Traditional writing assignments only teach students to write for academic settings. Assigning students policy briefs and policy memos gives them the opportunity to practice the type of writing they will perform both inside and outside of academia while still developing critical thinking skills and an understanding of the political world. Including policy-style writing assignments in the curriculum teaches undergraduates the skills demanded by their future employers, helps future academics learn how to write grant and conference proposals, offers students practice at the highest levels of Bloom's taxonomy of learning, hones synthesis and analysis, teaches students to be client-oriented, and makes students more effective citizens.

In recent years, the relationship between foreign military occupation and the increased likelihood of violent insurgency and terrorism has been asserted (Pape 2005) but is far from proven. The actual micro-level dynamics that make the correlation between the two sufficient to warrant extended discussion is even less understood and has led a variety of researchers to examine the micro-level foundations of how the presence of foreign military personnel might exacerbate conflict or provide motivation for the local population to mobilize against the foreign troops in their midst (e.g., Downes 2008; Edelstein 2008)

Experiential learning is a growing practice in higher education today. Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs use experiential learning to expose students to application and reinforcement of academic theories and concepts. This most often is accomplished through a required internship. This article argues for the addition of service learning requirements to MPA curricula. A complementary relationship between internship and service learning requirements yields four primary benefits: (1) further involvement of pre-service and in-service students in experiential-learning activities; (2) additional exposure to real-life application of course concepts; (3) better and more targeted classroom reinforcement mechanisms; and (4) additional community benefit. Complementarity between internship and service learning requirements allows the best of each experiential-learning approach to augment the other. We contend that this produces better-prepared MPA graduates by exposing them to a more diverse set of immersive learning opportunities and application scenarios.

Government policymakers rarely consult with academic experts before formulating policy positions. When policymakers do seek out academics, they are often attempting to justify a position they already hold, not searching for objective analysis. Academics could add much to the policy debate if they were more meaningfully engaged in the discussion.

The study of women and politics in the media is a relatively young subfield, blessed with scholarship from the fields of communications, cultural studies, history, sociology and political science. Members of these fields use methodologies—such as semiotics, qualitative analysis, and quantitative content analysis—to examine the content of communication about women and politics in news and advertising. Studies of the impact of messages use polls, experiments, and focus groups. Scholars draw primarily upon theories of framing (Entman 1993), hegemony (Gramsci 1971), and organizational structures (Epstein 1973; Sigal 1973) to explain why news content looks the way it does. Although most research focuses on content rather than causes and consequences, some studies are putting the pieces together to explain how efforts of groups and individuals influence coverage of women and politics and how audiences react to those messages.

This article describes teaching a course called Harry Potter and Politics. Focusing on aspects of political culture, the class tackled themes of identity, institutional behavior, and globalization. Teaching Harry Potter has several benefits. Students are both familiar with the wizarding world and yet have enough distance to examine it dispassionately. The book is driven by ethnic conflict, political power struggles, and dysfunctional bureaucracies. Finally, there is an academic literature on the books. Beyond Harry Potter, teaching politics through popular culture is not only natural for addressing political culture, but taps into the ways undergraduates are increasingly experiencing politics.

Surveys indicate that there is more interest today in politics among college students than has been the case in the recent past. This article describes a multidisciplinary freshman seminar aimed at using that interest to promote student engagement and the Reacting to the Past simulations at the course's center.

Transparency of research is a large concern in political science, and the practice of publishing links to datasets and other online resources is one of the main methods by which political scientists promote transparency. But the method cannot work if the links don’t, and very often, they don’t. We show that most of the URLs ever published in the American Political Science Review no longer work as intended. The problem is severe in recent as well as in older articles; for example, more than one-fourth of links published in the APSR in 2013 were broken by the end of 2014. We conclude that “reference rot” limits the transparency and reproducibility of political science research. We also describe practices that scholars can adopt to combat the problem: when possible, they should archive data in trustworthy repositories, use links that incorporate persistent digital identifiers, and create archival versions of the webpages to which they link.

Since the 1980s, the question of citizenship has taken root as a major theme in the social sciences and as the focus of juridical, political, social, and cultural debates in all democratic societies. In Europe, citizenship has taken different shapes and definitions in its rhetoric, ideology, and practice with regard to immigrants; incorporation into nation-states and their expansion of political participation beyond boundaries relating to home and host country to include a broad European space. Citizenship is also an issue for European construction itself. Within nation-states citizenship has been expressed in different domains extending from the national community to the civil society, even though only “legal” citizenship allows the full participation of individuals and groups in the political community. At the European level, despite the transnational participation of immigrants encouraged by the very nature of the European Union and its supranational institutions and de facto expansion of dual citizenship, the claim for equal recognition as citizens that underlies the political strategies of immigrants remains within the framework of the legitimacy of the state of residence and citizenship.

