science discipline. In these essays, we assess some of the changes in the discipline since the publication of the Somit and Tanenhaus (1963; 1964; 1967) studies that cover the first 60 years of the twentieth century. In the first paper of the series, published in the January 2007 issue of PS (Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007), we focused on the individual visibility and impact of all regular faculty in Ph.D.-granting departments by using SSCI-based cumulative citation counts to their lifetime work. In particular, we identified the 400 most-cited faculty members in the discipline, and we found that citation counts are strongly influenced by factors such as date of Ph.D., subfield, and gender. This, the second paper in the series, shifts to departmental-level data and details the historical changes in Ph.D. production and placement rates from 1902–2000. The last paper in the series, to be published in the July 2007 issue of PS, will combine the individual-level citation data presented in the first paper with the Ph.D. production and placement data in the second paper to look at the factors that affect reputational rankings of Ph.D.-granting political science departments.The authors would like to thank Russell Dalton, Lee Sigelman, and the anonymous reviewers of PS for their helpful feedback and corrections. We are also indebted to the bibliographic assistance of Clover Behrend-Gethard and to the inspiration of Joe Tanenhaus' pioneering work. Any errors presented in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors welcome corrections to the data that is presented in this series. Comments and corrections can be sent to [email protected].

This symposium presents 13 articles forecasting the 2012 US national elections. Included in this collection are the eight national and one state presidential vote forecasting models published in PS: Political Science & Politics during the 2008 elections along with three additional forecasts and one article offering a composite of the forecasts. Although the focus remains on the presidential contest, as in past years, several articles extend their scope to cover the congressional elections as well.

According to the Bread and Peace Model postwar, American presidential elections should be interpreted as a sequence of referendums on the incumbent party's record during its four-year mandate period. In fact postwar aggregate votes for president are well explained by just two objectively measured fundamental determinants: (1) weighted-average growth of per capita real disposable personal income over the term, and (2) cumulative US military fatalities due to unprovoked, hostile deployments of American armed forces in foreign wars. No other outside variable systematically affects postwar aggregate votes for president.

“Nor should we omit in our study [of public administration] the problem of legislative-administrative relations, in view of the increasing role of the public servant in the determination of policy, through either the preparation of legislation or the making of rules under which general legislative policy is given meaning and application” (Gaus 1931, 123).

In the title of his 1993 Gaus Award Lecture, Francis Rourke posed the deceptively simple question, “Whose Bureaucracy Is This, Anyway?” His subtitle was “Congress, the President, and Public Administration.” Rourke, a pioneer in the field of bureaucratic politics, concluded that federal administration was constitutionally and politically under the “joint custody” of Congress and the president. Clearly, Congress has formidable constitutional authority and responsibility for the structure and operation of the executive branch. A great deal of political science research demonstrates that the legislature and its committees are a major political force in federal administration. Even as the older “iron triangle” model gives way to newer approaches, no one (other than misguided reformers) could reasonably answer Rourke's question and exclude Congress. Its oversight, influence, and intervention in agency operations on behalf of policy objectives and incumbency are central features of contemporary federal administration.

For this occasion, I decided to tackle a topic of, I hope, some historical and theoretical interest, of current policy importance and one that might have interested James Madison.I would like to thank Alan Gerber and Eric Schickler for their help on this work. A useful clarifying point came from Morris Fiorina. Matthew Glassman helped with the references. That topic is supermajority rule in the U.S. Senate—that is, the need to win more than a simple majority of senators to pass laws. Great checker and balancer though Madison was, this feature of American institutional life would probably have surprised him and might have distressed him.

Popular music is ubiquitous in the lives of our students, music is used by politicians at virtually every one of their campaign events, and musicians are increasingly active in politics, but music has never been considered as a pedagogical tool in teaching political science classes. This article describes the use of music in an introduction to American politics class. I argue that playing music in class can increase student interest, reinforce important concepts, and actively engage the students in the learning process. Finally, using popular culture connects meaningfully with the way that many of our undergraduate students are experiencing politics.

From PowerPoint presentations to web-based quizzes to entire classes taught online, technological changes have had a strong influence on pedagogical practices. The initial research into the pedagogical effectiveness of these emerging technologies suggests there are many ways in which they might be useful (Boschmann 1995; Hiltz 1994; Palloff and Pratt 2001). In this paper, we examine student participation on a structured online discussion group that spanned three universities and address two research questions: what explains student participation in online discussion groups and how effective are these groups as pedagogical tools? To address these topics, we draw upon our use of online discussions as a class assignment during the fall semester of 2000. First, we examine previous research and generate several expectations about student behavior and attitudes.

