People in Political Science.

Nelson Polsby, Heller Professor of Political Science and former director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley, passed away on February 6, 2007, at the age of 72. He was a prominent member of a renowned graduate cohort group that studied under Robert Dahl at Yale in the fifties and included his long-time Berkeley colleagues Raymond Wolfinger and Aaron Wildavsky. After briefly teaching at the University of Wisconsin and Wesleyan University, Nelson joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty in 1967, where he remained until his death. Nelson received many honors during his illustrious career, including honorary degrees from the University of Liverpool (1992) and the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (2001), election to the American Academy of Arts and Science (1982), and the Frank Goodnow Award (2003) for Distinguished Service to the Political Science Profession. He was managing editor of the American Political Science Review from 1971–1977 and served on the editorial board of 21 other journals. His death was widely reported by the press in the U.S. and Europe, including a lengthy obituary in the Times of London.

This short article outlines why the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for the final 71 years of the twentieth century, not only lost the 2006 presidential election, but posted a miserable third place finish by taking only 22.7% of the national vote versus 36.7% for the winner, Felipe Calderón of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) and 36.1% for the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). It also explains why, despite its recent electoral results, the once-hegemonic party will continue to play an important, but reduced political role: as a coalition partner with the governing PAN to create majorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

It has now been four years of contested elections for the Council of the Association. In this note we ask: What can we learn about these elections from a political science perspective?

Classes begin today: one section of Rhodes College's celebrated great books course, The Search for Values in the Light of Western History and Religion, and two sections of a new course for me and (surprisingly) for Rhodes, Southern Politics. Today, as on subsequent Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the next 14 weeks, I'll begin at noon with Search and keep going until 2:50 with my other two classes. Over the years I've found that it's easier (not easy, but easier) to teach my classes back-to-back-to-back than to pump myself up for a class, come down afterward, and have to climb that motivational hill again before meeting the next one.

This is the 35th year that I have been monitoring participation by women at our Annual Meeting. These PS reports have documented the ascent of women in our profession. While some are sanguine in believing that women have achieved sufficient advancement and that my annual assessments are no longer necessary, there was a plenary roundtable at the 2006 meeting with a premise that there is still a problem of continuing underrepresentation in the discipline (see Table 1).

In memoriam.

Professor Donald Rothchild, one the foremost of the students of African international relations, passed away on January 30, 2007, at the age of 78 from complications related to lymphoma.

Over February 16–17, 2007, after careful deliberation and consideration of the Association's Bylaws and the Council's charge as articulated by President Robert Axelrod, and after canvassing the membership for suggestions as articulated in the APSA Constitution, the 2006–2007 Nominating Committee submitted the following slate of elective Officers. In its deliberations, the Committee was mindful of giving due regard to diversity, geographical distribution, fields of professional interest, type of institution, academic/nonacademic employment status, as well as to the Council's guidance to take into account non-Ph.D.-granting institutions in the nomination of candidates, and to avoid selecting a nominee for president of the same gender for more than two consecutive years.

Scholars are sometimes called upon to adjudicate charges of plagiarism, that is, of the unacknowledged “lifting” of one writer's words or ideas by another. When literal copying of whole expressions or sentences is involved, judgments are straightforward. But when the accuser claims that his or her ideas were plagiarized, as in the recent court case against Random House over Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, the situation is much more complicated. Passing judgment in such cases requires a reflection on the meaning of “plagiarism” and the best ways of assessing it, which this brief article seeks to provide.

Here's a preview of some of the articles that will be published in the April 2007 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics:

Grounded in APSA President Robert Axelrod's task force on interdisciplinarity, the 103rd Annual Meeting in Chicago moved past disciplinary boundaries to explore “Political Science and Beyond.” Program Co-Chairs Elisabeth Gerber of the University of Michigan and David Lake of the University of California, San Diego organized all panels and plenary sessions by working closely with the Program Committee, a 52-member team drawn from the Organized Sections.

Founded in 1953, the APSA Congressional Fellowship Program is the nation's oldest and most prestigious congressional fellowship. More than fifty years later, the program remains devoted to its original objective of expanding knowledge and awareness of Congress.

When the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency in 2000, the central cleavage that defined Mexican politics in the last 15 years of the twentieth century—pro-regime vs. anti-regime—could no longer guide voters on Election Day. With no PRI to vote out of office (or to defend), Mexicans were impelled to turn their political attention to non-regime issues, such as economic policy, social policy, relations with the United States, and crime control. As Kathleen Bruhn and Kenneth Greene make clear in their contribution to this symposium, Mexican political elites are seriously divided on these issues, while the views of their bases are not far apart.