Much attention has been centered on the use of emerging technologies in higher education, including flipped classes. However, widespread admiration for and adoption of these innovations seems to be occurring at a much faster pace than the assessment and evaluation of them. Questions about student performance in and perception of flipped classes remain unanswered, so more research is needed. This study examines student perceptions of a partially flipped Introduction to American Politics course. In general, the results indicate that students preferred the partially flipped format, although (1) it is not clear that students would prefer a fully flipped course, and (2) some aspects of the flipped format worked better than others.

Amidst changing voter preferences and unexpected volatility in candidate fortunes, the 1984 contest for the Democratic presidential nomination contained at least one constant. From Iowa and New Hampshire through “Super Tuesday” and the middle round in big industrial states to the early June finale, voter preferences among the major contenders for the Democratic nomination diverged sharply by age.

Gary Hart enjoyed his greatest support among young voters, while Walter Mondale's strength was drawn from older voters, especially those over 65. The appeal of Jesse Jackson varied by age as well. Young blacks flocked to the Jackson banner. Older blacks, perhaps no less excited by the presence of an attractive black candidate for president, were more reluctant to follow, giving a greater share of their vote than did young blacks to Walter Mondale. Not since the protest candidacies of McCarthy and Kennedy in 1968 or the more successful insurgency of McGovern in 1972 has so much attention been paid to the contrasting responses of Americans of different ages to candidates for the presidency.

Popular accounts of the relationship of age to presidential choice in 1984 have treated these differences as indicative of generational conflict. The epicenter of the Hart constituency is located in the “Vietnam” or “baby boom” generation, while Mondale's generational home base has been placed among voters who came of age politically during the New Deal. The implication is that Mondale represented vestiges of the old Democratic New Deal coalition, whereas Hart was the candidate of Americans for whom the New Deal is only an historical footnote. Simply put, the 1984 Democratic battle commonly has been described as pitting the old coalition against the new ideas.

This article reports the results of a 2008 national survey of political theorists. The results, based on 1,086 responses from professors at accredited, four-year colleges and universities in the United States, provide information about the demographic characteristics of political theorists, opinion data on the place of political theory within political science, the proportion of political theorists in political science departments, teaching loads, expectations for tenure, the experience of political theorists on the academic job market, and, finally, rankings of theorists, journals, publishers, professional organizations, and Ph.D. programs.

Instant-response technologies, or clickers, are student response devices that help address some of the challenges involved in teaching large classes, namely student motivation and engagement with the material. This article evaluates a diverse set of teaching and learning strategies enabled by clicker technology and their impact on student learning. We highlight five aspects of teaching that are enhanced by the use of clickers, describe an experiment comparing student performance in traditional and clicker lectures, and report results of a survey of student perception about the effects of this technology on motivation, learning, and engagement. We argue that while the use of clickers is time-consuming for the instructor and presents a steep learning curve, clickers improve teaching effectiveness in large classes and hold promise for increasing student learning.

This study analyzes the important role state political culture played in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Donald Trump appealed to demographically distinct types of voters in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries and caucuses that varied considerably from previous Republican presidential nominees. Relative to the demographics of the primary electorates, however, this study finds that state political culture played an outsized role in determining Donald Trump’s relative level of support in a particular state. When state demographics are utilized in ordinary least squares regression models as independent variables with state partisanship and Daniel Elazar’s state political culture typology, political culture proves to be a significant determinant of the level of support given to Trump in a state. States that are characterized by a more moralistic political culture are considerably more likely to have given Trump a lower share of the vote while voters in states that are characterized by a more traditionalistic or individualistic culture were more likely to support Trump.

Innovative teachers of political science have frequently moved beyond the confines of conventional teaching formats to better engage students with the demands of the discipline. In particular, the use of simulations has been proposed as an alternative to passive, lecture-based techniques, and a growing literature examines their value and efficacy. This article contributes to the literature by describing the development of a simulation that draws on the principles of immersive theater in an attempt to maximize participation while encouraging students to think critically about political concepts and ideas.