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.

Presidential candidates frequently tout their political experience on the campaign trail, telling voters that it has prepared them to deal with complex problems, make weighty decisions, and show leadership. The value of that argument was put to the test in the 2008 presidential campaign by Hillary Clinton against her opponent, Barack Obama. This paper uses a multilevel model to analyze the value of national and state political experience on overall presidential greatness, as judged by seven surveys of academic experts. Overall, there is no evidence that political experience improves the likelihood of strong presidential performance, and even some weak evidence that political experience in certain political positions, most notably mayor and member of Congress, leads to poorer performance. In the end, great presidents are not great simply because they have spent their lives in politics and learned important lessons. Other personal and historical factors are likely to be more important.

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.

Doctoral students in political science are understandably concerned with job placement. Most students enter graduate school with an eye to academia and want to know what they must do to secure their ideal academic position. Faculty members readily offer guidance on how to increase students' likelihood of obtaining an academic job. And PS has published many articles that focus on this topic, ranging from empirical descriptions of the job market to personal accounts of job-hunting experiences. Unfortunately, graduate students often receive anecdotal or contradictory advice. To help rectify this, we undertook a more systematic examination of the qualities department hiring committees seek when granting interviews to job applicants.The authors would like to thank John Coleman, Katherine Cramer Walsh, Charles Franklin, the anonymous reviewers at PS, and the survey respondents.

College teachers are increasingly using instructional technology to supplement or substitute for face-to-face instruction. The incentives and arguments for doing so are many, including facilitation of higher education for non-traditional students and changing student demographics, skill building to improve student preparation for workplaces that are likely to use computer technology, space restrictions in universities with growing enrollment, the opportunities that Internet classrooms provide for organizing and monitoring student work and assignments, and so on. However, little is known about how online instruction affects the learner. Online instruction is, in many ways, fundamentally different from face-to-face instruction (see, for example, Lee 2003; McCormack and Jones 1998; Palloff and Pratt 1999). For instance, instructors are unlikely to simply post their lecture notes online in the hope that the students will read, take notes, memorize, and retain the information, which would be the closest equivalent to a traditional lecture classroom. Consequently, it cannot be assumed that different instructional modes (such as lectures or online instruction) necessarily have the same learner outcomes. This lack of knowledge concerning the effects of online instruction on learner outcomes also extends to the question of gender equality.Authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order. We gratefully acknowledge financial support for both the redesign and the evaluation of the course from the Pew Learning and Technology Program, Center for Academic Transformation, Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign.

This article draws upon my experience using film and literature to teach political science majors and non-majors about war. It assesses the value of using films and literature to teach about war, offers organizing themes and approaches to the material, and discusses ways to help students develop their capacities to analyze the politics of war and of cultural products concerning war.The author thanks Joseph Yenerall for suggesting this article, and Judith Sanders, Lawrence Lieberfeld, and the reviewers of PS for help in its preparation.

October 2, 2008, the New York Times presidential campaign coverage carried the headline “Poll Finds Obama Gaining Support and McCain Weakened in Bailout Crisis.” Similarly, the headline on October 21 read “Obama Appeal Rises in Poll; No Gains for McCain Ticket.” The 2008 presidential election, more so than any previous campaign, was presented as a horse race between senators Barack Obama and John McCain. In the midst of president George W. Bush's plummeting approval ratings, a growing discontent among the American people about the continued U.S. presence in Iraq, and the largest economic recession since the Great Depression, the media did not cast the election as a debate about issues. Rather, the 2008 election was about the candidates' relative positioning, how they got there, and what strategies they would employ to secure victory.

Charges are frequently leveled that the peer-review system is broken, and reviewers are overburdened with requests. But this specific charge has been made in the absence of data about the actual reviewing loads of political scientists. I report the results of a recent survey asking a random sample of about 600 APSA members with PhDs what their reviewing loads are like and what their beliefs are about the value of peer reviewing to them and others. Article reviewing loads correspond to rank, institution, and scholarly productivity in predictable ways. At PhD-granting institutions, assistant professors averaged 5.5, associate professors averaged 7.0, and full professors averaged 8.3 in the past year; everyone else averaged just under 3 reviews a year. To recognize the value we place on peer reviewing, we need a system that collects data on who reviews and presents them in a format usable by scholars and their relevant evaluation bodies.

This article explores how results from Iowa may affect outcomes in subsequent nomination contests. We suggest that how Iowa matters may be determined, at least in part, by how voters and the news media assess whether or not candidates meet or exceed expectations there.

Identifying voters who share policy positions with the candidates has become an important component of modern political campaigns as they rely on microtargeted estimates to guide targeting decisions. Using survey data and microtargeted estimates from the 2012 election, I conduct one of the first independent examinations of the accuracy of microtargeting. The estimates are the most accurate in Florida, a state that requests information on the race of voters when they register and has party registration. The estimates are less accurate in the other battleground states that do not collect as much information. The accuracy rates range from 36% to 82% depending on the issue and state.

