This article discusses some of the challenges and lessons for teaching undergraduate-level courses related to terrorism. The author outlines some of the primary issues that instructors can expect to face, and provides strategies for dealing with several of these challenges. The goal is to relay useful information to those teaching, or planning to teach, courses on terrorism, with the larger hope of strengthening the community of terrorism scholars and possibly developing some best practices for teaching courses on terrorism.

The simple act of voting—and its barriers, costs, benefits, and mobilization—continues to be central to politics and political science (Kelley and Mirer 1974). The Supreme Court case Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board (2008) and a well-attended panel on the topic at the 2008 APSA annual meeting in Boston highlight the pertinence of voter-ID issues to the polity and discipline for the 2008 and future elections. As simple as voting is, it is also “of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure” (Burdick v. Takushi 1992).

As the nation witnesses a distinct decline in civic engagement among young adults, political science instructors across the nation face the formidable task of engaging students in lower-level, general education courses outside students' primary domain of interest. The research presented here seeks to understand if visually enhanced lecture material can effectively engage such students better than more traditional methods of classroom delivery. The project utilizes an experimental design involving two different sections of the same introductory American government course. By exposing the sections to different visual presentations, and controlling for a variety of potentially confounding factors, the impact that simple visual images have on student engagement both inside and outside the classroom are isolated. Findings suggest that the use of simple visual images can enhance students' impressions of the discipline of political science and boost their interest in and knowledge of politics and public affairs more generally.

Experiments designed as an election simulation involve participants in an investigation of strategic voting. Participants assigned political preferences and informed of candidate/party positions on an ideological dimension respond to and learn the results of two public opinion polls before voting. When given two alternatives, the participants vote sincerely. Confronted with three or more alternatives, participants make tactical decisions to narrow the field. Strategic behavior quickly reduces the number of alternatives to two. Consistent with Duverger's law, candidate/party viability encourages strategic voting and the development of a two-party system. The election simulation serves as a useful tool to teach about electoral behavior and to explore topics such as strategic voting.

“Turning out to vote is the most common and important act citizens take in a democracy,” John Aldrich writes (1993, 246), “and, therefore, is one of the most important behaviors for scholars of democratic politics to understand.” Turnout matters at the community as well as the individual level; the larger a county's voter turnout, for instance, the more discretionary federal resources it is likely to receive per capita (Martin 2003). “The blunt truth,” according to V. O. Key (1949, 527), “is that politicians and officials are under no compulsion to pay much heed to classes and groups of citizens that do not vote.”

The issue before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Crawford case (Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd. 2008) was whether a law (Indiana Senate Enrolled Act No. 483) passed by the Indiana legislature requiring most voters to show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs argued that it works an unfair hardship on many people who do not have the government-issued documents that count as a legitimate ID (Indiana Democratic Party et al., 12–16). They argued that the law, in effect, constitutes a poll tax, inasmuch as there are costs to obtain the right kind of photo ID, costs that unduly burden many eligible citizens wanting to exercise their right to vote.

A simulation of the foreign policy decision-making process, as described in this article, can assist an instructor in linking students' abstract understanding of complex political events, circumstances, and decision making to the real-world interplay of the multiple factors involved in decision making. It is this type of active learning that helps bring a student's abstract understanding into the concrete world. Instead of being passive learners relying on an instructor's knowledge, students are active participants in the learning process.

Twiley W. Barker, 83, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, died July 13, 2009.

Following the 2004 elections Republicans assumed ascendancy in Indiana, capturing the governorship for the first time in 16 years, retaining control of the Senate and regaining control of the Indiana House of Representatives after eight years in political exile. This political development set the stage for the passage in April 2005 of the Indiana photo-ID law, also known as Senate Enrolled Act 483 (SEA), on a straight party-line vote. Two days after SEA 483 was signed into law by governor Mitch Daniels the Indiana Democratic Party (IDP) filed suit in federal district court in Indianapolis (IDP v. Rokita 2006). The case was assigned in a blind draw to U.S. district judge Sarah Evans Barker, an appointee of President Reagan and a former U.S. attorney. The same day the Indiana chapter of the ACLU filed an action in Marion Superior Court, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. The Indiana attorney general intervened in both cases to defend the law's constitutionality and removed Crawford to federal court, where it was immediately consolidated with Rokita.

“It is beyond cavil that ‘voting is of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure’” (Burdick v. Takushi 1992, 433). Voting is particularly foundational “since the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights” (Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Educ. 1966, 667). As Justice Kennedy dissented in Burdick (1992, 434), even depriving one voter of the exercise of the fundamental right to vote is too substantial an impact to withstand constitutional scrutiny.

Michel Girard, professor of political science, Sorbonne, Paris, passed away suddenly on January 27, 2009, after a lengthy battle with cancer. To the end, Professor Girard was an unsurpassed scholar and professional. Ten days before his untimely death, he delivered a superb lecture at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., on the rise of the new great powers and their integration into the global international system. He had also organized a panel for the International Political Science Association meetings in Santiago, Chile, on which he included two North American scholars.

This section lists upcoming book publications across the broad field of political science. This list is fully reader generated. If your first-edition book is scheduled for publication in the three months before publication of the next issue of PS, enter the details of publication in the box found at the PS Web site: http://www.apsanet.org/section_223.cfm. We hope that spreading word of upcoming work will help keep our members even more attune to new scholarship within the discipline.