The article on the seats-votes curve by Kastellec, Gelman, and Chandler (January 2008, 139–45) presents interesting and helpful analysis and data. Especially important is the insight that incumbency necessarily requires a minority party to receive more than 50% of the vote to gain control of the House of Representatives. However the article is misleading in two respects.

In a recent issue, Young and Sigelman (2008) present evidence of a “Dakota effect,” in which persons born in the Dakotas are disproportionately likely to represent their home state, other states, and also generate government spending directed toward the Dakotas. These authors are unable to explain the causal underpinnings for overrepresentation in Congress or the Dakotan natives' keen ability to direct pork back to these two states.

Micheal Giles and James Garand have done us a great service by revealing many of the complexities involved in using either citational or reputational approaches to ranking journals in political science (October 2007).

Responses to articles and replies to responses.

Organizations of any duration develop norms of behavior. A few are codified in organizational rules but many remain informal, transmitted to new members through socialization mechanisms. All norms, informal norms in particular, are resilient but not permanent. They change if socialization instruments are no longer effective or if members are aware of established norms but opt to no longer follow them.

This symposium presents 10 articles forecasting the 2008 U.S. national elections. The core of this collection is the seven presidential-vote forecasting models that were presented in this space before the 2004 election. Added to that group are one additional presidential forecasting model, one state-level elections forecasting model, and one model forecasting the relationship between congressional votes and seats won by the parties. Some of the articles that are focused on the presidential race have also taken the opportunity to forecast the congressional elections as well.

We thank Dr. Arrington for his kind words about our article. In this letter we respond to his two main criticisms: that our use of the term bias in describing the situation facing the Democratic Party in 2006 is misleading and that using total vote to assess the results of the election is preferable to using average district vote, as we did in the article.

The 2007 John Gaus Lecture was presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, on August 31, 2007.

Reading the results of Lavariega-Monforti and Michelson's study of Latinas and Latinos in the profession in the January issue (“Diagnosing the Leaky Pipeline: Continuing Barriers to the Retention of Latinas and Latinos in Political Science”) made for depressing reading. Sadly, their observations are deadly accurate on the experiences of endemic institutional racism that Latino and Latina political scientists face in American academic institutions. This culture of endemic racism was vibrant in graduate school while I was getting my Ph.D. and appears to have changed little since then. For that reason I am very pessimistic that this situation will change in my generation and, frankly, the APSA has been very slow to act on this problem. In my personal experience, in British universities I have been evaluated on my merits, rather than on my ethnic background. I would urge other Latino and Latina political scientists to consider using their skills in the UK and elsewhere.

One of the most significant questions in the twenty-first century for academics, politicians, and Western societies more broadly is: How will Islamism impact on our future? This question, like the concept of Islamism itself, is massively complex and extremely mutable, changing, adapting, and transforming in various ideological, geographic, and cultural contexts. These five articles present a small sliver of the work being carried out in the UK on the challenges that Islamism poses for European liberal democracies, especially Britain, and these pieces ultimately propose some learned and hypothesized strategies to bring about a successful and peaceful engagement with this phenomenon.

With another Bush looking weak, many Democrats are feeling good about their prospects in November, even without the dream of a job in the White House for themselves. Yet this time, a Bush won't be on the presidential ballot in November, nor will someone closely affiliated with his administration, such as the vice president. Whatever the Bush legacy may be, the 2008 presidential election shapes up as an open-seat contest. A key predictor of the model used here to forecast the outcome of that contest is the showing of the presidential nominees in primaries (hence the sobriquet Primary Model). Since American elections in November are typically preceded by primary elections earlier in the year, it is natural to inquire whether the voting in presidential primaries is a leading indicator of the vote in the general election? Remarkably so, as it turns out. How the presidential candidates do in primary elections foretells their prospects in the November election with great accuracy.

In my three decades in the profession I have served on an uncountable number of search committees. In recent years I increasingly encountered an annoying (to me) practice among applicants, multiple vita entries for identically titled, and thus presumably identically written, conference papers. I originally dismissed such practices as vita padding, a not well socialized, nor particularly well accomplished, applicant seeking to make his or her research performance look more impressive than it actually is.

The statistical modelers are back. The presidential election forecasting errors of 2000 did not repeat themselves in 2004. On the contrary, the forecasts, from at least seven different teams, were generally quite accurate (Campbell 2004; Lewis-Beck 2005). Encouragingly, their prowess is receiving attention from forecasters outside the social sciences, in fields such as engineering and commerce. Noteworthy here is the recent special issue on U.S. presidential election forecasting published in the International Journal of Forecasting, containing some 10 different papers (Campbell and Lewis-Beck 2008). Our contribution in that special issue explored the question of whether our Jobs Model, off by only 1 percentage point in its 2004 forecast, was a simple product of data-mining (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008).

Recent years have witnessed a rapid proliferation of radical Islamist activity in western Europe, from MI5's claim in 2006 of 30 incipient “terror plots” and 1,600 individuals under surveillance, to actual terrorist atrocities in European cities, the most infamous and deadly of which included the transport network bombings in Madrid in 2003 and in London in 2005. Concomitantly, both the media and the wider social discourse have been rife with self-appointed punditry and a plethora of commentators pontificating on European radical Islam's putative causal factors and remedies. This paper will attempt to address the complex issues by providing a fuller, more nuanced understanding of some of the causes and antecedents of Islamic political radicalism among western European Muslims.

