At the 1980 APSA meeting in Washington, a group of approximately 25 political scientists and others, out of a much larger network of contributors and sympathizers, agreed to form an Association for Politics and the Life Sciences dedicated to the advancement of an integrated biosocial perspective in our discipline. Although this short article is intended primarily to announce that fact and detail plans for the immediate future, we feel that this might also be an appropriate occasion to review briefly the history and rationale behind this intellectual activity and describe some of the objectives of the Association.

The study of the relationship between biology and politics (sometimes called “biobehavioral political science” and sometimes also “biopolitics”) drew its initial impetus in the latter 1960s and early 1970s from emergent developments in a number of other disciplines, particularly (a) ethology (the naturalistic study of animal behavior and adaptation), (b) psychophysiology (specifically, efforts to correlate various physiological characteristics and “indicators” with various mental and behavioral states), (c) psychobiology (including neurological and endocrine influences on social behavior), (d) behavior genetics (involving both human and non-human animal research), (e) psychopharmacology (especially the chemical manipulation of behavioral states), (f) sociobiology (the application of modern Darwinian theory to the explanation of social behaviors), and (g) ecology (the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments, which gained visibility when the so-called “environmental crisis” erupted).

“Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?” This survey question, which appeared on the 2004 National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll, attracted as much controversy as any in recent years. More respondents chose “moral values” than any other issue. Among this 22% of respondents, 80% voted for President Bush. Initially, news reporters and pundits interpreted this finding as indicating that moral values played a decisive role in Bush's victory. The morning after the election, Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC program Hardball, suggested the election was “a referendum on values” (“Chris Matthews Gives his Assessment”). Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press, said that “People had an agenda. They put their moral values ahead of some of their economic interests” (“Analysis”). A reporter for the CBS Morning News concluded that “in the end, the number-one voter motivator [was] morality” (“Morality Proves Number One”).

In 1968 a wave of student protest manifested itself throughout the Western world. Fifteen years later, a phenomenon variously described as the “Yuppies” or “Yumpies” began to be noted in the United States; a new environmentalist party entered the West German Bundestag for the first time; and a peace movement emerged in Western Europe that was able to mobilize an even larger and more mature segment of the public than did the anti-war movements of the Vietnam era.

These seemingly dissimilar phenomena have something in common: they reflect a process of intergenerational value change that is gradually transforming the politics of Western societies. This process—a shift from Materialist to Postmaterialist value priorities—has brought new political issues to the center of the stage, and provided much of the impetus for new political movements. It has split existing political parties and given rise to new ones. And it raises serious doubts about the long-term viability of the Atlantic Alliance.

The rise of sustainability rhetoric, curriculum, infrastructure, and marketing on college campuses is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, college presidents are pledging to eliminate their campuses' global warming emissions; colleges and universities are building wind turbines, composters, and green buildings; and sustainability coordinators are the latest surge in new staff hires. However, the greening of college campuses has a less welcome side as well, and examination of the campus sustainability movement suggests an unsettling lack of theoretical and ideological analysis. In this article, I praise what is being done well, identify the political analysis that has been avoided, and provide arguments for what has yet to be addressed. I argue that the trend toward campus sustainability, while praiseworthy in some significant ways, has left some troubling theoretical assumptions largely undisturbed.

An unequal distribution of income and wealth is an inherent feature of all complex societies, and up to a point, a desirable one. A highly skewed distribution, however, raises questions of serious moral and practical concern: To what extent does socioeconomic inequality undermine the principle of political equality on which democratic societies are based? Under what conditions does it lead to lead to political polarization that retards economic growth or threatens the stability of democratic institutions? And under what circumstances do distributive struggles become the basis for violent social protest or rebellion?

Do our models of political behavior bear any resemblance to reality? Forecasting elections is one opportunity to assess whether our models of voting behavior are accurate. Over the past few decades, political scientists have been willing to put themselves out there to forecast elections. Explaining a past event allows us the ability to retrofit our models before we make them available to the broader community. In short, forecasting elections provides us the opportunity to develop humility. The forecasting community has done a reasonable job over the past few elections. Aside from 2000, forecasters have been largely accurate. Even in 2000, the forecasting community can claim a modest victory. The community was right about the popular vote winner; it just happened that the popular vote winner lost the election that counts—the Electoral College.