Politics are ubiquitous in social life, shaping all manner of interactions in so many spheres of human activity. From the playground to the retirement community, from the marketplace to the halls of government, from families to the global economy, we are constantly engaged in political struggles large and small. Political science, in turn, has long been fundamentally interdisciplinary, exchanging ideas, theories, data, and methods with fields from anthropology to zoology;mo;usb;mc; – and everything in between. As political science has become a more self-conscious discipline, it has simultaneously grown more aware of its intellectual debts and on-going contributions to cognate fields of study. The 103rd Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association will celebrate the interdisciplinary nature of political science and highlight new opportunities for intellectual exchange across disciplinary boundaries.

One day, argues Foucault, we may wonder how “the ruses of sexuality” seduced us to academic inquiry, but that day is possible only “in a different economy of bodies and pleasures” (1976, 159). In such a very different political reality, a genealogical account of the relationship between power and sexuality might not be necessary. But at present, “our discourse, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledge” is “busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment” sexuality so pervasive in our consciousness that it informs much of our political culture and democratic governance. Politicians fear being caught in its seduction, yet conjure it to excite voters. Campaign advisers dance with sexuality, provoking it to publicly bless their candidate and using it to scandalize their opponent. Janus-faced voters charge the state with its regulation while, publicly and privately, celebrating sexual freedoms. The body politic knows well the power of sexuality. The leading professional association of political scientists has yet to formally recognise it. Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. Perhaps that day has come.The authors would like to thank Cynthia Burack and Jyl Josephson for assistance with this article.

Here's an early look at some of the articles you'll see in the November American Political Science Review.

APSA is excited to once again return to Chicago for the 103rd Annual Meeting, which will be held from August 30–September 2, 2007. There is no place more fitting than the Windy City, home of the ground-breaking social science innovation of the various Chicago Schools of the mid-twentieth century, to celebrate the diversity of the political science profession and this year's program theme, “Political Science and Beyond.” The program committee, chaired by Elisabeth R. Gerber (University of Michigan) and David A. Lake (University of California, San Diego) has put together an impressive program, consisting of over 800 panels in 46 Thematic Divisions. Panels and plenary sessions will focus on the idea of interdisciplinarity and will feature discussions and presentations from some of the most respected social scientists of our time. In addition, the program chairs have put together several theme panels which will address topics directly related to the meeting's theme, as well as current issues and hot topics in today's society.

Scholars who study American political institutions have tended to specialize in a single body such as the U.S. Congress or the federal courts. However, a growing movement among judicial scholars argues that the courts cannot be understood in isolation, but instead must be understood as a part of the larger system of government. As Neustadt (1980, 26) has reminded us, in reality the U.S. system of government features “separated institutions sharing powers.” Alexander Bickel (1962) was one of the first voices in what one could label the Governance as Dialogue movement. Bickel said that the courts must engage in a “continuing colloquy” with the more political branches of government and with other political actors, refuting the judicial supremacy approach that was popular at that time. In Constitutional Dialogues (1988) and in his other writings, Louis Fisher has argued that the courts, and especially the U.S. Supreme Court, do not have the sole responsibility of interpreting the U.S. Constitution, but that constitutional interpretation involves a very complicated dialogue among various political actors. Others, such as William N. Eskridge (1991a; 1991b), have argued that the interactions between the courts, the executive, and Congress are a highly complex multiple-player game. Recent literature on the interactions between courts and Congress has been growing steadily, and includes, among others, works by Geyh (2006); Devins and Whittington (2005); Barnes (2004); Pickerill (2004); Miller and Barnes (2004); and Lovell (2003).

Interpretive research methods of various sorts have long been used to study “the political,” but the full range of such methods is not widely known, and many are curious about what they entail. Others, who begin to use one or another of them, have questions about how to proceed. For those just learning about these methods, questions may be as basic as: “What does ethnomethodology mean?” “What is semiotic analysis?” “Are these approaches recognized as legitimate in political science?” Scholars engaging, or perhaps teaching, these methods might ask, e.g., “How do ethnographers overcome problems of accessing their field site, talking to strangers, and turning a year's worth of observational and interview notes into concise text?”We thank 2005 and 2006 Program Chairs Ron Schmidt and Val Martinez-Ebers and Executive Director Betty Moulds and Associate Director Elsa Favila at the Western Political Science Association, and Qualitative Methods 2006 Section Program Chairs Julia Lynch and Melani Cammett, and Michael Brintnall, Rob Hauck, Christina Marmor, and others on the conference organizing staff at APSA. Michael and Rob came to the Café at the Western in 2006 to see for themselves what it was that we were trying to do. We are grateful for their help in making it possible at APSA. And, of course, we thank all those colleagues who have contributed their time and thought to creating the Café with us, including Cecelia Lynch, who saw right at the beginning that it was a ‘café’ and came up with its definitive name.