Many commentaries on the recent American elections conclude that the United States has taken a long-term move to the right. This shift seemingly began in the late sixties as a reaction to the turmoil occasioned by militant, sometimes violent protest tactics used by the civil rights and antiwar movements, and by the sharp challenge to traditional values encompassed in the changes in family and sex behavior, dress styles, the increased use of drugs, and the like. The Republicans have been victorious in four out of the last five presidential elections, those held from 1968 on. Only one of these, that in 1968, was close, but in that contest a right-wing and racist candidate, George Wallace, received 13 percent. The one election of the five which the Democrats won, that in 1976, was the first one after Richard Nixon's resignation following the Watergate scandal.

Yet the conclusion that America has been in a conservative mood for some time is challenged by the results of the races for Congress and state offices and by the findings of the opinion polls. In 1984, in the same election in which Ronald Reagan received 59 percent of the vote, eight percent more than in 1980, his party lost two seats in the Senate and gained only 14 in the much larger House, leaving it behind the Democrats by 252 to 183. The Democrats still hold 34 of the 50 governorships, down by only one. Judged by which party holds most electoral offices, the Democrats remain the majority party.

In late August 2000, at APSA's Annual Meeting, a panel of political scientists offered forecasts for the 2000 presidential election. Although they differed in particulars, most of the forecasters' models incorporated a measure of economic growth plus the president's approval rating. Because the economy was prospering and President Clinton enjoyed phenomenal approval numbers for the eighth year of office, the consensus prediction was a Democratic (Gore) victory by upwards of 6 percentage points. Although political scientists had offered forecasts before previous presidential elections, these political scientists' predictions for 2000 attracted more interest than usual. Their predictions drew exceptional interest both during the campaign, when nobody knew for sure how the election would turn out, and after, when the forecasters had to account for their mistakes.

This article examines how the American civil response to September 11 profoundly transformed the core of American Muslim political identity for a generation. I outline the evolving contours of the American Muslim as citizens after September 11 through an analysis of the impact of race and religion on two relationships: state to citizen and citizen to citizen. The American political response to September 11 had both positive and negative impacts for domiciled Muslims. At the national level, this event has forced American Muslims into a period of institution building and active citizenship while the federal government's response has problematized the Muslim as a continuous potential security threat. One simmering question for the American citizenry in general concerns the loyalty of the American Muslim. In the future, the American Muslim political class will be engaged in a continued effort to write Muslims into the American narrative in the same way that previous immigrant groups have fought to reappropriate “Americanness.” The larger philosophical question in this process is how, in doing so, this group can prove its loyalty to the nation while maintaining a distinctive religious culture and heritage. What will be the future core of the maturing American Muslim as both a citizen of the republic and a servant of his or her god?

The American Political Science Association's (APSA) Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy (2004) asserts that inequality is on the rise in the U.S., and democracy's future may be dim. These assertions are allegedly supported by empirical evidence.

Simulations are useful tools in the classroom for an assortment of pedagogical reasons. I have devised a mock constitutional convention for use in introductory American government courses to better engage students and spur critical thinking about the U.S. Constitution. This article details the particulars of the simulation and its outcomes.

The election of black and Latino mayors in big cities during the past five years has provided the opportunity to critically examine the role of minority mobilization and coalitions. The focus of this study is on the election of four minority mayors, Henry Cisneros in San Antonio in 1981, Federico Peña in Denver, Harold Washington in Chicago, and Wilson Goode in Philadelphia, all in 1983. The pioneering study by Browning, Marshall, and Tabb (1984) highlights the significance of minority mayoral elections in the context of the struggle for political equality. We have placed our analysis in the context of the three central questions underscored in their theory of political incorporation: How open are urban political systems to minorities? How does minority political incorporation occur? Does political incorporation make a difference for minority interests? Although the four cities we examine are different in some respects from the Northern California cities covered by Browning, Marshall, and Tabb, their findings are generally applicable with modifications.

Chicago

How open is the system? Machine politics have dominated Chicago for over fifty years with decidedly mixed results for the city's black population. Black political power remained disproportionally small and subordinate throughout the machine's existence. Thus, Harold Washington's election in 1983 marked a structural transformation of the electoral system as well as a political coming of age for blacks. Washington inherited a city council divided along ideological and racial lines. Although Washington could not command a majority of the city council when he was first elected, the 1986 council races left him with an even split. Of the 50 council seats, 25 represent liberal votes and 25 are identified with the more conservative Democratic party machine, 16 are black and 4 are Latino. Washington, as mayor, holds the deciding vote.

