People in political science.

The controversy over the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in cartoons that swept the globe at the beginning of 2006 was arguably the second major event after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that brought “Muslims” as a group of political actors to the forefront of international politics. The crisis was sparked in late September 2005, by the publication of political cartoons, depicting Islamic prophet Muhammad, in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. While the original cause of controversy was limited to a small country in northern Europe, political actions spread worldwide, ranging from peaceful protests to diplomatic sanctions to consumer boycotts, and finally to open violence against anything symbolizing “the West.” The levels of political action were muddled, and responsibilities as well as the potential to act were confused. Almost all of the actors involved in the controversy were left without an appropriate counterpart to address. For example, the Arab League and Muslim organizations blamed the Danish government for the publication of the cartoons, and for not taking action against the independent publisher of Jyllands-Posten. Enraged Muslim citizens of countries as geographically distant as Lebanon, Sudan, and Indonesia attacked and ransacked Danish embassies, and threatened anyone coming from a country belonging to the European Union. The editors of several newspapers—e.g., in France and Jordan—who had decided to reprint the cartoons either in an act of journalistic solidarity with Jyllands-Posten or to inform their Muslim readership about the cartoons, were fired. And, terrorist group Al Qaeda put the editor and cartoonists of Jyllands-Posten, as well as all of Denmark, at the top of its target list. The diplomatic fallout from the cartoon publication was enormous and has severely shattered relations between European and Arab countries. Despite the enormity of the event, the question of how the publication of 12 cartoons in Denmark could lead to a global crisis that dominated the news and kept diplomats and politicians on alert for more than three months remains unanswered.

While many bemoan the increasingly large role rankings play in American higher education, their prominence and importance are indisputable. Such rankings have many different audiences, ranging from prospective undergraduates or graduate students, to foundations and government funders, to university administrators identifying strengths and weaknesses of their school. This diverse audience necessarily has varying hopes for what “quality” is measured in school rankings, and different uses for the rankings themselves. But although there are currently a wide variety of ways to assess graduate school quality, most existing surveys have recognized failings that compromise their usefulness to at least one of these different constituencies.The authors extend their thanks to William Bowen, Derek Bruff, Jonathan Cole, Philip Katz, Gary King, Robert Townsend, Harriet Zuckerman, and two anonymous PS reviewers for their valuable comments on and criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.

What can undergraduate students of comparative politics learn from studying Spain? Clearly, many professors do not see any good reasons to integrate Spain in introductory courses on comparative politics or European politics. Spain is often considered as a country on the periphery of western Europe—geographically, economically, and politically—and thus not worth spending time discussing in introductory courses on comparative politics or even western European politics. Given the time constraints of short semesters, instructors have to make choices about which topics and countries to cover when choosing European case studies for their syllabus, and often settle for a mix of the “classic” cases such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, and “newer” cases, such as new democracies in eastern and central Europe. Spain fits neither the established, advanced industrialized democracies category nor is it of much obvious interest for studying the latest developments in EU expansion. Spain re-democratized in the latter half of the 1970s and is currently celebrating 30 years of electoral democracy. The country joined the EU, then the European Communities, in 1986, together with Portugal and Greece. Thus, the newness of Spanish democracy and its EU membership has long since passed as a point of interest for college instruction, giving way to the new democracies in central and eastern Europe and the more recent waves of EU expansion. At the same time, Spanish democracy is too young to present a classic case of advanced industrialized democracies. In short, Spain does not appear to have much inherent appeal for undergraduate comparative politics courses.I gratefully acknowledge research assistance from Wendy Whitman in collecting information on textbooks and syllabi.

Does the fallout from the now infamous Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad reflect inherent mass radicalism or irrationality on the part of Muslim societies? Judging from the news coverage broadcast to Western audiences, one would think so. Most media images focused on bearded men or veiled women demonstrating and burning flags reinforced by dramatic sound bites, as when the usually sober BBC (2006) cited one protester as saying: “They want to test our feelings. They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and their newspapers.” These reactions seemed disproportionate, if not irrational, because of the medium: they were, after all, just drawings.

As the University of Washington prepared for the arrival of Dr. Paul Farmer, a global health doctor and the subject of the campus common book, Mountains Beyond Mountains (New York: Random House, 2003), a team of faculty, administrators, and community leaders promoted ideas of global citizenship both on and off the territorial boundaries of the campus. The book, selected for its resonance with issues of general interest to the campus (interdisciplinary approaches, student engagement, a new global health initiative, the power of ideas, the role of entrepreneurship, and the capacity for non-state actors in world politics to shape agendas), had acquired a following more like a social movement than an administrative initiative. Coffee shops adjoining the campus featured copies of the book, and honors students coordinated and invited faculty members to come to evening discussion sessions. As University of Washington Professor Jonathan Mayer commented, “I have seen this book change careers and change lives.”