Introduction

John Pike, former director of space policy at the Federation of American Scientists, once said to me: “Everything there is to know about nuclear strategy can be learned from Dr. Strangelove.” “Everything” is only a mild overstatement. I show Dr. Strangelove annually to Notre Dame audiences to teach about nuclear war, and I will continue to do so until nuclear weapons and war itself are no longer problems. The film offers lessons about war, politics, and history and can serve as a teaching aid for classes in introductory international relations, foreign policy, defense policy, causes of war, organizational politics, and Cold War history.Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worying and Love the Bomb, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern. Produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Based on the book by Peter Bryant (a pseudonym for Peter George), Red Alert (New York: Ace Books, 1958). The British title for Red Alert was Two Hours to Doom. The book based on the screenplay is: Peter George, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (New York: Bantam Books, 1963. Published January, 1964). The film was scheduled for release on December 12, 1963, but was not shown until January 1964 due to President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. Ed. note: when talking about Dr. Strangelove, the film, the title is italicized. The character Dr. Strangelove is not italicized. A longer version of this guide is available via: <www.nd.edu/~dlindley/>.

A common complaint from political scientists involved in the study of religion is that religious issues have been largely overlooked by political science. Through a content analysis of leading political science and sociology journals from 2000 to 2010, this article considers the extent of this claim. The results show that political science publications involving religious topics have been significantly fewer than those engaging with subjects typically regarded as being more central to the discipline, and markedly less numerous than religious articles in leading sociology publications. Where political science publications have engaged with religious issues, these articles have also focused on a limited number of subject areas and been concentrated in specific disciplinary subfields. The proportion of articles covering religion has shown no real increase since the turn of the century. These findings underpin calls for political scientists to take religious issues more seriously.

Examiners of dissertations regularly have to endure “literature reviews” that consist of extended lists of mini-summaries of books. Indeed, quite often “dissertations” amount to little more than a list of book-summaries masquerading as an argument. While there are excellent courses on qualitative and quantitative methods, most students have learnt how to conduct literature reviews exclusively through the method of learning by doing. Ultimately, there is no alternative to this age-old method. However, this essay is premised on the belief that a brief attempt to understand the general function of a literature review in political science should make learning by doing easier and more productive.

Previous research has documented how political scientists evaluate and rank scholarly journals, but the evaluation and ranking of scholarly book publishers has drawn less attention. In this article, we use data from a survey of 603 American political scientists to generate a ranking of scholarly publishers in political science. We used open-ended questions to ask respondents to identify those scholarly publishers (1) to which they would submit “a very strong book manuscript” in their area of expertise, and (2) that they “read regularly or otherwise rely for the best research” in their area of expertise. Based on these results, we created rankings of scholarly presses based on publication and reading preferences. We find that certain high-profile university presses constitute a clear first tier in American political scientists' preference orderings, followed by a mix of university and commercial presses that represent the second tier and beyond. Moreover, we confirm the validity of our approach by comparing the results of our rankings (based on open-ended questions) with results from previous research based on respondents' evaluations and derived from close-ended lists of scholarly presses. Our results demonstrate that the rankings of scholarly publishers are similar for both approaches. These rankings can be used to guide political scientists as they decide where to send their best book-length work.

Engaging students in the design, administration, and postelection analysis of an exit poll can be an excellent experiential learning activity. Lelieveldt and Rossen (2009) argue that exit polls are a “perfect teaching tool” because they provide students with a cooperative (rather than competitive) learning experience; help students better connect theory, methodology, and course substance; and allow students to move outside of the classroom by branching out into the community. As professors at the University of Colorado, Denver (UCD), we have organized student exit polling during the 2008 and 2010 elections in the Denver area for research methods and elections classes. Although we have found these exit polls to be rewarding experiences for instructors and students alike, the reality is that conducting an exit poll with a group of polling neophytes, in the confines of a single semester, can be challenging. In this article, we discuss strategies and issues for instructors to consider when using an exit poll as an experiential learning exercise.

To allow researchers to investigate not only whether a paper’s methods are theoretically sound but also whether they have been properly implemented and are robust to alternative specifications, it is necessary that published papers be accompanied by their underlying data and code. This article describes experiences and lessons learned at the Quarterly Journal of Political Science since it began requiring authors to provide this type of replication code in 2005. It finds that of the 24 empirical papers subjected to in-house replication review since September 2012, only four packages did not require any modifications. Most troubling, 14 packages (58%) had results in the paper that differed from those generated by the author’s own code. Based on these experiences, this article presents a set of guidelines for authors and journals for improving the reliability and usability of replication packages.