The idea for a Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) did not suddenly dawn upon Senate Republicans in the summer of 2004, when debate on the amendment began in earnest on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Despite the passage of the federal Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, conservatives have long worried about what they believe are the threats to traditional heterosexual marriage posed by the courts. Their fears peaked in 2003, when the courts struck twice: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that state homosexual sodomy laws are unconstitutional, while the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health ordered state officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to respond to Oren, Ozminkowski, and Strake's comments on my recent article on myths about the physical sciences. All of them in my judgment either misperceive parts of my original argument or raise concerns that allow me to extend that argument. To the degree that others share their views, this essay may address widespread differences of opinion or misperceptions about these matters.

Citizenship in modern democratic states has a dual character. First, it denotes inclusion in a self-governing political community. Second, it means belonging to a specific national community, defined both by territorial boundaries and cultural practices. The democratic state appears in the guise of the nation-state, whose citizen is also a national. Political citizenship is universalistic and inclusive, while national belonging is culturally specific and exclusive. Everybody in the country is meant to belong, while the rest of the world is excluded: foreigners cannot belong. This dualism helps explain some contractions such as: why the age of democratic nationalism was a period of devastating wars based on the total mobilization of populations of warrior-citizens; how democratic states could justify the colonization of the rest of the world; and why democracy and racism are so often linked (Castles and Davidson 2000).

The balance of national and state powers has undergone continuous readjustment since 1790, without a constitutional amendment by means of numerous congressional preemption statutes superseding completely or partially certain regulatory powers of the states and thereby effectuating a major transformation in the federal system. Congress since 1978 has increased its regulation of subnational governments as polities by enacting preemption statutes containing mandates and restraints (Zimmerman 1994) while simultaneously enacting other statutes providing for extensive deregulation of the banking and communications industries and complete economic deregulation of the air, bus, and rail transportation companies.

The world is undergoing a process of structural transformation in multiple dimensions: technological, economic, cultural, and institutional. This creates as many opportunities as it induces perils. Perhaps the most fundamental problem we now face is the crisis of political institutions in charge of managing the transition. We know the problems, we understand the issues, and in many countries there is enough political will to tackle the questions to be addressed. However, the organizational and institutional tools of governance are either insufficient or inadequate. Furthermore, the crisis of governance is related to a crisis of political legitimacy, characterized by increasing distance between citizens and their representatives. Both crises feed into each other, threatening with political paralysis and opening the way both for authoritarian policies and for demagogic revolts.

The great political philosopher John Stuart Mill once asked, “Was there any domination which did not appear natural to those that possessed it?” (Mill 1984, 269–270). For same-sex couples seeking access to the institution of marriage, the public sense that marriage is naturally and obviously meant only for opposite-sex couples has been a formidable barrier. The first state supreme courts to rule on same-sex marriage, in the early 1970s, simply relied upon dictionary definitions to hold that marriage was obviously a heterosexual institution. Politicians mostly ignored the issue altogether until the courts of Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts forced public debate of the issue.

The question “What is political science?” is nearly as old as the discipline itself. Political science continually self-examines the discipline to evaluate who we are and how we have changed. In addition, there are numerous studies of groups within political science, including political science in the U.S. South and women in political science. There are also reviews of the development and state of subfields, e.g., urban politics , international relations, comparative politics, and political theory. Each of these histories provides an image of what political science is or what it should be. These self-reviews provide images of the discipline that shape our identities as political scientists and advance the progress of political science. Even if the images do not affect future directions in political science, they are “an important dimension of identity and critical reflection on the theory and practice of political science”. Developing and critiquing these images are important academic exercises.J. Tobin Grant is assistant professor, department of political science, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is coauthor (with Thomas Rudolph) of Expression vs. Equality: The Politics of Campaign Finance Reform (Ohio State University Press, 2004).I thank Badredine Arfi, Gregory Kasza, Scott McClurg, Thomas Rudolph, Edward Schatz, and Herbert Weisberg for their comments and suggestions on this article.

