Although young Americans are normally less engaged in politics than their elders (Converse with Niemi 1971), today's youth are more withdrawn from public affairs than earlier birth cohorts were when they were young (Bennett 1997). One indicator of youthful disregard for politics is their avoidance of exposure to mass media coverage of public affairs (Pew Center 1996, 1997; Times Mirror Center 1990). Polls conducted during the 1990s indicate that adults under 30 are considerably less likely than those over 30 to read newspapers and to watch TV news-casts, and slightly less inclined to listen to the news on radio. The Pew Research Center's April 1996 poll, for example, found that 31% of persons under 30 claimed to have read a newspaper the day before they were interviewed (compared with 76% of individuals over 30), 45% of young people said they had watched a TV news show yesterday (as did 86% of persons over 30), and 37% of the young had listened to the news on radio yesterday (versus 56% of people over 30).

The young are also less likely than older persons to have dispositions that motivate them to use the news media. The Pew Center's February 1997 poll shows, for example, that individuals under 30 are less likely than those over 30 to say they look forward to reading a daily newspaper (12% vs. 32%) and to report enjoying TV newscasts (14% vs. 30%).

This is a study of young adults' disconnection from mass media coverage of public affairs.

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.

Forecasting elections may be impossible, but no more so than resisting the temptation to try. As citizens following a campaign, we all indulge in private guesses about who is going to win electoral contests. Some go further and engage in illegal acts—unless done through the services of the Iowa Electronic Market—and bet money on election outcomes. Numerous political scientists have invited fame, but also ridicule, by designing sophisticated models to forecast elections; readers of PS are no strangers to those efforts. Students of elections can hardly escape this tempting opportunity any more than they can escape elections themselves. No phenomenon in our discipline comes in such a regular, precise, and verifiable form as an election.

As Republican hopefuls announce bids to run for president in 1996, while Bill Clinton is pondering his strategy for reelection, political scientists resume their tinkering with models to predict the outcome of the 1996 presidential election. Those forecasts, however, will not arrive until two or three months before election day, when the most up-to-date readings for the various predictors are available. Some would argue that such early forecasting is presumptuous any-how, since it ignores the whole general election campaign. Others will complain that those forecasts arrive too late to have more than curiosity value.

As an independent basic social science, the study of politics occupies an important position among all the social sciences. In 1952, however, China abolished political science teaching and research. This was a mistake which is now being corrected. China has reestablished the field of political science in recent years.

When a historical event is shown to be mistaken, people often like to describe the reasons for its having taken place as very absurd and unimaginable, as though to demonstrate how confused people were at that time compared with how smart we are now. Such a simple attitude, however, will not help us in understanding the realities scientifically nor will it help us in learning from the lessons of history, and is therefore to be avoided.

This essay describes both objective conditions and the way people thought, both in the early 1950s and after 1976. It deals with two opposite events: first, the abolition of political science in China three decades ago, and second, its current revival.

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.

The 2007 John Gaus Lecture was presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, on August 31, 2007.

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.

Japan is an excellent case for the comparative study of the connections between democracy and culture.

—It is a country with a well established system of constitutional democracy with roots in the nineteenth century. Politically, the country has been constitutionally and electorally democratic for the entire period since the end of World War II.

—Democracy in Japan also has strong social and cultural underpinnings. Despite a hierarchical Confucian tradition, the country is largely egalitarian in its educational, economic, and informational systems. The Japanese citizen enjoys a democratic day-to-day existence.

—Because Japan's democracy, like that of all countries, is far from perfect, it is a good case study for examining ideal conceptions of democracy in contrast to practical democratic realities.

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.

Assigning students to draft and publish a Wikipedia contribution is no longer a novelty. The pedagogical benefits from assigning a Wikipedia article vary depending on discipline, lesson plan, and how it is incorporated into the class. This research considers how a Wikipedia assignment can effectively overcome common challenges in teaching controversial topics including peer relations, teacher–student power dynamics, and (mis)perceptions of “the other.”

