Political science as a discipline lacks any convention on the order in which authors should be listed in co-authored publications. As a result, the order of authors' surnames currently provides no information to other scholars, hiring and promotion committees, and other reviewers about the relative contributions of each collaborator. This lack of information impedes the allocation of proper credit for scholarly contributions. Moreover, in collaborations between junior and senior colleagues, or other asymmetric status hierarchies, the absence of both information and any convention tends to favor more established scholars; this makes it more difficult for graduate students, untenured professors, and other vulnerable co-authors to negotiate for and receive appropriate credit. Listing authors by relative contribution is both more informative and fair. In publications where one author provides the necessary research funding, or a faculty member is not only a co-author but also a dissertation or other academic advisor, it is also appropriate to designate that collaborator as “last” or “senior author.” In all cases, articles should carry a short statement indicating the division of labor between the co-authors, even or especially if the contributions are equal.

As James Madison would not hesitate to tell us, the scale of a polity or jurisdiction is one of the most basic factors organizing political life. By scale, I refer to the number of inhabitants (or, alternately, constituents or voters) in a political unit, although geographic size may also shape political behavior. Large jurisdictional scale implies that candidates for office must campaign in larger constituencies, necessitating more use of paid media, more fundraising effort, and professional campaign advice. To residents of large-scale polities, government often seems distant, remote, and bureaucratic, and the intercession of interest groups, lobbyists, or organized protest activity may be more necessary to access or influence public officials. In these and other ways, the incentives, constraints, and opportunities facing politicians and citizens alike tend to differ systematically depending on a jurisdiction's scale.

It is clear from the presidential primary campaign that 2008 can legitimately be labeled “the year of the spouse as surrogate.” The sheer number of candidates on both sides of the aisle and the heavily front-loaded campaign season have made using the wives—and husband—of the candidates a “must.” Never before has media attention been so heavily focused on the spouses. In fact, they have often been an equal, or in some cases, bigger story than the candidates themselves. The same pattern will characterize the spouses of the vice presidential candidates. The bottom line is that use of presidential and vice presidential spouses has become an integral part of presidential campaigns. In this article, we detail how the Bush and Kerry camps strategically scheduled spouses in the final days of the campaign—from Labor Day until Election Day. We conclude with some thoughts about what to expect in 2008.

Although collaborative research has become much more common in the social sciences, including political science, little is known about the consequences of collaboration. This article uses papers submitted to the American Political Science Review to assess whether the widely acknowledged benefits of collaboration produced papers that were more likely to be accepted for publication. The results indicate that collaboration per se made little or no difference, but that the disciplinary configuration of the authors did result in differences in the success of these submissions.

Political science takes pride in objective and methodologically rigorous research. This should be reflected in a clear and concise writing style that convinces readers by the content of the research, not by the language used to report about it. This article demonstrates that this is true but only to a limited extent. It shows that—similar to recent findings from natural-sciences research—the frequency of positive words that political scientists use to describe their research has increased markedly in recent decades. At the same time, however, the magnitude of this increase is much less pronounced. The article discusses and analyzes potential explanations for this trend. We suspect that it can be attributed at least partly to changing norms in the discipline, in which research framed in a positive way is more likely to be published.

This symposium presents seven presidential election forecasting models and their predictions of the popular two-party vote in the 2004 election. The modern age of election forecasting is now into its third decade. Models have been tested quite publicly in the heat of battle—with some doing well, others not quite so well, and still others making way for new models. In this introduction, I provide a brief overview of the models, a summary of this year's forecasts, and some thoughts about how the forecasts should be judged.

Online surveys of public opinion are less expensive and faster to administer than other surveys. However, nonprobability online samples diverge from the gold standard of probabilistic sampling. Although scholars have examined the quality of nonprobability samples in the United States and Europe, we know little about how these samples perform in developing contexts. We use nine online surveys fielded in six Latin American countries to examine the bias in these samples. We also ask whether two common tools that researchers use to mitigate sample bias—post-stratification and sample matching—improve these online samples. We find that online samples in the region exhibit high levels of bias, even in countries where Internet access is widespread. We also find that post-stratification does little to improve sample quality; sample matching outperforms the provider’s standard approach, but the gains are substantively small. This is partly because unequal Internet access and lack of investment in panel recruitment means that providers are unlikely to have enough panelists in lower socioeconomic categories to draw representative online samples, regardless of the sampling method. Researchers who want to draw conclusions about the attitudes or behaviors of the public as a whole in contexts like Latin America still need probability samples.

