The most incisive twentieth century students of language converge from different premises on the conclusion that language is the key creator of the social worlds people experience, and they agree as well that language cannot usefully be understood as a tool for describing an objective reality. For the later Wittgenstein there are no essences, only language games. Chomsky analyzes the sense in which grammar is generative. For Derrida all language is performative, a form of action that undermines its own presuppositions. Foucault sees language as antedating and constructing subjectivity. The “linguistic turn” in twentieth century philosophy, social psychology, and literary theory entails an intellectual ferment that raises fundamental questions about a great deal of mainstream political science, and especially about its logical positivist premises.

While the writers just mentioned analyze various senses in which language use is an aspect of creativity, those who focus upon specifically political language are chiefly concerned with its capacity to reflect ideology, mystify, and distort. The more perspicacious of them deny that an undistorting language is possible in a social world marked by inequalities in resources and status, though the notion of an undistorted language can be useful as an evocation of an ideal benchmark. The emphasis upon political language as distorting or mystifying is a key theme in Lasswell and Orwell, as it is in Habermas, Osgood, Ellul, Vygotsky, Enzensberger, Bennett, and Shapiro.

There has been much debate over whether the United States has changed in any lasting and fundamental manners since September 11, 2001. Immediately following the carnage, editorialists and pundits proclaimed a national loss of innocence, the end of American exceptionalism, the new globalization of terror, and other cataclysmic shifts. One year later, it is still too early to be certain which claims will stand the test of time, and which will eventually come to seem overblown or simply off the mark. Our concern in this symposium is limited to civic engagement in the aftermath of the assaults, and this note will be narrower still in focus. Here, I attempt an early, mid-rally assessment of public approval of, and trust in, government and political figures.

In recent years, a number of prominent political commentators have raised concerns about the lack of ideological diversity on college campuses (Shapiro 2004; Black 2004; Kors and Silvergate 1999; Kimball 1998). Among other accusations, they claim that liberal college professors may actually penalize students for expressing conservative opinions by assigning them lower marks on exams and assignments (Horowitz 2003; Hebel 2004). Their concern is not without merit. Researchers have found that, when evaluating a colleague's research, college professors are more critical of work that contradicts their own views (Mahoney 1977). It is logical to assume that the same bias influences professors' evaluations of students' arguments. It is also reasonable to expect that students, charged with the important task of evaluating their professors, are vulnerable to their own ideological biases.We thank Markus Kemmelmeier and Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier for their helpful suggestions and valuable guidance. We also acknowledge the valuable support of research assistants Jessica Defenderfer, Cristina Ciocirlan, and Kathleen Winters. Finally, we would like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the dozens of political science faculty throughout the country who took the time to distribute our survey to their undergraduate students. This project would not have been possible without their generous assistance. This research was funded through a Faculty Research Grant from Elizabethtown College.

“Turning out to vote is the most common and important act citizens take in a democracy,” John Aldrich writes (1993, 246), “and, therefore, is one of the most important behaviors for scholars of democratic politics to understand.” Turnout matters at the community as well as the individual level; the larger a county's voter turnout, for instance, the more discretionary federal resources it is likely to receive per capita (Martin 2003). “The blunt truth,” according to V. O. Key (1949, 527), “is that politicians and officials are under no compulsion to pay much heed to classes and groups of citizens that do not vote.”

As new academic journals have emerged in political science and existing journals experience increasing submission rates, editors are concerned that scholars experience “reviewer fatigue.” Editors often assume that an overload of requests to review makes scholars less willing to perform the anonymous yet time-consuming tasks associated with reviewing manuscripts. To date, there has not been a systematic investigation of the reasons why scholars decline to review. We empirically investigated the rate at which scholars accept or decline to review, as well as the reasons they gave for declining. We found that reviewer fatigue is only one of several reasons why scholars decline to review. The evidence suggests that scholars are willing to review but that they also lead busy professional and personal lives.

