This article argues that instructors should introduce students to abstract concepts only after they have provided concrete illustrations of them. The advantages of working from the concrete to the abstract are twofold: (1) students have an easier time conceptualizing abstractions from within a particular context, and (2) such a context provides them with a greater motivation to do so. In an effort to mirror the pedagogical approach I defend, I begin by reviewing the manner in which Plato introduces the concept of justice to his readers in Book I of the Republic. I then examine the common model of teaching abstract concepts, demonstrate how an effective alternative differs from this model, and review the education theories that support the alternative model.

In only 10 years, Wikipedia has risen from obscurity to become the dominant information source for an entire generation. However, any visitor can edit any page on Wikipedia, which hardly fosters confidence in its accuracy. In this article, I review thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders to assess both the accuracy and the thoroughness of Wikipedia's coverage. I find that Wikipedia is almost always accurate when a relevant article exists, but errors of omission are extremely frequent. These errors of omission follow a predictable pattern. Wikipedia's political coverage is often very good for recent or prominent topics but is lacking on older or more obscure topics.

This article describes social structural inequities in the academy that contribute to gender imbalances in faculty service demands, which can slow women's career advancement. The author criticizes as ill-considered and ineffective the popular notion that the solution rests with individual female faculty, who should “just say no” to service. Instead, she proposes structural and cultural solutions to this systemic problem, including a revaluation of faculty labor required to maintain the day-to-day operation of institutions of higher learning and research.

Recent discussions of teaching research methods have focused on understanding the relationship between methods courses and the broader discipline, including the need to integrate qualitative methods and other approaches beyond the traditional statistical approaches still common in the majority of undergraduate research methods courses. This article contributes to this conversation by arguing that the basic elements of research design and qualitative techniques should be integrated into substantive (or “non-methods”) courses across the discipline. To accomplish this aim, I offer a brief outline of methodological benchmark skills—drawn from the pool of skills necessary for a successful thesis—that can be taught in various courses across the discipline through a traditional assignment: the semester research paper.

The stakes of political conflict involve contending values and issue definitions as well as policy. Welfare reform was the most important change in American domestic policy since civil rights. Its significance hinges crucially on how participants understood the issue, but existing research fails to resolve what their perceptions were. Most accounts suggest that welfare reform was an ideological contest concerning the proper scope of government, but there are other views. This study gauges the welfare agenda rigorously by coding speakers in congressional hearings on the basis of how they framed the issue and the position they took on it during the six chief episodes of welfare reform that occurred between 1962 and 1996. The reform efforts aroused four distinct divisions. Over time, positions moved rightward, but more important, the dominant issue changed: The ideological debate about government was overtaken by a more practical debate about how to manage welfare. This is the first study to track the substantive meaning of any issue in Congress over an extended period of time using hearing witnesses and a preset analytic scheme.

This article addresses the pedagogical value of teaching Aristotle's Politics 4.1 early in an introductory course in political theory that draws texts from the history of political thought. I argue that this chapter provides an interpretive key to understanding arguments made elsewhere in the Politics and can be used to introduce students to the kinds of theorizing that appear in the study of politics more generally. I begin by laying out some common learning obstacles that students experience in introductory political theory courses, using Politics 4.1 to address these issues. I then outline my approach to this text and conclude by reflecting on some of the possibilities and limitations of this method of introducing the nature of political theory to an undergraduate population.

Process tracing is a fundamental tool of qualitative analysis. This method is often invoked by scholars who carry out within-case analysis based on qualitative data, yet frequently it is neither adequately understood nor rigorously applied. This deficit motivates this article, which offers a new framework for carrying out process tracing. The reformulation integrates discussions of process tracing and causal-process observations, gives greater attention to description as a key contribution, and emphasizes the causal sequence in which process-tracing observations can be situated. In the current period of major innovation in quantitative tools for causal inference, this reformulation is part of a wider, parallel effort to achieve greater systematization of qualitative methods. A key point here is that these methods can add inferential leverage that is often lacking in quantitative analysis. This article is accompanied by online teaching exercises, focused on four examples from American politics, two from comparative politics, three from international relations, and one from public health/epidemiology.

We argue for the importance of adequately distinguishing between the concepts of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. We review the literature across disciplines to suggest ways that political scientists might benefit by taking into account important biological distinctions in addition to cultural factors regarding sex, gender, and sexuality in their research. We clarify the distinction between these concepts in an effort to help reduce discrimination and defuse misconceptions, stereotypes, and imposed social roles. We believe that it would be fruitful for us as a discipline to better communicate this research to the wider public in the hope that public opinion and elite discourse will shift in a more tolerant and positive direction as a result.

A PSA is pleased to recognize the recipients of campus-wide and departmental awards for teaching excellence during the 2010–11 academic year. Pi Sigma Alpha hosts these recipients each year at the Reception Honoring Teaching at the APSA Annual Meeting.

Since tenure decisions concern the award of an employment guarantee, the burden of proof ought to rest on the candidate; in cases of doubt, the vote should be negative. However, a number of corrosive tendencies often weaken the strict application of this principle. To counteract these tendencies, this article advocates a strategy of pre-commitment to fairly objective standards and reliance on the professional judgments of a variety of anonymous outside experts, as reflected in a candidate's success in the double-blind peer review process.