Is the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) a legitimate organization? Do the veto powers legitimately pursue international security, or do they protect their narrow national interests? One way to evaluate the legitimacy of the UNSC is through its agenda. Does it address the most significant conflicts in world politics? Or is it influenced by the national interests of the veto powers? This article addresses these questions with a dataset that includes the number of UNSC meetings held and resolutions passed on 40 conflicts from 1991 to 2013. This analysis provides evidence for the legitimacy of the UNSC—conflicts with more refugees and more deaths are significantly more likely to be on the agenda. The analysis does not support critics of the UNSC—the national interests of the veto powers, measured as arms sales to and trade with the conflict participants, do not significantly alter the UNSC agenda.

Much ink has been spilled to describe the emergence and likely influence of the Tea Party on the American political landscape. Pundits and journalists declared that the emergence of the Tea Party movement pushed the Republican Party to a more extreme ideological position, which is generally anti-Washington. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the ideological positions taken by candidates in the 2008 and 2012 pre-Iowa caucus Republican presidential-primary debates. To establish the positions, we used the debate transcripts and a text-analytic technique that placed the candidates on a single dimension. Findings show that, overall, the 2012 candidates moved closer to an anti-Washington ideology—associated with the Tea Party movement—and away from the more traditional social conservative Republican ideology, which was more salient in the 2008 debates. Both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, the two candidates who ran in both elections, shifted significantly in the ideological direction associated with the Tea Party.

What evidence can be found of political science scholarship on teaching and learning? What questions are being asked and what methodologies are being used by political scientists engaged in this work? This article identifies and discusses six transformative trends in STL, specific to the discipline of political science. The most prominent trends are the dramatic increases in:

1. democratic and civic education

2. the use of technology in the classroom

3. curriculum development and innovation in teaching strategies.

Scores of studies have measured the quality of political science departments. Generally speaking, these studies have taken two forms. Many have relied on scholars' survey responses to construct rankings of the major departments. For example, almost 50 years ago Keniston (1957) interviewed 25 department chairpersons and asked them to assess the quality of various programs, and, much more recently, the National Research Council (NRC 1995) asked 100 political scientists to rate the “scholarly quality of program faculty” in the nation's political science doctoral departments. In response to these opinion-based rankings, a number of researchers have developed what they claim to be more objective measures of department quality based on the research productivity of the faculty (Ballard and Mitchell 1998; Miller, Tien, and Peebler 1996; Robey 1979). While department rankings using these two methods are often similar, there are always noteworthy differences and these have generated an additional literature that explores the relationship between the rating systems (Garand and Graddy 1999; Jackman and Siverson 1996; Katz and Eagles 1996; Miller, Tien, and Peebler 1996).

This research examines the effect of disgruntlement among primary and caucus voters who supported U.S. presidential nomination losers—a potentially divisive nomination process. I analyze the general election voting behavior of primary and caucus voters in the 2008 presidential election to determine if differences exist between supporters of the winning nominee in each party and backers of other candidates who also sought the nomination. A multivariate analysis of the determinants of “loyal party vote” suggests that Clinton and Edwards supporters showed a significantly higher degree of defection in the general election, although this behavior did not occur among people who voted for Romney or Huckabee in their state's primary or caucus.

This article examines the extent to which service-learning courses affect students' attitudes and opinions. Elsewhere, we used a pre/postsurvey field experiment to demonstrate that volunteering with a homeless person tends to erode the stereotypes held by the domiciled—a confirmation of the venerable contact hypothesis. Here we use the same research design to assess whether students in service-learning courses exhibit a similar type of opinion change after spending a day with a homeless person. We find that even with limited contact a significant number of service-learning students came away from their time with homeless individuals holding fewer stereotypes and with a more nuanced perspective on the causes and consequences of homelessness. Nevertheless, working with a homeless person did have a negative effect on some students and contact generally failed to change students' views on public policy.