The aftermath of the 2000 election has been a time of constant learning in regards to election administration in the United States. Both scholars and policy makers initially focused primarily on voting technology and on which voting technologies were best at capturing votes. In early 2001, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project developed the “residual vote” metric; numerous studies have since examined residual vote rates across different voting platforms. Congressional reform of elections—exemplified in the “Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002” (P.L. 107-252)—also focused largely on voting technology, with HAVA imposing new standards for voting equipment and providing states with one-shot funding to aid in its purchase.Authors are listed alphabetically. The data collection in Cuyahoga County, Ohio was funded by the Election Science Institute (ESI) through a contract with the Cuyahoga County Commission. We are grateful to Steven Hertzberg of ESI for his assistance in the data collection. The Utah poll-worker survey was funded by the Institute of Public and International Affairs (IPIA) at the University of Utah. Steven Snell of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy (CSED) at Brigham Young University provided valuable research assistance for this project.

The Dutch have been counted among the staunchest supporters of European integration ever since the parliamentary ratification of the European Community for Coal and Steel in late 1951. The major political parties—the Christian Democrats (CDA) and its forerunners, the Labor Party (PvdA), and the liberal parties VVD and D66—supported all important European treaties of the past decades. Only the smaller orthodox-Calvinist parties, some smaller left-wing parties, and, more recently, the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) have opposed these treaties in parliament. This overwhelmingly large support in the Second Chamber of the Dutch parliament included the Treaty of Rome of 2004—the treaty establishing a constitution for Europe. One hundred twenty-eight out of 150 members of parliament favored the ratification of the European Constitution. This article draws on several chapters in Aarts and van der Kolk 2005.

Does Latin America exist?

Latin American studies centers (like African, or Middle Eastern or West European studies centers) are based on the assumption that Latin America (and Africa, the Middle East, etc.) are more than arbitary geographic expressions: they define coherent cultural regions, having people with distinctive values and worldviews that make them think differently and behave differently from people of other cultures.

The most powerful challenge to this view currently comes from the rational choice school, whose practitioners occasionally mention the importance of cultural differences but whose models almost always ignore them, implicitly assuming that in a given situation all people will make the same “rational” choices regardless of cultural perspectives. But if major differences exist between the worldviews and motivations of people in different cultural zones, a rational choice model that applies to the United States may not accurately describe the behavior of people in other cultures.

The existence of meaningful cultural areas has been challenged on other grounds as well. Modernization theory focuses on the differences between “traditional” and “modern” societies, each of which are characterized by distinctive economic, political, social, and cultural institutions. This perspective tends to attribute any differences between Latin American and highly industrialized societies to differences in their levels of economic development: with economic development, these differences will tend to disappear. Differences between various “traditional” cultures tend to be ignored.

The usefulness of “Latin America” as a meaningful cultural boundary could also be disputed on various other grounds.

Although the overall representation of women in the field of political science has increased gradually over the last several decades, most gains are being achieved at junior levels. When considering the status of women in the profession, it is instructive to incorporate information on the presence of women in editorial positions at top-ranked political science journals. Our 2010 snapshot of women editors in the top 50 journals in the field finds that on average, women are reasonably well represented in editorial positions in proportion to the ranks they hold in the profession overall and at PhD-granting institutions; however, substantial variation exists across journals. Our discussion of the role-model effect and the gatekeeping power of editors suggests that greater inclusion of women and others who bring different perspectives to research could result in a more vibrant range of research topics and methodological approaches published in a journal.

Since the dawn of time, it seems, social critics have been warning of a “crisis of legitimacy” in the political world. Manuel Castells repeats this ageless battle-cry in his 2004 Ithiel de Sola Pool lecture (PS, January 2005, 9–16), warning darkly of an “increasing alienation of citizens” that “threatens to undo the democratic system” (9). As proof, he offers an array of point-in-time survey results from Western countries in recent years, as well as anecdotal evidence of “the expression of political protest” in places like California and France (9). Yet, none of this shows anything except the fact that states are imperfect creations for the expression of political community and, as Isaiah Berlin might have added, the timeless costs of social life.