On March 20, 1986 many South Florida Hispanics were disappointed yet politically emboldened by the result of a close U.S. House vote on President Reagan's Nicaraguan Contra aid bill. Although the proposal was defeated in a 222–210 vote, the outcome was viewed locally as a Latin victory because Miami's moderately liberal Democratic delegation broke ranks with House leadership by voting three to one in support of the President's proposal. It is apparent that pressure felt from Miami's Cuban and Nicaraguan exile communities, as well as from the Florida Commission on Hispanic Affairs and the Cuban-American National Foundation, was decisive in compelling locally elected Democratic House members to support the President over their party.

Two days after the vote, 200 protestors gathered in downtown Miami in a demonstration against Contra aid. Alpha 66, a militant anti-Castro organization, called a counter-demonstration attended by about 2,000 angry Hispanics who threw eggs, rocks, and insults at the smaller group of protestors. Miami riot police escorted the anti-Contra demonstrators away from the scene in buses in order to prevent their injury. The fractious counter-demonstration was broadcast live by a Spanish language radio station and was attended by several local and state officials, including the three Cuban-Americans who constitute a majority on the five-member Miami City Commission. These events underscore an increasingly visible phenomenon in Miami's volatile politics.

Throughout the past two decades, the number of women in elected politics has been increasing slowly, but incrementally. Women remain most underrepresented at the national level, with little prospects of parity in the near future (Whicker et al. 1993). By 1992, women held only 30 or 5.6% of the 535 seats in the 102nd Congress, 28 in the House and two in the Senate (CAWP 1992). Much media focus on increased activism and advances caused the 1992 elections to be labeled in the press as “The Year of the Woman.” Indeed, the number of female members of Congress did jump to 54 or 10.1%, not quite doubling (47 in the House and seven in the Senate) (Krauss 1992), but substantial percentage gains in the number of seats held by women obscured the fact that women remained underrepresented relative to their proportions in the population by over 40%.

At the state level, the number of women is larger, but still proportionately less than their share of approximately 50% of the population. In 1991, women were still only 18.3% of all state legislators, but nationwide, their numbers had increased from 344 in 1971 to 908 in 1981, to 1365 in 1991. The numbers of women in state legislatures, then, have been increasing incrementally, if slowly (Dodson and Carroll 1991). Incremental growth in women attaining state legislative office continued in the 1992 elections. For the 1993 session, the total number of women members was 1517 (20.4%), of which 338 were state senators (17%), and 1179 were state representatives (21.7%) (CAWP).

The cartoon, comic, or—as influential cartoonist Will Eisner called it—“sequential art” is an art-form that is cognitively friendly to contemporary notions of individualistic-liberal-democracy. Whereas traditional forms of art have rather hierarchical standards of aesthetics, which then enforce customary notions of power and the conventional hermeneutic pecking order, the iconography of comics and cartoons is supportive of a kind of pluralistic democratic individualism. If, as some thinkers suggest, the world is understood by cognitive images in the brain, then—as the work of C. S. Pierce, Scott McCloud, and others support—comics is an art that allows for the individual self-creation that subsequently supports democracy.

This article describes a local government budgeting simulation developed by the author and used in an undergraduate course on the politics and administration of local government budgets. The exercise allowed students to participate in a simulated budget process that provided them with firsthand experience in allocating scarce resources, making collective decisions, and considering the political implications of budget alternatives. The simulation activities also provided students with opportunities to practice their written and oral communication skills, as well as experience in developing arguments to support particular revenue or spending proposals.

It is easy enough to rattle off numerous categories of social identities long of interest to political behavior scholars—race, sex, state or nation, party, ideology, social class, etc. But, a precise definition and measurement strategy for examining these identities is more elusive. This article discusses the conceptual foundations of a recently developed approach to measuring identity and focuses on its specific application as a new measure of partisanship in the United States.

Should we trust the results of our statistical computations? Closely following the development of the mainframe computer, Longley (1967) criticized the accuracy of the first regression programs. Approximately every 10 years thereafter, similar comments echoed for each new generation of statistical software. In a recent criticism, McCullough and Vinod (1999) argue that commonly used statistical packages may give “horrendously inaccurate” results, which have gone largely unnoticed (635–37). Moreover, they argue that in consequence of these inaccuracies, past inferences are in question, and future work must document and archive statistical software alongside statistical models (660–62). When political scientists discuss accuracy in computer-intensive quantitative analysis, however, we are relatively sanguine. Numerical accuracy is almost never discussed in articles or even in textbooks geared toward the most sophisticated and computationally intensive techniques (e.g., King 1989; Mooney 1997). Notable exceptions are a forthcoming APSR controversy that depends on the meaning and evaluation of numerical accuracy in ecological inference (King 2001; Tam Cho and Gaines 2001) and a study of numerical accuracy issues in replication (Altman and McDonald 2001).