In 1999, on a trip to Russia to study gender violence, I was sitting in on a special training at a Moscow police academy. In between jokes about the impossibility of prostitutes getting raped, the cops-in-training could not stop focusing on me, the one American and one of three women in a rowdy room. For example, one man loudly asked me whether all Americans had cars and followed up with a comment that, of course we did, because this is where “you” (meaning me) would have sex. The training on rape and sexual harassment that I had come to observe had come to a halt because the new police were so intent on making sexual jokes. These comments felt even more threatening than they might otherwise because, a few days before, I had been picked up by the Russian police, shoved into a police car with several drunken officers, and driven around Moscow until I offered a bribe.

I show herein how to develop fundable proposals to support your research. Although the proposal strategy I discuss is commonly used in successful proposals, most junior faculty (and many senior scholars) in political science and other social sciences seem to be unaware of it. I dispel myths about funding, and discuss how to find funders and target funding programs. I then outline how to write a proposal; and detail how to respond to reviews.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

The presidential election forecast made with the Fiscal Model three months before Election Day put the incumbents' share of the two-party vote (VOTE2) at 48% (Cuzán and Bundrick 2008). As of the time of this writing, it appears the incumbent-party ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin took a little less than that (around 46.5%). At 1.5%, the error is less than 2.3%, which is Campbell's (2008, 680) “benchmark” for a “quite accurate” forecast. This is the second time in a row that the Fiscal Model ranks among the best performers (Campbell 2005, 23).

It is assumed that voters blame incumbents for poor economic performance but give credit when the economy is strong. A huge literature shows the impact of economic indicators and economic perceptions on vote choice and presidential popularity, but there is precious little research on whether public perceptions match economic reality. We propose a novel comparison of perceptions with performance by utilizing the Gallup Poll “most important” problem question. The average percentage that mentions unemployment, inflation, and the general economy over each presidential term from 1949 to 2008 is compared against the Presidential Economic Scorecard. The public correctly perceived unemployment and the general economy as salient national problems, but not inflation, and we speculate on why public perceptions do not correspond to actual inflation rates.

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models.

Ninety-nine days before the elections I utilized national- and district- or state-level information to forecast the 2008 U.S. presidential, House, and Senate elections (Klarner 2008). Overall, the presidential model performed very well, while the House and Senate models understated the extent of the Democratic wave.

Many political science students struggle in quantitative methods courses because they have never been taught how to learn math. Learning math is different from learning in other fields, so the techniques students have used successfully in other classes are inappropriate in mathematically oriented classes. However, most students have never been told this, so they blame their difficulty with math on the impenetrability of the subject rather than tactical studying errors. This brief article discusses some of the reasons that common studying techniques do not work in quantitative methodology classes, and discusses some simple techniques to help students develop learning habits that are better suited to quantitative courses.

In this article we report the results from a new survey of political scientists regarding their evaluations of journals in the political science discipline. Unlike previous research that has focused on data from the United States, we conducted an Internet survey of political scientists in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We present data on journal evaluations, journal familiarity, and journal impact, both for our entire sample (N = 1,695) and separately for respondents from each of the three countries. We document the overall hierarchy of scholarly journals among political scientists, though we find important similarities and differences in how political scientists from these three countries evaluate the scholarly journals in the discipline. Our results suggest that there is a strong basis for cross-national integration in scholarly journal communication, though methodological differences among the three countries may be an impediment.

Scientists seek to participate in the collective process of cumulative knowledge building. As scientists, we are bound to the principle of objective neutrality in the assessment of our data and in the formulation of our inferences and conclusions. However, the production of knowledge does not need to be, and some would say cannot be, a valueless process, devoid of opinion. The imperatives for the investigator are intellectual honesty, transparency in research, and objectivity in the assessment of data. If value judgments are accepted as permissible it is then worthwhile to discuss the relationships between the investigator's identity, those value judgments, and the design and conduct of research. Indeed, investigators possess multiple identities; these multiple identities may, at various times and places, aid or impede the research process. Moreover, these intersectional identities, and the inconsistency with which these identities are granted status in various environments, leave the researcher well positioned to explore social stratification, hierarchies of power, and inequality.

Combining salary data for permanent non-emeritus faculty at seven departments of political science within the University of California system with lifetime citation counts and other individual-level data from the Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld (2007a) study of faculty at Ph.D.-granting political science departments in the United States, I analyze determinants of faculty salaries. For the full data set the main finding are that (1) base salaries of UC political science faculty are slightly more strongly correlated to citation rates (annualized or total lifetime citations) as a measure of research visibility than they are to seniority measured by years since receipt of the Ph.D.; and (2) that gender differences and subfield differences in salary essentially vanish once I take into account both year of Ph.D. and research visibility (as measured by annualized citation counts), while gender inequities would appear to exist if I did not control for both variables.

It is often a difficult proposition for introductory American government students to comprehend different electoral systems and how the rules of the game affect the representation that results. I have developed a simulation in which different proportional-based electoral systems are compared with a single-member plurality electoral system. In addition, the simulation can also serve to illustrate other concepts commonly introduced in introductory courses.

