Although research at other levels of elected office has shown that incumbency has a powerful, additive effect on votes (Hogan 2004; Jacobson 2009; Krebs 1998), these effects largely have been ignored in presidential forecasting models (but see Abramowitz 2008). Instead, some scholars speculate about the conditional effects of incumbency; specifically, the decreased applicability of the retrospective model when the president is not on the ticket leaving the somewhat-harder-to-blame-or-reward vice president to represent the administration. The difficult-to-predict 2000 presidential election generated some discussion on this point. Although I and others argued (Campbell 2001; Holbrook 2001; Wlezien 2001) that part of the explanation for the forecasting error in 2000 lies with Al Gore's failure to embrace the Bill Clinton-Al Gore record and reinforce retrospective voting, others indicate that the retrospective cue may generally be weaker when the president is not on the ticket (Campbell 2001; Lewis-Beck and Tien 2001; Nadeau and Lewis-Beck 2001). Indeed, Campbell (2001; 2008) argues in favor of only giving half weight to presidential performance variables when the vice president, rather than president, is representing the incumbent administration. The logic here is simple: absent the president on the ticket, it is more difficult to frame the election as a referendum, leading voters to attach less weight to incumbency-oriented considerations. This is not to say that factors such as presidential approval and economic performance are unimportant when incumbents do not run, only that these factors might matter less.

The publication of the latest rating of doctoral programs by the National Research Council (NRC 1995) has sparked great interest among university faculties. For some, the results vindicated years of focused efforts to improve their department's capacity, performance, and image. For others, it generated frustration because of the small change in scores from previous NRC rankings. And for still others, the NRC report occasioned soul-searching or defensive rationalization, including complaints that the reputational rankings did not reflect the “true” quality of the faculty (Magner 1995).

The NRC study conducted surveys of faculty in each of 41 scientific fields to learn about each doctoral-granting faculty's reputation for scholarly quality (93Q) and for the effectiveness of their doctoral program (93E). In addition, the NRC gathered information about the performance of departments (number of publications, citations to the publications of faculty, and external funding) as well as some other characteristics of the faculty (number of faculty, number of full professors) and doctoral student enrollments (number of students enrolled, number of Ph.D.'s granted in recent years). With these data, it is possible to explore the extent to which reputations are responsive to the performance of the faculty as well as to other department characteristics.

The number of radio stations airing political talk shows—predominantly conservative talk radio—has surged in the past few years. This massive change in the radio industry says something about the demand for such shows, but attributing the rise of talk radio to a corresponding rise in conservative popular opinion is misleading. We argue that this remarkable growth is better explained by the collision of two changes that have transformed the radio business: deregulation and the mainstreaming of digital music technologies. Regulatory changes have shifted much of radio production and control from local to mass production (managed by industry giants such as Clear Channel Communications) and created a context ripe for nationally syndicated hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Mark Levin. Meanwhile, rapid technological changes have given consumers more control over the way they listen to music. Technologies such as MP3 players, Internet radio, smart phones, and Pandora Radio have made it more difficult for stations with a music format to be profitable. As music programming has become more problematic, many stations have developed a highly successful business model by converting to talk formats airing nationally syndicated shows.

College professors are evaluated for promotion and tenure on the basis of their accomplishments in three areas: teaching, research, and service. All too often, however, service is considered the poor cousin of the trio. In political science in particular, we believe that this imbalance is detrimental to the individual scholar, our students, the discipline, and the general public. The goal of this symposium is to contribute to what we see as a nascent revitalization and rehabilitation of service—especially public service—as a respectable and integral part of a political science career. We encourage our colleagues to engage the political world more often, more directly, and more reflectively, and we encourage the profession—the APSA, our departments, and our colleagues—to value such engagement institutionally and through our social norms.