Although the study of regional and local politics has been largely conducted in the context of the United States (Loughlin 2001), in recent decades, researchers have studied sub-state transformations and multilevel governance in Europe (see, for example, Marks 1993; Bukowski et al. 2003; Weatherill 2005). In this article, I urge professors to incorporate this literature in undergraduate, comparative politics classrooms and I suggest how to do so using the case of Spain. I argue that Spain, and more generally southern Europe, provides an exciting context in which to discuss subnational themes. The article is structured in four sections. First, I explain the Comparative European Politics course in which I discuss the Spanish sub-state. The second section demonstrates Spain's comparative appeal by summarizing its State of Autonomies and situating it within the European context. The third section raises theoretical debates about democracy, subnational institutions, and the European Union. The final section offers accessible lecture examples for European politics courses.

There are many different ways to develop rankings of Ph.D.-granting academic departments. Perhaps the most common method is reputational: we simply ask knowledgeable scholars in the discipline to provide their rankings and aggregate these in some fashion. Other ways involve more “objective indicators.” But, of course, departments have multiple attributes, e.g., we might be interested in how good a department is as a place to get a Ph.D., or we might be interested simply in the research record of its faculty, etc. Thus, we might want to use different indicators to measure different aspects of the department.

The recent international uproar caused by the publication of the “Muhammad Cartoons” has had the useful side effect of stimulating thought about the roles newspaper editors and editorial cartoonists ought to play in our increasingly globalized world. This symposium article is based on my 10-year study of cartoons related to watershed changes in the Indonesian political system.This article draws on previous articles by the author. See the References section.

“Publish or perish.” Every graduate student has heard the phrase. Many junior scholars understand that it reflects the cold reality of professional survival in any political science department that bases tenure and promotion decisions, in whole or in part, on a record of demonstrated scholarly achievement. Despite occasional pronouncements by college presidents or faculty committees that teaching should be given greater weight in personnel decisions, the pressure to publish will not soon subside. If anything, it may be becoming more acute, as graduate students entering the job market struggle to publish some portion of their dissertation in a respected scholarly journal so as to distinguish themselves from the pack of applicants presenting otherwise similar credentials.I wish to thank Jack Jacobs, Lenny Markovitz, Michael Hiscox, and the graduate students at the CUNY Graduate Center and Harvard University for many useful suggestions and comments on the presentations that served as the basis for this article. I have incorporated ideas offered by Jim Jackson, Marianne Stewart, and John Geer at an editors' roundtable in which we participated at the 2006 Midwest Political Science Association meeting. Bob Lineberry and two anonymous referees helped me to clarify certain points in the manuscript. I am responsible for any errors that remain.

Spain occupies a prominent position in the teaching of comparative politics. It is a paradigmatic example of a successful transition to and consolidation of democracy, as well as an intriguing study in constitutional development, federalism, and a host of other topics. I have found that it is particularly useful when discussing electoral systems and representation.

On July 2, 2006, Mexican voters elected National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderón as the next president of Mexico. Calderón's victory was extremely narrow; he won under 36% of the total vote and less that 0.6% more than his leftist rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This potentially problematic situation was aggravated by López Obrador's decision to challenge Calderón's victory, both in the courts and in the streets. López Obrador's protest campaign culminated on September 16, when tens of thousands of his followers gathered in downtown Mexico City to acclaim him “legitimate president” of Mexico. Meanwhile, in the legislature, leaders of López Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) oscillated between hints that they would collaborate with Calderón's administration and signs that they would adopt a posture of untrammeled hostility.

Flipping through the recently published collection of R. K. Laxman's cartoons chronicling Indian democracy (titled Brushing Up the Years: A Cartoonist's History of India 1947–2004, 2005), I was intrigued by the dynamic nature of the material collected together. It is indispensable as a teaching tool that displays the many vicissitudes of Indian democracy over the years. But also, the active nature of actual democratic life pulsated through each and every framed visual satiric political presentation. What is it about his visual melancholic humor that seems to question democratic functioning at its kernel? There is nothing funny/trivial about democratic governance, but by drawing in the comical aspect of a functioning democracy, Laxman's cartoons draw out a democracy alive to its inherent possibilities; a democracy laughing at itself for the aberrations from its idyllic potential.

The Fourth Congress of the Russian Political Science Association (RPSA) met in Moscow over October 20–22, 2006. The theme of the congress was “Democracy, Security, and Good Governance: New Challenges for Political Science.” I represented the American Political Science Association at the Congress, and representatives of the IPSA and of the Greek, Korean, Ukrainian, and Belarus Political Science Associations were there as well on behalf of their organizations. Political scientists from Germany, Egypt, and Switzerland also took part. Friday was devoted to plenary sessions, Saturday to thematic panel sessions, and Sunday to section meetings. Some 400 members of the RPSA from throughout the country attended the congress. Many of these were young scholars, including graduate students. In Russia, political science—politology, as it is more commonly termed—has become a recognized discipline in many universities and research institutes, and a number of textbooks have been published for use in political science courses.

