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.

Political science, as a discipline, is a relative newcomer to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). We examine authorship patterns of SoTL articles in PS: Political Science & Politics, the Journal of Political Science Education, and International Studies Perspectives from 1998–2008. Our findings indicate more collaborative SoTL articles compared to non-SoTL teaching articles. Authorship patterns reveal a relatively high presence of women, assistant professors, and authors housed in Ph.D. and BA departments for SoTL publications. We conclude that SoTL constitutes an important new field of inquiry in the discipline that is likely to become more prominent as a younger cohort of scholars matures.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposiumof presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summerleading up to the election. This article is an assessment of theaccuracy of their models.

In summer 2008, our Jobs Model forecast a Democratic presidentialcandidate two-party popular vote share of 56.6%, which would deliverthe incumbent party the biggest defeat of any post-World War IIcontest (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008). However, we argued, from our analysis ofdifferent experimental and observational evidence, that thisunprecedented victory would be prevented by racially intolerantvoters. We estimated the net racial cost of being a black candidateand corrected our overall forecast downward to 50.1% for BarackObama. The unparalleled economic crisis, initiated after the releaseof our summer forecasts, prompted a reconsideration; the uniqueshock to the economy was no ordinary campaign perturbation. Wecalculated that the ensuing boost to anti-incumbent economic votingwould add approximately two percentage points to the opposition;therefore, we issued a public revision of our forecast to 52.0 % forObama (Lewis-Beck 2008).We are pleased that this final forecast fell so close to the actualresult of 53.5%. Nevertheless, we contend the actual result shouldhave been much closer to our original forecast. Given the dismalstate of the polity and the economy prior to the election, the Obamavictory should have been much bigger, as we show below.

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.

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 voteforecasting models published in PS: Political Science &Politics during the 2008 elections along with three additional forecastsand one article offering a composite of the forecasts. Although the focus remains onthe presidential contest, as in past years, several articles extend their scope tocover the congressional elections as well.

According to the Bread and Peace Model postwar, American presidential electionsshould be interpreted as a sequence of referendums on the incumbent party's recordduring its four-year mandate period. In fact postwar aggregate votes for presidentare 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 ofAmerican armed forces in foreign wars. No other outside variable systematicallyaffects postwar aggregate votes for president.

Canada's June 28th, 2004, federal election was an exciting and, in several respects a surprising contest. One major surprise was the election campaign itself. Rather than being the predictable, boring event many commentators had anticipated, the campaign was a closely fought battle between a longtime governing party and a new opposition party that had been formed only six months before the election was called. A second surprise, at least for some observers, was turnout, with participation in a national election falling to the lowest level in Canadian history. A third, potentially very significant, surprise was the success of the separatist Bloc Québécois, accompanied by a resurgence of support for Quebec sovereignty. After the election, the future of Canada's national party system, indeed, the future of Canadian democracy, appeared more problematic than had been the case only a few months earlier.

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.

Textbooks are the most important pedagogical tools in higher education and they should convey sufficient and accurate information on minority groups and women in the United States. Yet textbooks tend to marginalize these groups in their depictions. This article examines the coverage of Asian Pacific Americans in twenty-eight American Government or Politics textbooks. Asian Pacific Americans have faced a unique history of exclusion, discrimination, and stereotyping. The content analysis of the textbooks reveals that textbooks do not fully cover their history and contributions to US politics, either measured by page numbers or by historical events and figures important to Asian Pacific Americans. To rectify this lack of coverage, this article concludes with five constructive recommendations, including an option to invite scholars on Asian Pacific American politics to serve as textbook reviewers and textbook coauthors.

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/>.

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.

“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.