Based on the results of the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, an analysis using theories and methods of modern political science (pivotal politics theory, ideal point estimates, and bootstrap simulations) suggests that the conditions are ripe for real policy change. Specifically, we should expect policies to move significantly in a liberal direction, few or no policies should move in a conservative direction, and many of the outcomes will be moderate or somewhat to the left of center (rather than far left). Furthermore, the predictions depend as much on partisan polarization and the results of the congressional election as they do on the outcome of presidential election itself.

The 2008 presidential nomination was marked by the most aggressive frontloading in recent history; the process was a mess from the outset. Frontloading is the trend in recent presidential nominations in which states schedule their primaries and caucuses near the beginning of the delegate-selection season to have a greater impact on the process. In 1976, 10% of the delegates had been chosen by March 2. In 2008, 70% of the delegates had been chosen by that same date. As part of their ongoing efforts to address frontloading and other problems, both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) revised the schedules and rules for 2008 presidential primary elections and caucuses.

When designed and executed properly, role-playing simulations go a long way to enhance student learning. Typically, however, simulations are divided along subfields. Most exercises, whether based on real or fictitious events, either place students in various roles within a country or have them represent the international interests of one country among others. In an effort to bridge this divide and answer recent calls to internationalize the curriculum, we have designed and implemented a department-wide crisis simulation. The article demonstrates that students engaged in a large-scale, department-wide simulation gain a greater appreciation and understanding of political processes and variables including negotiation, the opportunities and constraints of institutional design, identity, and strategic thinking.

In a recent article in PS, Soroka and Wlezien (2008) argue that the policy preferences of low- and high-income Americans rarely differ, and therefore that “regardless of whose preferences policymakers follow … policy will end up in essentially the same place” (325). In this article, I analyze a much larger and more diverse set of policies than those examined by Soroka and Wlezien and show that income-based preference gaps are much larger and more widespread than their data suggest. In terms of federal government policy, the affluent are far better represented than the poor; the findings in this paper indicate that this representational inequality has substantial repercussions across a wide range of policy issues.

The current method for selecting presidential nominees by the two major parties went into place mostly in 1972 and certainly by 1976, after Buckely v. Valeo. It was the natural culmination of reform efforts over the history of the republic in that, while prior reforms consistently invoked greater openness and democratic governance as rationales for their adoption, this method actually empowered voters as the central figures in determining who would be nominated (see Aldrich 1987). This fact became fully evident almost at once. The selection via primaries of senator George McGovern in 1972 and governor Jimmy Carter in 1976 as the Democratic presidential nominees arguably not only would not have happened, they would not have even come close to winning nomination without successful appeal to the voting public.

Political science, as a discipline, is a relative newcomer to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). We examine authorship patterns of SoTL articles in PS: Political Science & Politics, the Journal of Political Science Education, and International Studies Perspectives from 1998–2008. Our findings indicate more collaborative SoTL articles compared to non-SoTL teaching articles. Authorship patterns reveal a relatively high presence of women, assistant professors, and authors housed in Ph.D. and BA departments for SoTL publications. We conclude that SoTL constitutes an important new field of inquiry in the discipline that is likely to become more prominent as a younger cohort of scholars matures.

Notwithstanding political science professors' concerted efforts to remain politically neutral in the classroom, we find evidence that students are able to successfully identify the partisan loyalties of their professors. Furthermore, we find that there is a tendency for students to drift toward the Democratic Party over the course of the semester, yet the direction of the shift appears to be unrelated to either the instructor's actual political loyalties, or to the student's perception of the professor's partisan preferences. Given that political science professors appear to exert no real influence on students' party loyalties, it is unclear whether efforts to diversify the field by hiring more Republican professors would actually reduce the “liberalizing” effects of higher education.

Movies have a long and distinguished history in the political science and international relations classrooms; they provide connections between abstract theories and concepts and concrete everyday practices. However, traditional approaches to teaching movies in the political science and international relations classrooms allow for passive student learning, where students watch the movie and then react. We propose using insights from simulations to help resolve these problems with using movies in the classroom. In this article, we outline the learning methods and approaches of simulations, and then apply them to movies in the international relations classroom.

There are perhaps many good arguments for Iowa maintaining its “first in the nation” status, in terms of the presidential nomination process. The strongest, however, would seem to be an argument that it is representative of the nation as a whole. That is, somehow, Iowa is a microcosm of the national political forces, faithfully mirroring the relevant electoral structures and choices of the macro-stage. This belief is certainly held by some. Palo Alto County, in northwestern Iowa, has long been considered a presidential bellwether, faithfully voting with the winning candidate in a series beginning in 1916. But as media worthy as that fact might be, it seems most likely a product of chance, for its heavily rural, northern European-descended population make it far from demographically representative of contemporary America (Lewis-Beck and Rice 1992, 4–6). A similar charge is commonly made today against the state as a whole, by political commentators across the land. But is it true? Is Iowa really unrepresentative? That is the question we seek to answer.