Since the 1980s, the question of citizenship has taken root as a major theme in the social sciences and as the focus of juridical, political, social, and cultural debates in all democratic societies. In Europe, citizenship has taken different shapes and definitions in its rhetoric, ideology, and practice with regard to immigrants; incorporation into nation-states and their expansion of political participation beyond boundaries relating to home and host country to include a broad European space. Citizenship is also an issue for European construction itself. Within nation-states citizenship has been expressed in different domains extending from the national community to the civil society, even though only “legal” citizenship allows the full participation of individuals and groups in the political community. At the European level, despite the transnational participation of immigrants encouraged by the very nature of the European Union and its supranational institutions and de facto expansion of dual citizenship, the claim for equal recognition as citizens that underlies the political strategies of immigrants remains within the framework of the legitimacy of the state of residence and citizenship.

The confluences of global flows, by forming new spaces and entanglements of possibilities, have a mutating effect on citizenship. In an ever-shifting landscape configured by mobilities and positionalities, the idea of citizenship tied to the terrain and imagination of a nation-state (Anderson [1983] 1991) is called into question. In theory, citizenship as protected entitlements depends on membership in a nation-state. But increasingly in practice, entitlements and benefits are realized through specific mobilizations and claims in milieus of globalized contingency. The movements of global markets, technologies, and populations interact to shape novel spaces of political mobilization and claims. As rights and protections long associated with citizenship are becoming disarticulated from the state, they are re-articulated with elements such as market-based interests, transnational agencies, mobile elites, and marginialized populations.

Political science, judging by the reading material that reaches my desk, has become much more of a science than it was more than 50 years ago when I served on the faculties of the University of Minnesota and Bennington College. It is important that this development not distort the reality that politics and government remain fundamentally human institutions. My own movement from the academy to practical politics, to private life, and to government service has reinforced my view that the unpredictable human ingredient is an essential part of the political process—an obvious observation but one difficult to quantify.Max M. Kampelman was counselor of the State Department, U.S. ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and ambassador and U.S. negotiator with the Soviet Union on Nuclear and Space Arms. He is now chairman emeritus of Freedom House; the American Academy of Diplomacy; and the Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy.

My topic today is accountability of the federal public service. Democratic accountability is at the core of both public administration and political science because, inherently, democratic government is accountable government. For that reason, it is worrisome that present definitions and systems of accountability are out of date, perhaps even seriously broken.

Healthy adult development commonly includes a desire and intent to form intimate, long-term relationships. For individuals attracted to members of the other sex, these relationships may be formed, socially affirmed, and, by mutual choice, legally recognized by government agencies in the U.S. For individuals attracted to members of the same sex, these relationships may be formed, but social affirmation and legal recognition are only sporadically available. Thus, the normative relational developmental processes for same-sex attracted individuals incur unique challenges that other-sex attracted individuals do not.

“Nobody listens to us. There is not a single person in Washington who will get us…anything but shit and more shit. I'm sorry. This is where we are now. Nowhere.”

In the 2004 presidential election, 121.1 million ballots were cast for the major party candidates. President George W. Bush received 51.24% of these votes to Senator John Kerry's 48.76%. As Bush prepares for his second term, we know how the candidates performed. How did the election forecasters do?

