Call for papers for the 2009 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition in Toronto, ON, Canada, September 3–6, 2009.

On November 21, 1972 Samuel Lewis Popkin, an assistant professor of government at Harvard University, was imprisoned in the federal section of the Norfolk County jail in Dedham, Massachusetts, under a contempt order of the United States District Court, District of Massachusetts. He was imprisoned for contempt of court for refusal to answer several questions before a federal grand jury investigating the publication of the Pentagon Papers. In the course of the grand jury proceedings Popkin asserted a right under the First Amendment to refuse to answer questions concerning the identity of confidential sources and the content of his opinions and data developed in the course of research on and in Vietnam. He refused to answer the questions on the grounds that they violated his rights to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly under the First Amendment in the absence of a showing by the government that the information sought was relevant and necessary to the government's investigation.

On November 28, 1972, the grand jury was discharged at the government's request and Popkin was released from jail.

In early January, 1973, Popkin filed a petition for a writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court to review the case. The petition was denied by the Court in April, 1973.

The Popkin case is the first on record in American law in which the question of a scholar's right to the confidentiality of his sources and data has been raised and decided, at least in part, on the merits.

Why does the war on drugs continue after 40 years? This article combines theories of policy termination and prospect theory to explain the drug war's persistence. After reviewing the case for termination, the article turns to policy termination theory. As previous case studies have demonstrated, rationality and economic reasoning alone fail to persuade politicians to end existing policies. In the case of the drug war, specific characteristics of the drug policy and the current political environment, as well as typical institutional and bureaucratic constraints, create substantial obstacles to end the drug war. Perceptions of the risks and benefits of drug war termination also create difficulties. The article concludes that a number of factors need to shift before drug war policy termination can take place.

Core graduate-level seminars, in many ways, establish the “canon” literature for scholars entering a discipline. In the study of American Politics, the contents of this canon vary widely across departments and instructors, with important implications for the perspectives to which graduate students are exposed. At a basic level, the demographic characteristics of the authors whose work is assigned can have a major impact on the diversity (or lack of diversity) of viewpoints presented in these introductory courses. Using a unique dataset derived from a survey of core American Politics graduate seminars at highly-ranked universities, this project assesses the gender diversity of the authors whose research is currently taught—overall and within a comprehensive list of topics and subtopics. We also assess the “substantive representation” of women (and other underrepresented groups) within the American Politics canon by examining the frequency with which gender, racial, and other forms of identity politics are taught in these introductory courses.

Colleges and universities are increasingly intentional about meeting well-articulated and consistent general education goals and documenting substantive learning outcomes. Institutional imperatives to document the successful teaching of essential knowledge and skill sets frequently fall to faculty and departments, posing new challenges in an environment of time and resource constraints. A capstone course is an increasingly common method to measure student learning and assess programmatic and institutional success. We provide concrete suggestions to design a capstone course and assess student learning outcomes. After describing the structure of the course and four innovative assignments, we present the results of assessment conducted through the capstone. We further the conversation on the development of best practices and how political science departments can align institutional and programmatic goals and lead the way in university assessment.

A lifetime award can be a mixed blessing. As my daughter Ashley has observed, a lifetime award means you must really be getting old. I think she has decided it means entering the mode that my computer calls, “stand-by, energy saver.” Then again, last week at dinner my wife Beverley said, “I don't mean this to sound morbid, but I don't know a lot of what you've done to get this award. Don't you think it would be a good idea to write out your obituary?” As always, I am grateful for Beverley's advice, but I told her the first thing I had to do was write this talk for tonight. And the first thing I must do tonight is to thank all of you for coming to hear it. I know there are many other things you could have chosen to do after a hard day of conferencing. You are here voluntarily. That is a strange thing for me, since I am used to lecturing to people who are there only because the material is going to be on an exam. So I thank you and hope there will not be too many who are thinking after the lecture (as my departed co-author Aaron Wildavsky might have put it), “better he should have written the obituary.”

In this article we report the results from a new survey of political scientists regarding their evaluations of journals in the political science discipline. Unlike previous research that has focused on data from the United States, we conducted an Internet survey of political scientists in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We present data on journal evaluations, journal familiarity, and journal impact, both for our entire sample (N = 1,695) and separately for respondents from each of the three countries. We document the overall hierarchy of scholarly journals among political scientists, though we find important similarities and differences in how political scientists from these three countries evaluate the scholarly journals in the discipline. Our results suggest that there is a strong basis for cross-national integration in scholarly journal communication, though methodological differences among the three countries may be an impediment.