As Nelson Dometrius's opening essay suggests, academic standards, like other occupational standards and practices, change over time. These changes may draw fire from both established and younger scholars trained in the classical tradition. Shifting norms in political science range from different publication standards over time (few would doubt that the number of publications required for tenure has increased in most schools), to changing ideas about journal quality, to different conference practices. In this essay, I argue that the increasingly common practice of presenting identical papers at multiple conferences is not a negative influence on the discipline and does not conflict with any of the commonly offered rationales for conference attendance and participation. In fact, I suggest that making changes to existing papers—presenting future versions of a paper—may produce a more focused research agenda and may battle some potentially negative trends in political science. I also argue that this practice is a rational and predictable outgrowth of the shifting academic incentive structure.Thanks to Nelson Dometrius, Todd Collins, Gibbs Knotts, and Niall Michelsen for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

In the 1990s I testified before a National Science Foundation (NSF) panel headed by Cora Marrett, then assistant director for the NSF Directorate for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. The subject of the panel's inquiry, and this issue's symposium, was social science research and the federally mandated but decentralized human subjects protection program and its principal actors, institutional review boards (IRBs). My testimony addressed the ways in which the regulatory system ill-fit and ill-served political science research. IRBs had expanded their mission to include all research, not just research funded by the federal government, enhancing their scope of authority while slowing the timeliness of reviews. Similarly, and with the same result, IRBs were evaluating secondary research as well as primary research. Although the federal legislation provided for a nuanced assessment of risk, the distinction between potentially risk-laden research necessitating a full IRB review and research posing minimal or no risk that could be either exempted or given expedited review was disappearing. The length of the review process threatened the beginning or completion of course work and degree programs. IRBs were judging the merits of research projects rather than the risks involved. This trend was especially problematic because representation on many IRBs was skewed toward biological and behavioral scientists often unfamiliar with the methods and fields of political science and the other social sciences. And the list went on.

Takfiri jihadists, typified by an al-Qaeda perspective, claim that the “true” Muslim Umma (the Islamic community) is held together by a centrifugal universality based on religious identity, and that this religion compels people to engage in a form of radical violent Islamism to confront the evils of the Dar el-Harb (non-Islamic World). A closer examination of those mechanisms of individual radicalization (whether cultural, political, social-psychological, etc.), which lead people to carry out violence in the name of Islam, demonstrates that unique combinations of chance encounters; ideological commitments; individual and collective interactions with state and international organizations/institutions; and individual experience account for propensities to support and participate in radical violent Islamism. Individual processes of mobilization and radicalization and “macro-cultural” contexts serve to ground identities and create recruitment potential for radical violent Islamists to encourage others to join and participate in their cause.The support of the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. This work has been supported by a British Academy Small Grant “Memories and Massacres in the Formation of Algerian National Identity,” reference SG-41624 and an ESRC research grant under the auspices of the program, New Security Challenge, and the article reflects research being conducted on ESRC grant RES-181-25-0017. I would especially like to express thanks for the hard work of Rebecca Fowler in helping with both this article and the symposium in its entirety.

For many faculty members, particularly those at research institutions, presenting a paper more than once at a conference has long been taboo. Peers evaluating tenure requirements or merit rankings may credit a second presentation less, or not at all. On the other hand, norms in the discipline vary dramatically across institution types. We argue that at universities with considerable teaching loads and substantial service expectations, duplicate research presentations can be an effective way to maintain an active research agenda, absent other institutional incentives to do so. We currently teach international relations and comparative politics courses at an institution where the incentives to research remain modest, and the incentives to teach and spend a considerable amount of time in service related activities are substantial. Our comments are particularly geared toward this environment. We begin by defining what we mean by duplicate research presentations. Next, we outline how the incentive structure at a teaching institution creates different priorities, allowing different norms to develop. We then examine how duplicate research presentations can be an effective tool for overcoming traps common to untenured faculty. We end with an unabashed defense of the increasingly common practice of duplicate research presentations, particularly at teaching and service oriented universities.

At first glance, the outcome of the 2008 presidential election would appear to be very difficult to predict. For the first time in over 50 years, there will be no incumbent president or vice president in the race. Instead, the Republican Party, which has seen its popularity and electoral fortunes plummet since 2004, is pinning its hopes of retaining control of the White House on Arizona Senator John McCain—an individual who has frequently clashed with his own party's leadership. And McCain's Democratic opponent will be Illinois Senator Barack Obama, the first African American ever to receive a major-party presidential nomination.

Social scientists are well aware of the unintended consequences of public policies. The protection of human subjects regulations, which emerged in response to a serious problem in the medical community, provides an ideal example of such unintended consequences; to paraphrase an old aphorism, “the road to bureaucratic hell is paved with well-intentioned public policies.” In this essay I will seek to make three points. First, the protection of human subjects by federal regulation was long overdue. Second, this benefit to society has, in its application, ignored another widely accepted regulatory principle, namely that the costs of regulation should not outweigh its benefits; a combination of “bureaucratic creep” and litigation phobia has resulted in intrusive and counterproductive regulation of social science research, such that the cure has become worse than the disease. Third, ironically, because of institutional review boards' definition of what is and what is not research, the protection of human subjects is denied to subjects who actually could be at risk.