Reconciliation was marked by confusion and misunderstanding on Capitol Hill. Still, this unusual procedure permitted the Reagan Administration to have its budget considered and approved as a single package.

In 1974, Congress passed a budget act to assert control over the federal budget and free itself from executive dominance over spending plans. In 1981, that act instead provided the Reagan Administration with a tool to put forth its economic program as a single philosophical package and to restructure basic social legislation to reflect that philosophy. The tool is reconciliation.

Reconciliation has been slowly ripening on the budgetary vine for several years. The combined adroitness of key Administration budgeteer, David Stockman, who went from Michigan congressman to director of the Office of Management and Budget, along with the current economic climate, provided a unique opportunity for the executive branch to use congressional procedures to bypass normal congressional control over the federal budget.

In recent years, arriving on the job market with published work has shifted from a desirable condition to a necessity. Even middling universities can afford to ignore applications from job applicants without peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals. Thus, it is important for graduate students to focus as early as possible on publishing their work.I wish to thank Brian Brox, Jonathan Hartlyn, and Nancy Maveety for comments on an earlier draft.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a global effect on higher education. Overnight, entire degree programs had to be moved online. Whereas this meant that teaching and learning in political science and international relations also went into “emergency e-learning” mode, as a recent teacher spotlight in PS: Political Science & Politics termed it, moving online also offered opportunities. One opportunity is collaborative online international learning (COIL) that enables students from universities in different countries to work on a common project. This article argues that working together collaboratively online not only mitigates the pandemic’s physical restrictions and sustains a global space of learning; it also provides for a particular active and affective learning in an intercultural virtual environment that substantiates classroom experiences even in post-pandemic higher education. To support this argument, this article reflects on the experiences of a British–Japanese COIL project that investigated political responses to COVID-19.

These comments are mostly derived from my teaching experience at the University of Texas at Austin, which has a sophisticated and elaborate teacher evaluation system, and in the universities of London and York in England, which don't.

1. Students' evaluations of their teachers do not depend solely on the qualities of the teacher. If objective evaluations are to be obtained, a multivariate statistical analysis should be conducted, controlling for such factors as:

a. class size—the smaller the class, the better the evaluations.

b. expected grade—one of the strongest correlates of teacher evaluations proved to be the grade the student expects to receive—the higher the expected grade, the “better” the course. This too can be controlled for—by asking the students on the form what grade they expect to receive.

c. whether the class is required or optional—compulsory courses will obviously be less popular. One way to test for this is to ask students on the evaluation form to rate the class relative to their expectations of the class (above, below, or as expected).

2. A statistical study at Texas by J. Sidanius showed that student evaluations of teachers tend to be biased against women and minority teachers. Apart from the intrinsic worries this raises, such information, if true, could be used in court actions over denial of tenure for women/minorities where teacher evaluations played a role.

3. There is of course the general philosophical question of whether students are best able to assess whether they are learning anything from a given teacher.

Who will win the next French presidential election? Forecasting electoral results from political-economy models is a recent tradition in France. In this article, we pursue this effort by estimating a vote function based on both local and national data for the elections held between 1981 and 2007. This approach allows us to circumvent the small N problem and to produce more robust and reliable results. Based on a model including economic (unemployment) and political (approval and previous results) variables, we predict the defeat, although by a relatively small margin, of the right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of the French presidential election to be held in May 2012.

With numerous recent incidents in which law-enforcement officers played a role in the deaths of citizens, there is a renewed focus on cops and their actions. Part of that discussion is related to the nation’s preconceived notions of cops and where those ideas might originate. Popular culture contributes to those images; this study explores one source of those images: film. More specifically, it investigates the image of law enforcement on the silver screen from 1984 through 2014. With a sample of 34 films and more than 200 cop characters, this study finds a mixed general depiction of law enforcement in movies but a positive depiction of individual cop characters. The prevalent descriptor of those characters was good, hard-working, and competent law-enforcement officers. This exploratory study informs broader discussions about the images of cops found in popular culture.

The traditional format for teaching courses to undergraduate students has long been that of lecture when professors speak and students listen. However, as times have evolved so too have the pedagogical methods in the classroom. In teaching a course on diversity and discrimination in the society, this instructor opted to combine several teaching methods as a means of not only conveying the substantive material to the class but, more importantly, engaging the students at an interactive learning level. By combining traditional lecture with watching/discussing documentaries and incorporating structured student debate, a dynamic learning environment was created. As a result of incorporating the students into every aspect of the class, the students learned from both the instructor and students alike. Thus, the use of this multifaceted approach created a positive and engaging learning environment for the whole class.