Educators often use role-playing exercises that involve problem based learning in their courses to improve their students' critical and analytical skills, introduce them to new ways of thinking, increase interaction with their fellow students, and to enhance student interest in course lessons and materials (Greening 1998; Albanese 1993; Hensley 1993).A popular role playing simulation is moot court (Deardoff and Aliotta 2003; Guiliuzza 1991). Moot courts are academic simulations of appellate advocacy that educate students about the law and the judicial process. Students, acting as lawyers or judges, “try” a case before an appellate court.2 In addition to acting as lawyers or judges, students are assigned to serve as “law clerks, reporters, or amicus brief writers” (Knerr and Sommerman 2001, 4). Moot court is an extremely fluid pedagogical tool which can be used for more than learning about the law or the judicial process. It has been used in a variety of disciplines including political science, media, history, journalism, sociology, art, economics, business, and the life sciences to educate students about a variety of subjects such as history, journalistic rights, anti-trust laws, or professional ethics (Carlson and Skaggs 2000; Dhooge 1999; Bentley 1996).

The dramatic expansion of democratic regimes throughout the world has produced a boom in the field of survey research. There are at least six reasons for this boom. First, democracy brings with it elections, and with elections, parties and candidates who want to know where and how to campaign and contributors who want to know on which “horse” to place their bets. Second, democratic governments care very much about public opinion since not only does their reelection depend upon the public will, but their ability to govern depends to a great degree on how well they are able to gauge public reaction to their policies. Third, democratic governments want objective information to help them plan their programs and to be able to gauge their impacts once implemented. Fourth, international donors increasingly carry out surveys of “users” or potential users of public services to help them plan their investment strategies. Fifth, international donors regularly examine program impacts as a means of evaluating project success and as a means of targeting future grants and loans. Finally, within the field of political science at least, there is a growing consensus that political culture matters for sustaining democracy and that the entire “democracy game” goes beyond finding the right institutions to having citizens believe in democratic principles. There is, of course, no unanimity on this point, raised so forcefully years ago in Dahl's “Preface to Democratic Theory,” and there will be those among the “new institutionalists” who entirely dismiss the role of what Dahl called the “consensus on the polyarchal norms” (1956, 135). Yet, broadly speaking, it is fair to say that most democracy experts would agree that in democracies, the public matters; publics vote, protest, and even rebel, and to exclude them in the calculus of the study of democratic consolidation is to risk missing an important part of the story.

Learning how to write a research paper is an important skill for political science majors, and faculty can also benefit when their students develop their research-paper-writing talents. Few departments, however, teach these skills explicitly, and many curricula seem to be based on the assumption that students will arrive at college with adequate basic writing skills. Several programs also suppose that a major will develop the ability to write a research paper through her experience with political science and other courses. These expectations are faulty, as most students are not “proficient” writers when they move to campus (McGrath 2004; NCWASC 2003, 16–7; Persky, Daane, and Jin 2003, 20–1), and writing a research paper in political science is a specific skill set that must be developed (Scholes 1998, 95; Russell 2002, 9–10). The approach I advocate here is to demystify the paper and the process for students by identifying and explaining the different parts of a typical paper—introduction, literature review, model and hypothesis, research design, analysis and assessment, and conclusion—and showing how the paper-writing process is broken into manageable tasks. While faculty know the components of research papers, most students have no idea what these sections should contain or what their titles mean. In addition, because revision and editing are essential general writing skills linked with the overall substantive learning process (NCWASC 2003, 1, 9; Maimon 2002, x), I suggest that students submit their papers in pieces, benefiting from feedback from faculty, peers, and themselves. In this essay, I unpack the parts of the paper and the writing process, providing suggestions for teaching about these segments and integrating research-paper-writing skills into the curriculum.

The Reagan-Bush Administration vigorously pursued a “Reagan Doctrine” of aiding anti-communist freedom fighters worldwide, in no place with more controversy than toward the anti-US Sandinista Government of Nicaragua. Why, then, would the new presidency of George Bush quickly have agreed to defer asking Congress for military aid to the Contras, have agreed to send only humanitarian aid instead, and have agreed to permit four separate congressional committees each to determine whether any aid at all should be continued? Unravelling this odd turn of events can help us better to understand the under-rated influence of public opinion on American foreign policy.

Most of us assume the public usually to follow presidential leadership when it comes to foreign affairs. Indeed, though very few truths are undisputed when political scientists discuss Americans' opinions on questions of public importance, one accepted inference—borne out by much scientifically-verified evidence—is the “rally ‘round the flag” syndrome. The syndrome is simple: presidential popularity in public opinion polls rises when a president acts decisively toward an international crisis. These changes in Americans' stated opinions have been measured in international crises for several decades.

“Rallies” occur only when special “crisis” conditions are met. These crisis situations usually involve threats to America which are (1) remote from the everyday experience of Americans, and (2) involve threats about which the president personally informs the public, usually over the dramatically effective medium of television, and (3) involve decisive—and usually military—response at the president's direction.