Herein I propose a moratorium on the use of the word “simple” immediately preceding the word “model” in any communication, written or verbal, between and among political scientists.

Gordon Tullock (PS: Political Science and Politics, January 2004, 2) states (about the 1960 presidential election) that:

“Illinois went for Kennedy by a margin smaller than the usual number of votes produced by the Chicago machine from graveyards and empty lots. Texas went to Kennedy by fewer votes than are normally cast by cattle in South Texas.”

When compiling data for the article “Small Spaces for Different Faces: Political Science Scholarship on Asian Pacific Americans” (July 2004 PS), I inadvertently omitted the numbers for one issue of Social Science Quarterly. The omission does not change any of the rankings, but it does alter some figures slightly. The correct numbers for the affected totals are as follows:

In his April 2003 PS: Political Science and Politics article “Marbury v. Madison: How John Marshall Changed History by Misquoting the Constitution,” Winfield H. Rose presents an argument in which Chief Justice Marshall knowingly distorted the meaning of the Constitution for strategic gain. The strategic gain was the creation of judicial review (the power of the Court to invalidate acts of other branches of government as violative of the Constitution). The key means to achieve this goal was to intentionally misquote Article III in the Court's most famous of cases, Marbury v. Madison (1803). Rose offers his argument as the product of a new discovery (that of detecting Marshall's misquotation), and this discovery as the product of a fresh reading of the case. The reading is a “fresh” one because Rose looks anew at the actual text of the decision and does not rely on the accepted “textbook wisdom” of the case. He calls us rightly to revisit the case and follow him beyond the “conventional textbook wisdom” regarding the case. However, Rose's analysis fails in the end precisely because it remains so wedded to the textbook wisdom on Marbury and judicial review that he advises against.

Jo Michelle Beld's article on child support guidelines defends the efforts of the Minnesota Child Support Enforcement Division to maintain the state's formula for determining child support award amounts (2003). She responds to long-standing criticism, in this instance conveyed by Stephen Baskerville, that the child support enforcement community, which has a financial interest in child support amounts, exercises unchecked authority through the forced use of guidelines, and that as a result, child support awards are arbitrarily high (2002).

In every modern political system, power is shared to a greater or lesser extent between levels of government. These power sharing arrangements are perhaps most explicit in formal federal systems like the United States and Canada, where federal constitutions define the relative powers of central and subnational governments. They may be no less important, however, in unitary democracies and even authoritarian regimes where central governments require local actors to implement policy on the ground and often delegate significant authority to them. Indeed, in any large and complex modern society, effective governance requires some sharing of power between higher levels of government, capable of coordinating many disparate actors and interests, and lower levels of government, capable of responding to local conditions.

“Maybe we ought to recall him?” Ted Costa to Mark Abernathy, telephone conversation, November 17th, 2002 (comment of Mark Abernathy, IGS Berkeley Oct 18th).

The names of the co-authors of the track three summary were inadvertently omitted in publication. Along with John Ishiyama, the authors of this summary include Thomas Baldino, Wilkes University; Bruce Caswell, Rowan University; Maqsood Choudary, Delta College; Michelle Deardorff, Jackson State University; Scott Erb, University of Maine, Farmington; Kerstin Hamann, University of Central Florida; Suzan Harkness, University of the District of Columbia; Richard Holtzman, University of Texas, Austin; Mariya Omelicheva, Purdue University; Candace Young, Truman State University.

Why does one federation succeed while another fails? Federations may fail for exogenous reasons: foreign invasion, collapse of its currency, or global market forces. If we focus on endogenous factors, the possible reasons for failure include diversity, where populations drift apart or clash too often, or jealousy from redistributive asymmetry, with unequal shouldering of costs or dispersion of benefits, and, of course, corruption and insurrection. While potentially significant, these problems are not particular to federalism; they threaten all democracies. There is, however, one threat that afflicts federations in particular. It is the one that perplexed and animated James Madison in the American context: opportunistic authority migration between levels of government.

Contemporary debate over globalization casts its political effects as both revolutionary and contradictory. Globalization, it is claimed, drains political authority from nation-states, long the dominant form of political organization in world politics. The state's monopoly of familiar governance functions erodes as authority migrates down to newly empowered regions, provinces, and municipalities; up to supranational organizations; and laterally to such private firms and transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that acquire previously “public” responsibilities.

This symposium presents seven presidential election forecasting models and their predictions of the popular two-party vote in the 2004 election. The modern age of election forecasting is now into its third decade. Models have been tested quite publicly in the heat of battle—with some doing well, others not quite so well, and still others making way for new models. In this introduction, I provide a brief overview of the models, a summary of this year's forecasts, and some thoughts about how the forecasts should be judged.