Almost a decade ago, historian Gary Okihiro asked “Is yellow black or white?” (Okihiro 1994). Although Okihiro argued for solidarity between nonwhite groups, he noted that yellow is neither black nor white: That dichotomous racial framework does not adequately represent Asian Americans. Similarly, a political framework that was developed when African Americans were overwhelmingly the nation's most numerous minority does not fully capture the politics of Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander ancestry. As recent waves of non-European immigrants have required a broader conception of what it means to be an American, they have also made it necessary for political scientists to develop an expanded notion of the scope of minority politics.The distinct Characteristics of Asian Pacific-American (APA) politics have led to the formation of Asian Pacific American Caucus (APAC), an APSA-related group. APAC helps to bring together political scientists and other scholars who study APA politics.

On television's Law and Order, the police catch criminals and hand them over to the lawyers to get convictions. Part of the program's dramatic tension comes from the police operating under the scrutiny of a rigid and unforgiving legal system. The suspense increases as the lawyers try to do their job even though there is often a gap between justice and what the law requires.

James Madison contributed much to political science and to the art and science of governing democratic regimes. A major contribution was his recognition of the multiple threats facing the newly established Confederation (see, e.g., Dougherty 2001). Madison was willing to invest heavily in converting these threats into new opportunities. In his “Preface to Debates in the Convention” ([1984] 1840, 19), Madison reflected on the causes for alarm.James Madison Award lecture presented at the American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., September 1, 2005. The author is appreciative of support from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Science Foundation and useful comments by Bill Blomquist, Eric Coleman, Sue Crawford, Joshua P. Hill, Marco Janssen, Robert Keohane, Mike McGinnis, Lesa B. Morrison, Amy Poteete, Mike Schoon, David Schwab, and Kenneth Shepsle on an initial draft of this paper. As always, I deeply appreciate Patty Lezotte's careful editing.

The purpose of the John Gaus Award and Lectureship is to recognize “scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration.” That tradition has a long and honorable history. Many of the presidents of the American Political Science Association were scholars of public administration (Frank J. Goodnow, Woodrow Wilson, W. W. Willoughby, Leonard White, Luther Gulick, Pendleton Herring, Emmette S. Redford, Carl J. Friedrich, James Q. Wilson, and Matthew Holden, Jr.) and several others made contributions to the literature (V. O. Key, Jr., Charles S. Hyneman, Robert A. Dahl, Aaron Wildavsky, and Elinor Ostrom). Yet a visitor from another planet studying political science and public administration might conclude that these tribes have evolved into two distinct species.Prepared for presentation as the John Gaus Distinguished Lecture, American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, September 1, 2006, Philadelphia. I would like to thank Paul Brace, George Krause, Alisa Hicklin, Larry O'Toole, Jim Rogers, and Michael Thies for their assistance.

After an exhausting 22-hour trip from St. Louis, I landed in Maputo, Mozambique, alone, for the first time in July 2003 to begin my dissertation research on women and women's organizations in Mozambique since democratization. I spent an hour talking to a young man who was returning home (to Maputo) from Brazil. Seeing it as an opportunity to practice my Portuguese with someone who spoke English, I did not realize that an hour had passed and my “welcoming party” still had not arrived. The young man and I switched from Portuguese to English as he began telling me the “cool places to hang out and get a drink” in Maputo. I had no idea who was coming to pick me up as I was armed only with the information that it was my in-country advisor's brother who would be there. As this young man and I were talking someone came up to me and asked, “Are you Frances?” With a sigh of relief, I said yes, and he replied, “I was here all of the time and I did not realize that you were here until I heard you speaking English with this young man. I did not recognize you; we thought you would be white.”

By any standard, the 2000 presidential election was close. It was close in the Electoral College, where Bush prevailed by the slimmest majority (271–266), and it was close in the national popular vote, where Gore edged Bush by about 540,000 votes in an electorate of more than 100 million. Needless to say, the 2000 election was also astonishingly close in individual states like Florida, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Oregon.