Early analyses of the 2006 presidential election in Mexico have called our attention to the post-election process, to accusations of fraud, to the extent of partisan polarization, and to the prospects of democratic consolidation, but few have offered an explanation of why President Vicente Fox's National Action Party (PAN) was able to maintain control of the executive office, even by the slim margin of 0.56%. In this article, I argue that the first post-PRI-regime election split the anti-PRI vote into different ideological and policy-oriented camps. This made the 2006 race a choice between policy programs and priorities that reflected economic concerns, and voters' assessments of the economy were a central feature of candidate support. Economic growth in the second half of the Fox administration as well as unusually high oil prices played a crucial role in the election. They enabled the PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón, to appeal for stability and to attack his main contender, PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as a danger to it. Had economic growth remained slow and oil prices at the expected rate, the PAN's chances to keep the presidency would have been slim, especially against a popular leftist candidate who had a lead in the polls, promised to help the poor at the expense of the rich, and voiced harsh criticism against the “neoliberal” policies of the PRI and PAN governments.

Information about women who hold appointive office is a neglected area.

–Eileen Shanahan, former Assistant Secretary, HEWEileen Shanahan, former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HEW, quoted in Carroll and Geiger-Parker, 1983.

With every new presidential administration in the United States, the incoming president is in charge of appointing thousands of individuals to work throughout the executive branch of government and assist him in fulfilling his constitutional responsibility to “faithfully execute the laws of the Nation” (Pfiffner 1996). When the Center of American Women and Politics (CAWP) first began studying female political appointees in the early 1980s, very few women had ever served in Cabinet positions or other high-ranking executive positions within the federal government. In fact, in 1977, almost two hundred years after the founding of the United States, President Carter appointed only the fourth and fifth women ever to serve as Cabinet Secretaries (CAWP 1998). As Carroll and Geiger-Parker note in the introduction to the very first study of female political appointees, “for the first time in history, women had been appointed in large enough numbers to survey and to compare with other appointees” (1983a, ix).

The conduct of war is among the most important acts of the state. In the last century alone, failure in this undertaking has toppled governments and imposed hostile occupation under a conqueror's rule for hundreds of millions from Paris to Warsaw and Tokyo to Jakarta. Military failure in World War I destroyed the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires and created a host of new states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in their stead. Allied military victory in World War II made global superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, and split Germany into two countries; the success of Soviet arms ended Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian independence, and resulted in a generation of subjugation under Soviet satellite rule for the peoples of Eastern Europe. Pyrrhic victory in two world wars exhausted Britain and brought an end to its global economic hegemony. Failure in internal war has toppled governments from Afghanistan to Vietnam; variations in the conduct of such wars can mean the difference between decades of misery in grinding stalemates as in Lebanon or in a rapid, decisive conclusion as in Rwanda's.

Of the many vital functions that political parties serve in American democracy, selecting candidates for public office is near the top of the list. Giovanni Sartori (1976) cites this purpose as their chief defining element—claiming that, at a minimum, a party is a “political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office” (64). Moreover, understanding how parties vet, groom, select, and promote candidates is central to empirically evaluating the strength of political party organizations, the quality of elected policymakers, and ultimately the effectiveness of government. For scholars of American politics, this has led to fruitful lines of research on the processes that the Democratic and Republican Parties use to select their candidates—namely the conventions, primaries, and caucuses that nominate individuals for various federal, state, and local offices. For example, many have investigated the effects of reforms to the presidential nomination process in the early 1970s (Aldrich 1993; Hagen and Mayer 2000; Reiter 1985; Wayne 2000), some arguing that it took power of choosing candidates away from the party organizations and towards other institutions like the press, interest groups, and small ideological factions (Polsby 1983) with potentially negative consequences for governance.