This essay corrects and updates one that was originally published in Qualitative & Multi-Method Research and, in a condensed version, in three other APSA Organized Section newsletters. Our research into IRB policy has shown that many political scientists are not familiar with some of its key provisions. The intent of the essay is to increase awareness of the existing policy’s impact on political scientific research and, in particular, on graduate students and junior faculty. We remain concerned that at present, faculty are leaving discussions of research ethics to IRBs (and their counterparts worldwide), whereas these Boards largely focus on complying with the regulatory details of governmental policy. Even though this essay seeks to clarify the latter, we remain convinced that research ethics ought to be vigorously taken up within disciplinary and departmental conversations.

This article presents forecasts of the 2012 presidential and US House of Representatives elections. The presidential forecasts are of the national two-party presidential vote percentage for the in-party candidate and are based on the trial-heat and economy forecasting equation and its companion convention-bump equation. The House election forecast is of the net seat change for the Democratic Party from 2010 to 2012. This forecast is produced from two versions of a seats-in-trouble forecasting equation.

Women's political action committees (PACs)—those committees founded by women to raise money for women candidates—have been and will likely continue to be an important part of American electoral politics. In this article, we investigate the impact of EMILY's List, because it is the standard bearer of women's PACs and is commonly cited as crucial to women's electoral success. Empirical studies of EMILY's List impact to date have largely assumed causal inference by using traditional linear models. We use a propensity score–matching model to leverage on causality and find that an EMILY endorsement helps some candidates and hurts others. Our findings set the stage for further and more nuanced investigations of when, where, and how EMILY's List can enhance the likelihood of electoral success for women.

In 1869, the state of Iowa admitted Arabella Mansfield to the Bar, making her the first woman to receive a license to practice law in the United States (Epstein 1993, 49). That same year, Myra Bradwell applied for an attorney's license in the state of Illinois. When the state refused her, she appealed her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied her claim by an eight-to-one vote (Bradwell v. Illinois 83 U.S. 130 [1873]). In his concurring opinion, Justic Joseph Bradley argues that, “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator” (83 U.S. 130 [1873]). Ironically, shortly before the Supreme Court announced its decision, another woman in Illinois, Adah Kepley, attained a license to practice law. The judge who granted this license believed that her admission to the Bar was “proper and in accord with the spirit of the age” (Berkson 1982, 288).See Bowman (1998/99) for a list of biographies of these early women lawyers.

Google Books Ngrams data are freely available and contain billions of words used in tens of millions of digitized books, which begin in the 1500s for some languages. We explore the benefits and pitfalls of these data by showing examples from comparative and American politics. Specifically, we show how usage of the phrase “political corruption” in Italian, French, German, and Hebrew books strongly correlates with Transparency International’s well-cited Corruption Index for France, Italy, German, and Israel. We also use Ngrams to show that the explosive growth in usage of the phrases “Asian American,” “Latino,” and “Hispanic” correlates with real-world changes in these populations after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. These applications show that Ngram data correlate strongly with similar data from well-respected sources. This suggests that Ngrams has content validity and can be used as a proxy measure for previously difficult-to-research phenomena and questions.

From campaign rhetoric to tweets, President Trump has positioned himself as “disrupter in chief,” often pointing to administrative action as the avenue by which he is leaving a lasting mark. However, research on the administrative presidency begins with the premise that all presidents face incentives to use administrative tools to gain substantive or political traction. If, as this article suggests, Trump’s institutional standing differs little from his recent predecessors, then how much of the Trump presidency represents a change from past norms and practices? How much represents continuity, or the perennial dynamics of a far-from-omnipotent executive in an ongoing world of “separate institutions sharing powers” (Neustadt 1990, 29)? To answer this, we tracked presidential directives and regulatory policy during Trump’s first year in office. We found evidence of continuity, indicating that in its use of administrative tactics to shape policy, the Trump White House largely falls in line with recent presidencies.

In recent decades, the scientific forecasting of election outcomes has made great strides in a number of advanced industrial democracies. One country that has not received much attention to date is Canada. In this article, we present a vote function model to forecast Canadian federal elections. We explain our model's theoretical underpinnings and assess its statistical properties and forecasting capabilities against all federal elections held between 1953 and 2008. We then explore potential ways for improving the model's accuracy. We conclude by discussing the forecast of different hypothetical scenarios for an upcoming federal election.

The profile of Femina Studens rei Publicae which has developed from the gross statistics and the 1969 survey of departments of political science shows that the professional woman in academia is primarily in the lower ranks, often not even on the first step of the promotion “ladder” and is teaching undergraduates. Although her habitat is the small college, there are signs that she may be emerging from it to the faculties of the city and state university. Recently she has been receiving Ph.D.'s at a greater rate of growth than that for men, but she still remains a small minority. In considering the following ratios related to her publications, other evidences of scholarship, and the recognition accorded to her in the profession, it is important to stress that the woman political scientist who is teaching constitutes five percent of the membership in the A.P.S.A. and according to the 1969 survey, 8.4 percent of all faculty in political science in colleges and universities.