This article explores the ethical difficulties that arise because of the interaction between fieldwork practitioners and their sites, in terms of the positionality of the researcher. What are the ethics of blending in or of standing out? This question stems from my experience of 12 months of fieldwork in South Africa in two distinct locales and among two different populations, one in which I could “pass” and another in which I was marked as various degrees of “outsider.” Drawing on this fieldwork, as well as an overview of the literature in political science on positionality, I argue that our discipline—because of the way it shapes interactions and research outcomes—must take positionality seriously in ethical training and practice.

We evaluate hypotheses about human capital and structural theory-based predictors of variation in academic salaries. We use standard statistical models to explore differences in salary among full-time political science faculty, while also utilizing selection models to control for factors that place individuals on different trajectories stemming from their graduate school experience. We report on several findings, one of which is the positive effect on salary associated with graduation from a highly ranked PhD program; a second being the negative effect on salary of a high undergraduate teaching load. Other findings are that negotiation positively affects salary for men, but not for women, and that journal publications increase salaries amongst women, but not men. At the associate professor level, we find a significant gender gap in salary, even with controls for human capital, structural factors, and productivity. We also find a significant effect of race on the salaries of male faculty.

Our political economy model has correctly forecasted the 1998 and 2005 elections. However, in 2002 we predicted a tight race to the benefit of the Christian Democrats(CDU)/Christian Socialists(CSU)-Free Democratic Party (FDP) opposition, so underestimating the narrow defeat of the FDP by the Green Party. In the German political system, proportional representation makes single-party domination almost impossible. On the contrary, the big parties, Social Democratic Party (SPD) or CDU/CSU, are pushed to build a majority coalition. In this competition, the FDP has been the “pivotal party” in German political life, at least until 2002. Since then, the Greens have challenged the FDP, with the Ecologists allowing the SPD to form a red-green coalition in 1998 and in 2002. Similarly, in 2005 the FDP was not associated with the grand coalition driven by Angela Merkel.

An official recount was required to determine the winner of a knifeedged election. A Senate candidate's untimely death resulted, surprisingly and circuitously, in the Democrats picking up an extra Senate seat. Amidst widespread allegations of fraud and irregularities, the winner of the popular vote in the presidential election failed for the first time since 1888 to win the decisive electoral-college vote. And thus was foiled the vice president's bid to emerge from the shadow of the president he had served for eight years. The year 2000? No. The year was 1960. The Democrat, John Kennedy, was the president-elect who failed to secure the plurality of the popular vote, while the Republican, Richard Nixon, was the vice president whose popular-vote majority offered him scant consolation in defeat.The Senate candidate was not, of course, Missouri Democrat Mel Carnahan, whose death in September 2000 seems to have spurred a large sympathy vote, resulting in a posthumous victory (which, in turn, permitted the appointment of his widow to fill the seat). Keith Thompson was the Republican senator-elect from Wyoming at the time of his death in December 1960. Immediately thereafter, Democratic governor J.J. Hickey resigned to make himself eligible for appointment to the vacant seat by his own successor, Democratic Secretary of State Jack Cage.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) is one of the most important—if not the most important—public policies developed over the last half century to increase access to the U.S. political system for people of color. The VRA also provides an important context for understanding the ascension of nonwhite groups into the elected leadership of the nation (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984; Davidson and Grofman 1994; Menifield 2001; McClain and Stewart 2002; Segura and Bowler 2005; Bositis 2006). This essay assesses the present-day significance of the VRA for the political representation of communities of color by examining the implications of majority-minority districts and other key provisions in the VRA for the election of nonwhite officials in the beginning years of the twenty-first century.

People often make choices that go against their own best interests. In the controversial bestseller Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that people can benefit from simple “nudges” to improve their decision-making. In an upper-level undergraduate course on political decision-making, I created a series of assignments around Nudge. In the project, students designed their own “nudges” to solve a variety of political and social problems. Students gave this assignment rave reviews, not only for the course content they learned, but also for what they discovered about their connections to society and its problems. In this article, I describe the assignment and report students' evaluations of it. This assignment could be tailored to any course on political behavior, public policy, or public administration.

Young adults have particularly low levels of civic engagement. Incorporating experiential learning activities as part of the political science curriculum shows promise to reverse this trend. We analyze the impact of a mock presidential election simulation on the civic engagement of college-aged students. Exit surveys of student participants and a one-year follow-up survey confirm that this experiential learning activity had a positive effect on participants' levels of political knowledge, their interest in public life, and their attitudes about government in general.