The digital revolution has made it easier for political scientists to share and access high-quality research online. However, many articles are stored in proprietary databases that some institutions cannot afford. High-quality, peer-reviewed, top-tier journal articles that have been made open access (OA) (i.e., freely available online) theoretically should be accessed and cited more easily than articles of similar quality that are available only to paying customers. Research into the efficacy of OA publishing thus far has focused mainly on the natural sciences, and the results have been mixed. Because OA has not been as widely adopted in the social sciences, disciplines such as political science have received little attention in the OA research. In this article, we seek to determine the efficacy of OA in political science. Our primary hypothesis is that OA articles will be cited at higher rates than articles that are toll access (TA), which means available only to paying customers. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the mean citation rates of OA and TA articles from eight top-ranked political science journals. We find that OA publication results in a clear citation advantage in political science publishing.

Introduction

In recent years, the availability of online source material and online papers has increased instructors' concerns regarding plagiarism in the classroom. Many instructors do not realize, however, that the digital revolution has also created a niche for fast and (at least somewhat) reliable plagiarism-detection software.

By winning the presidency and strengthening its majority in both chambers of Congress, the 2008 election gave control of the government to the Democratic Party. However, as the 2010 election season unfolded, the news for the Democratic Party could not have been much worse. Economic conditions had not improved dramatically. A bitter and lengthy fight over health care reform signaled to citizens that little had changed in how Washington, DC, governed. The stimulus package and its impact on the federal debt caused unease in a segment of the electorate that was concerned with the size of government. In this context, observers of American politics began to take note of the number of citizens affiliating with, or at least expressing favorability toward, a loose coalition of groups known as the Tea Party movement. Tea Party rallies began to occur throughout the United States, seeking to draw attention to the movement's primary issues.

Debates over methodology have long occupied a prominent role in political science and its various empirical sub-fields. Recently, these debates and occasional dialogues seem to have intensified. The Perestroika movement within APSA protested the perceived hegemony of rational choice and quantitative methods in journal publications and graduate training (Kasza 2001). Renewed attention has focused on the types of methodologies employed by studies published in the discipline's leading journals (Garand and Giles 2003; Bennett, Barth, and Rutherford 2003; Braumoeller 2003). The kinds of concerns over methodological diversity that motivate these studies also inform discussions about graduate training (Alvarez 1992; Dyer 1992; Schwartz-Shea 2003; Morrow 2003; Smith 2003).

The past decade has opened up unprecedented opportunities for scholars of post-communist countries. Throughout much of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, scholars can now engage policymakers and other elites directly through interviews—probing their decision calculi and obtaining unpublished information and data. Yet there are gaps in the scholarly literature that would prepare researchers for interviewing highly placed individuals in these countries.

There is probably no subject which has been studied more thoroughly by political scientists than American presidential elections. A vast literature has developed examining the effects of attitudes toward the parties, candidates, and issues on voter decision-making in these quadrennial contests (for a comprehensive review of this literature see Asher, 1988). Despite the proliferation of literature on this topic, however, relatively little research has addressed what is perhaps the most basic question about presidential elections: who wins and who loses?

A few scholars have developed models for predicting the national outcomes of presidential elections. Brody and Sigelman (1983) proposed a model based on the incumbent president's approval rating in the final Gallup Poll before the election. This extremely simple model yielded an unadjusted R2 of .71. Hibbs (1982) proposed a different bivariate model based entirely on the trend in real per capita disposable income since the last presidential election. This model yielded an unadjusted R2 of .63. Thus, neither of these bivariate models proved to be highly accurate.

Lewis-Beck and Rice (1984) have developed a forecasting model which combines economic conditions and presidential popularity, Their model, which uses the president's approval rating in May and the change in real per capita GNP during the second quarter of the election year to predict the popular vote for president, yields an unadjusted R2 of .82.