The Isle of Ted Simulation is a successful teaching tool that is disarmingly simple yet repeatedly captivates participants. Although I originally designed the simulation to explain collective-action problems in American politics, almost all recent uses of the simulation have been in international relations and international organization classes. The simulation is an effective teaching tool for a wide variety of issues including:

1. collective goods and free riders (e.g., Olson 1971)

2. international organizations versus international organization and global governance versus global government (e.g., Rosenau and Czempiel 1992)

3. regimes and the effects of transparency (e.g., Keohane 1982, 1984; Krasner 1982; Mitchell 1994; Young 1989, 1994)

4. relative and absolute gains (e.g., Grieco 1988)

5. constructivist approaches to international relations (e.g., Wendt 1992)

6. rational choice models of decision making (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita 2000; Lave and March 1993; Monroe 1991)

7. and how the shadow of the future can engender cooperation in the present (e.g, Axelrod 1984; Hardin 1982; Shubik 1970).

Which factors shorten or lengthen the survival of a scandal involving a chief executive? Using new data tracking scandals involving presidents and governors from 1972 to 2011, I chart the duration of each political, personal, and financial scandal faced by an elected official, their staff, or nominees. I specifically examine institutional, political, and economic factors to investigate what factors quicken a “negative” end to a scandal. National chief executives and their staff are more likely to survive a scandal when they have more partisans in the legislature but are less likely when there is greater political opposition, however there is no comparative effect at the state level. Positive economic growth and public approval have no effect on survival of a scandal at either the national or state levels. These findings clarify how the political environment shapes the duration of executive scandal.

As the 2006 midterm elections approached, pollsters, scholars, and journalists attempted to predict whether the Democrats would take back the House, Senate, or both. Much media attention was paid to President George W. Bush's declining popularity and the public's dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled Congress (see e.g., Cook 2006). With most attention paid to the immediate political dynamics of the campaign, less noticed (though not entirely neglected) was the fact that the Democrats faced a significant structural disadvantage in their effort to retake both houses of Congress. The Democrats faced an uphill battle to control the Senate simply due to the small number of seats that were seriously contested. Their hurdle to taking over the House was subtler but perhaps just as high: as we show here, they needed to win well over half the vote share in order to have an even chance of winning 50% of the seats, thereby overcoming a structural advantage enjoyed by Republicans leading up to Election Day.We thank Gary Jacobson and Walt Borges for generously sharing their data, Robert Erikson, Eduardo Leoni, Robert Shapiro, David Epstein, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and the National Science Foundation for financial support. Replication datasets and statistical code are available at www.columbia.edu/∼jpk2004/house2006.html.

In a world where citizens desire to have their preferences reflected in public policy and, for instrumental reasons, policy makers share that desire, the linkage of opinion to policy still faces formidable problems. Chief among these is this: policy making is highly specific, detailed, and informed, while mass electorates choose not to attend closely enough to politics and policy to have preferences that are similarly specific, detailed, and informed. We now believe that many citizens have meaningful preferences over the general contours of government activity. At the level of whether “government should do more to …” deal with any number of problems, we now see individual citizen preferences in a somewhat more favorable light than we once did. More important, we now view change in aggregate preferences over time as expressive of real beliefs and values about public choices.

But this is not enough. Policy makers face no choices as simple as “do more” or “do less.” They deal at a wholly different level. They deal at a level of specificity where public attitudes are only infrequently measured, and for good reason; mass publics in the main do not have (real) attitudes over details they cannot reasonably be expected to attend to. And yet each of those choices, complicated and specific though they are, will reflect some measure of movement at the more general level where citizen preferences are engaged. The daily choices of the C-SPAN world are obscure and arcane to typical citizens. And yet the actors in that world feel bound by citizen preferences.

In a sense, the study of comparative politics is the study of the role that context plays in structuring behavior. Institutional contexts, such as the nature of the electoral system or the existence of an independent judiciary, drive differences in electoral outcomes or human rights across nations. Individual-level contextual factors such as norms, culture, or ethnic or religious identity can be determinative in understanding when social movements will likely flourish and which cleavages will lead to political parties or ethnic strife. Variation in context leads to variation in political outcomes and behavior across both peoples and nations, and provides comparative politics with its richness.