On Sunday, October 10th, 2004, the New York Times Magazine featured an article with the cover title, “Really, What Does He Think? John Kerry and the Post-9/11 World” (Bai 2004). On the cover of the magazine was a serious-looking photo of Senator Kerry, superimposed with keywords such as “Terrorism,” “Iraq,” “Al Qaeda,” “Multilateralism,” “Nuclear proliferation,” and so on. While the article itself was intriguing, even more intriguing was the magazine's attempt to capture Kerry's core ideas on American national security with the use of keyword graphics—namely, the keywords on the cover, placed in what appeared to be a random order around the photo of Kerry, and the underlining of “John Kerry,” “terrorism,” and “Americans” in the inside title. Catchy graphics, but hardly an accurate depiction of the keywords that might actually represent Kerry's thinking on American national security. And, for all the comparison made in the article itself with President Bush's stance on national security, where were the graphics for George W.? (They did not emerge in the next New York Times Magazine.) The magazine was, nonetheless, making an important point: that words (and the ideas they represent) are emotive—particularly in the highly charged climate of the 2004 presidential campaign.I am grateful for comments and suggestions from Andrew Bailey, Diane Maurice, David Mayhew, and Frances Rosenbluth. I am also grateful to the Georg Walter Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy (Yale Center for International and Area Studies) for funding that initiated this article, and to Mina Moshkeri (LSE Design Unit) for her assistance in preparing the graphs.

In 2003–2004 I served as the assistant editor of Political Theory. During my term I reviewed hundreds of manuscripts, read scores of outside reviews, and communicated regularly with Stephen White (the editor) about the criteria of a successful manuscript and the direction of the discipline. To aid graduate students looking to publish, as well as others, I offer several principles to facilitate writing and submitting a political theory essay.Nicholas Tampio defended his dissertation on The Kantian Problematic in Contemporary Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University in September 2004.For comments on earlier drafts, I thank James Morone, Patricia Nordeen, Jesse Tampio, and Stephen White.

The theory of minority political incorporation (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984; 2001) addressed the rise of African Americans and Latinos in urban politics through coalitions that combined the mobilization of African-American communities and White liberals (Sonenshein 1993) and, at times, Hispanics. While Hispanics were important to the theory of political incorporation, their role was neither consistent nor central in coalitions for minority advancement during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. However, Latinos; impressive demographic strength is now translating into major voter registration and turnout gains, and Latinos increasingly are taking the lead in minority incorporation in some cities and states. There is, perhaps, no better example of Latinos; increasing political clout than City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa's smashing electoral victory to become the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles in more than 130 years. Villaraigosa's election attracted national and international attention, and energized Latino activists around the country.

Prior to the 2004 presidential election we provided forecasts of the final vote relying on two different models. The first model follows what we did in 1996 and 2000 and relies on two variables:

1. the cumulated weighted growth in leading economic indicators (LEI) through the 13th quarter of the sitting president's term—March of the election year—which provides advance information about income growth leading up to Election Day while also summarizing prior income growth; and

2. the current value of presidential approval, which absorbs some economic effects but also reflects non-economic aspects of incumbent performance.

Recently, Microsoft's PowerPoint has come under a series of brutal attacks. Critics have accused the software of promoting simplistic thinking, dumbing down presentations, and constricting interactions between presenter and audience (Schwartz 2003; Parker 2001; Thompson 2003). One detractor went so far as to label PowerPoint “technological cocaine” and another demanded a ban on the software, urging that “Friends Don't Let Friends Use PowerPoint” (Keller 2003; Stewart 2001). The most coherent exposition of PowerPoint's weaknesses has come from Edward Tufte, Yale Professor and visual presentation guru. Tufte (2003) argues that PowerPoint is format—rather than content—or audience-oriented, and thus “turn[s] everything into a sales pitch.” His list of grievances against the software is long. PowerPoint replaces serious analysis with chartjunk, logotypes, and corny clip art. It breaks information into small arbitrary fragments and stacks it chronologically in a manner that inhibits analysis through comparison. It “messes up data with systematic intensity” through bad resolution, thin graphics, and low-information charts. PowerPoint's “inherent defects,” so says Tufte, are “making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues' time.”Ron E. Hassner is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He remains indebted to Scott D. Sagan for introducing him to both PowerPoint and baseball.

“Be careful what you ask for,” goes the old adage. “You just might get it.” This advice is well-taken by interest groups that successfully press for policy goals at odds with the preferences of the broader population. Victory may be won, but at the expense of awakening widespread opposition and aggravating friend and foe alike.