Just as there was a boom in the establishment of Master's of Business Administration programs over the past 30 or more years, today there is an equivalent boom in graduate programs in the field of public policy. This is so for the transition states of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union where the dynamics of globalization and “Europeanization” are apparent and the pressures for reform pronounced (Verheijen and Connaughton 2003, 843). Appointing personnel with the educational prerequisites necessary for managing reform and meeting the challenges of globalization has been problematic for both official actors such as national education ministries, international organizations, and bilateral development agencies, as well as for non-state actors such as the business sector, philanthropic foundations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The need for graduates who can function in international and cross-cultural contexts is prompting institutions to create new courses and professional degree programs (Mallea 1998, 16).

A century and a half ago, casting a vote in the United States was an engaging social experience, as voters at the polls talked with friends, threw down shots of free whiskey, listened to lively entertainment, and generally had a good time (McGerr 1986). According to Altschuler and Blumin (2000, 75)We are grateful to Pam Lamonaca and Nicole Batdorf, who played a key role in organizing Election Day festivals, and Timothy Ryan and Marcos Luis, who helped in all phases of this project. We also thank Dan Winslow, whose ideas about raising turnout were an impetus for this project, and Dan Bergan and Beth Weinberger, who commented on earlier drafts. The studies described here were funded by generous grants from the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale, the Tufts Summer Scholars Program, and Working Assets, none of which bear responsibility for the content of this report.

Social scientists have long been interested in how academic disciplines are organized (Ben-David and Collins 1966; Kuhn 1970; Lipset 1994; Rojas 2003; Somit and Tanenhaus 1964; 1967). One important element of this organization is the network of Ph.D. placements among Ph.D.-granting institutions. Various authors have linked the structure of placements to prestige rankings of departments (for sociology departments see e.g., Hanneman 2001; and Burris 2004; for political science departments see Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007c), or have used various features of the structure of academic exchange networks to examine the shaping of disciplinary careers and practices (Feld, Bisciglia, and Ynalvez 2003; Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007b). There is also a more general literature on status and market exchange (see e.g., Podolny 2005).We are indebted to Clover Behrend-Gethard for bibliographic assistance.

Tom Mann is, well, beaming. Five months ago he wrote a Sunday Outlook piece for the Washington Post arguing that “the prevailing view in Washington today”—namely, that “there's probably no way congressional Republicans can lose this fall”—is “wrong.” Tom was vindicated on Election Day when the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress, and here at the “America Votes 2006” conference in Little Rock, co-sponsored by the Clinton School of Public Service and the State Legislative Leaders Foundation, he is accepting the congratulations of, among others, me. Other elections prognosticators at the conference, such as Charlie Cook and the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, have already moved on to speculating about what's going to happen in 2008, but Tom is rightly enjoying the moment.

Collaborative institutions, which involve the collective decision-making by multiple political agencies, communities, and stakeholders, are becoming increasingly important for addressing policy dilemmas that are not bound within a single jurisdiction. This is especially true in the environmental arena (Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000; Karkkainen 2002; Koontz et al. 2004; Lubell 2004; McKinney and Harmon 2004; Brick et al. 2001; Sabel et al. 2000). In the water management field, for instance, Sabatier, Weible, and Ficker (2005) have argued that the growth of collaborative efforts among small watersheds is so widespread that it has become a new paradigm of management. A considerable body of policy research, particularly on watershed management, has begun to examine the factors that support the emergence of collaborative environmental governance (Lubell et al. 2002; Blomquist 1992; Ostrom 1990). Understanding what factors affect the performance of collaborative institutions has also become an emerging theme in this scholarship (Sabatier, Leach, Lubell, and Pelkey 2005; Leach, Pelkey, and Sabatier 2002; Conley and Moote 2003; Innes and Booher 1999). Empirically and methodologically however, what is often missing from research on collaborative institutions is a clearer picture of what factors support the endurance of collaborative institutions over time.

Political humor directed at President Alyaksandr Lukashenka is beyond the official boundaries of the permissible in Belarus, a former Soviet Republic tucked away on the eastern border of the European Union and oft labeled “Europe's last dictatorship.” In August 2005, KGB officers raided the Minsk office of the civic group Third Way, confiscated the computer equipment, and threatened criminal charges for posting animated cartoons on the group's web site (http://mult.3dway.org). Oleg Minich, the cartoonist and founder of the virtual cartoon club Multclub, faced imprisonment of up to five years. His alleged crime falls under Article 367 of the Criminal Code, “Defamation of the President of the Republic of Belarus.” This flagrant attack on the freedom of expression was part of a broader crackdown on the mass media in preparation for the 2006 presidential election.