In 2010, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) celebrated its fortieth anniversary as the leading association for political science in Europe. Forty-one years earlier, in 1969, three European political scientists sent a letter to about a dozen of their European colleagues outlining some suggestions for creating an informal network of institutions and centers interested in comparative politics research. The authors of the letter were Serge Hurtig, Jean Blondel, and Stein Rokkan. Over the next year, led by Blondel and Rokkan with the support of a number of leading professors at the forefront of comparative research in their respective countries (the “founders” being Serge Hurtig, Norman Chester, Hans Daalder, Richard Rose, Jorgen Westerstahl, and Rudolf Wildenmann) and the backing of the Ford Foundation, the ECPR began to take shape. The original plan called for a European journal, a summer school, inventories of European political scientists and graduate courses, workshops, a data information center, and the construction of a transnational infrastructure of institutions to foster a self-sustaining community of professional political scientists. On July 29, 1970, a Ford Foundation grant was awarded to support the achievement of these aims, and the ECPR was established.

We propose that teaching critical thinking is the most important job of teachers in the political science profession. Yet political scientists rarely engage with one another about the specific assignments used to teach critical thinking. This article is the beginning of what we hope will become a dialogue on how to best teach students to think critically. We make a few recommendations for assignments that aim to make students think critically within the various political science methodologies: normative, interpretive, causal, and comparative analysis. We argue for a particular strategy in teaching critical thinking that reinforces students' abilities to recognize which kinds of arguments require which kinds of evidence.

This article examines a mock trial I have developed and used in teaching the history of political thought. Mock trials have been underused but have great potential to become an effective and exciting tool for student learning in this area. In this mock trial, the plaintiff, defendant, attorneys, and witnesses are eminent political or economic thinkers or political leaders of the past. Active engagement in this mock trial helped my students immensely in gaining deeper insight into and a more nuanced understanding of the ideas of the thinker they represented, as well as enhancing their critical and analytical abilities and improving their research skills. As a teaching tool that is amenable to creative adaptation, a mock trial can be an engaging and effective exercise for delving into the history of political thought and making it more relevant.

Dissemination of journal submission data is critical for identifying editorial bias, creating an informed scholarly marketplace, and critically mapping the contours of a discipline's scholarship. However, our survey and case study investigations indicate that nearly a decade after the Perestroika movement began, political science journals remain reserved in collecting and releasing submission data. We offer several explanations for this lack of transparency and suggest ways that the profession might address this shortcoming.

Given the large number of cases and considerable institutional and contextual variation across and within local governments, one might assume that the study of local elections is an area already well harvested by political scientists. The truth, however, is that this area of inquiry is relatively unexplored. In fact, to say that a field of study on local elections exists would be a bit of an overstatement. Not only is the literature rather small and not particularly cohesive, but the data collection and methods of analysis are also somewhat primitive, particularly compared to research on state and federal elections. While, on the one hand, this lack of subfield development means that there are many unanswered and even unexplored questions, on the other hand, it means that the possibilities for future research are practically limitless.

Tyson D. King-Meadows was recently promoted to associate professor with tenure in the department of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research interests include Congress, African American political behavior and attitudes, representation, and public opinion. He is author of Devolution and Black State Legislators: Challenges and Choices in the Twenty-first Century (2006, with Thomas F. Schaller) and When the Letter Betrays the Spirit: Voting Rights Enforcement and African American Participation from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama (2011).

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Within contemporary political science, local elections are the perennial bridesmaids of behavioral research. While municipal contests are more numerous than any other type of election, academic interest in the factors that motivate local participation and voting behavior pales in comparison to the attention given to national politics. Case studies of individual elections in a small subset of larger American cities do exist, but within the local politics literature, few studies argue for a general theory of local voting behavior (but see Kaufmann 2004; Oliver and Ha 2007). Even in those cases that do, insufficient data exist to rigorously test or replicate these results on a large scale.

Previous research has documented how political scientists evaluate and rank scholarly journals, but the evaluation and ranking of scholarly book publishers has drawn less attention. In this article, we use data from a survey of 603 American political scientists to generate a ranking of scholarly publishers in political science. We used open-ended questions to ask respondents to identify those scholarly publishers (1) to which they would submit “a very strong book manuscript” in their area of expertise, and (2) that they “read regularly or otherwise rely for the best research” in their area of expertise. Based on these results, we created rankings of scholarly presses based on publication and reading preferences. We find that certain high-profile university presses constitute a clear first tier in American political scientists' preference orderings, followed by a mix of university and commercial presses that represent the second tier and beyond. Moreover, we confirm the validity of our approach by comparing the results of our rankings (based on open-ended questions) with results from previous research based on respondents' evaluations and derived from close-ended lists of scholarly presses. Our results demonstrate that the rankings of scholarly publishers are similar for both approaches. These rankings can be used to guide political scientists as they decide where to send their best book-length work.

Many political science publications advance knowledge using previously collected data and an innovation or two in theory or methods. To encourage students embarking on a seminar paper project, I review some of these publications to illustrate that the understanding of political phenomena often advances in incremental steps.