How does the structure of the peer review process, which can vary among journals, influence the quality of papers published in a journal? This article studies multiple systems of peer review using computational simulation. I find that, under any of the systems I study, a majority of accepted papers are evaluated by an average reader as not meeting the standards of the journal. Moreover, all systems allow random chance to play a strong role in the acceptance decision. Heterogeneous reviewer and reader standards for scientific quality drive both results. A peer review system with an active editor—that is, one who uses desk rejection before review and does not rely strictly on reviewer votes to make decisions—can mitigate some of these effects.

Fieldwork advice has increased and improved over the years. Yet, thebulk of political science fieldwork advice is general; it assumesthat the subject to whom advice is given is simply a politicalscientist—in training, perhaps—with no other salient identities thatmight intercede (but see Mazzei and O'Brien 2005 and the PS 2006fieldwork symposium, The Methodologies of Field Research in theMiddle East, for recent exceptions). Of course in reality it is notjust the fieldwork setting that varies; the relationship of theresearcher to the field matters a great deal—and that may be muchmore dependent on our specific identities than we have previouslycredited. It is not simply the subjects that we study, but us aswell who have to negotiate sometimes sticky issues of race, class,gender, nationality, and so forth.

Data access and research transparency (DA-RT) is a growing concern for the discipline. Technological advances have greatly reduced the cost of sharing data, enabling full replication archives consisting of data and code to be shared on individual websites, as well as journal archives and institutional data repositories. But how do we ensure that scholars take advantage of these resources to share their replication archives? Moreover, are the costs of research transparency borne by individuals or by journals? This article assesses the impact of journal replication policies on data availability and finds that articles published in journals with mandatory provision policies are 24 times more likely to have replication materials available than articles those with no requirements.

Recent studies identified gendered citation gaps in political science journal articles, with male scholars being less likely to cite work by female scholars in comparison to their female peers. Although journal editors, editorial boards, and political scientists are becoming more aware of implicit biases and adopting strategies to remedy them, we know less about the proper baselines for citations in subfields and research areas of political science. Without information about how many women should be cited in a research field, it is difficult to know whether the distribution is biased. Using the gender distribution of membership in professional political science organizations and article authors in 38 political science journals, we provide scholars with suggested minimum baselines for gender representation in citations. We also show that women represent a larger share of organization members than the authors in sponsoring organizations’ journals.

Scholarly publication in peer-reviewed journals is widely regarded as the road to scholarly success. However, in a diversity of fields such as sociology, economics, and political science, it has been shown that the rate of publication is much lower for women than for men. The question of whether a systematic relationship exists between gender and research methods has also frequently been debated. In this paper, we explore patterns of authorship and scholarship in two influential interdisciplinary journals, Political Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics, over the last decade. A systematic content analysis was conducted to determine the gender ratio of authors, the methods and theories employed, and the ratio of quantitative to qualitative research studies. In addition, we tracked the use of primary or secondary data sources and the prevalence of research funding by gender. Overall, we find that while women are publishing less than men, their rate of publication is somewhat higher than their representation in the field.

The New Research on Gender in Political Psychology Conference brought together new and experienced teachers with interests in gender politics. The conference session “Teaching Gender throughout the Curriculum” generated a great deal of discussion concerning the pedagogical practice of gender mainstreaming. Gender mainstreaming—the integration of gendered content into courses required for a major—was recognized as one of 11 recommendations for reforming the undergraduate political science curriculum in the 1991 APSA report “Liberal Learning an The Political Science Major: A Report to the Profession” (popularly referred to as the Wahlke Report). Little information is available on the prevalence of gender courses in the undergraduate curriculum, but the data that does exist suggest such courses are uncommon (Brandes et al. 2001). We found virtually no data on the practice of gender mainstreaming in political science and little data in the way of assessing the impact of gendered content when students are exposed to it. This absence of data suggests gender mainstreaming has not emerged as a serious priority for curricular reform.

The American economy and financial system is experiencing upheaval ona scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. A numberof the largest and most established banks and investment firms havedeclared bankruptcy (including Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers) orbeen taken over at fire-sale rates (as was the case, for example,with Merrill Lynch). In the fall of 2008, Congress and the U.S.Treasury along with the Federal Reserve Bank committed more thaneight trillion dollars in payments, loans, and guarantees of varioussorts to prop up financial institutions (including thesemi-governmental mortgage entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) aswell as the country's largest insurer, American International Group(AIG). The speed, number, and scope of these interventions lackhistorical precedent.