Few would dispute that religion has played a fundamental role in shaping our understanding of human relationships, including marriage, and what types of relationships are permitted. However, science, especially biology, has also played an important role in government regulation of marriage (Bittles and Neel 1994; Ottenheimer 1990; Dupuis 2002; Ellison 2004; Strasser 2002). A cursory overview of government regulations of marriage reveals laws that establish age requirements, necessitate testing for diseases, ban nuptials between individuals with biological relations, set limits on the number of spouses, and ban interracial marriage (miscegenation), among other things (Barlow and Probert 2004; Bratt 1984; Cott 2000; Micklos and Carlson 2000; Moran 2001; Ottenheimer 1990; Scott 2000). Certainly some of these policies reflect a religious based morality, but some, such as those that ban marriages between individuals within a family, also reflect a biological understanding of potential problems associated with the offspring of these couples (Bratt 1984; Ottenheimer 1990; Cott 2000; Micklos and Carlson 2000; St. Jean 1998; Scott 2000; Stoddard 2003).

The Jobs Model of presidential election forecasting predicted well in 2004. The model, based on data available in August 2004, generated an error of only 1.3 percentage points when forecasting the incumbent share of the two-party popular vote (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2004). In contrast, the median forecast from seven teams of statistical modelers was off 2.6 percentage points (Campbell 2004, 734). We believe that the Jobs Model was more accurate because it broadened measurement of economic performance, a conceptual variable lying at the core of most of these efforts. Take, as a representative example, the Growth Model in Table 1, Column 1. Its forecast for George W. Bush was 54.0% (almost exactly at the median for the above-mentioned group of forecasters). This model was earlier reported by us, but rejected on grounds of specification error (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2004, 754). We argued that the changing nature of the American economy required attention to a hitherto neglected variable—job creation. When this variable, new jobs over the presidential term, is added to the Growth Model, the fit statistics improve dramatically (see Table 1, Column 2,).

Undergraduate students should not just study political theory. They should theorize. Writing-intensive political theory courses can help them do so sooner. By preparing an original political vision, a utopia or a dystopia, throughout the course of the semester, students read and compare the texts of the course against their own emerging texts and move into more critical and systematic political analysis. As a political theorist, my focus is not so much on utopias or dystopias as a subject of study per se, but on tapping into the creative freedom, critical distance, and hard-hitting insights of these traditions while teaching writing. I take seriously Berlin's above-stated concern for the “place and mode of operation” conveyed to the student through the process of learning to write. Visionary writing accelerates students' appreciation of the complexity of another's theory, but also of their own standpoint and capacity for agency and judgment.Khristina Haddad is assistant professor, department of political science, Moravian College. She teaches a writing-intensive course on visionary political writing and is affiliated with German Studies and Women's Studies. Her research interests include politics of time and temporality, Hannah Arendt, political action, fear, feminist theory, women's studies, and, in particular, the politics of women's health.I am greatly indebted to friends and colleagues who helped me along at various stages including (in alphabetical order) Robert Humanick, Eleanor Linn, Bob Mayer, Karla Morales, Laurie Naranch, Gary Olson, Miguelina Ortiz, Martha Reid, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, Lyman Tower Sargent, Joel Wingard, and Elizabeth Wingrove. Thanks go also to all those whose dedicated work inspires student writers and teachers of writing at the Gayle Morris Sweetland Writing Center at the University of Michigan, to helpful commentators at the Society for Utopian Studies' Annual Meeting in Toronto, to two anonymous reviewers at PS, and to three groups of students who shared their visions with me.

The research on voter turnout in America is impressive in quantity and quality, but it lacks breadth. National and state elections have received most of the attention, while the myriad of other elections, from municipal contests to policy referenda, have often been ignored. As a result, we know a great deal about turnout in state and national elections, and much less about turnout in other races. The temptation is to generalize the state and national conclusions to other elections, but this is risky. For example, in a recent aggregate-level study of small town elections in Iowa, Rice and Schlueter (2004) report a relationship that runs contrary to virtually all of the state and national literature: education and turnout are negatively correlated; that is, the citizens in better-educated communities vote in local elections at lower rates than the citizens in less-educated communities. This finding exposes the limitations in our understanding of voter turnout. If all we want is to speak with assurance about turnout in state and national elections, then the current literature is very helpful. If, however, we want to be able to speak more generally about turnout (and speak more specifically about turnout in elections other than state and national contests), then we need to study more types of elections.For a copy of the data, contact Professor Tom W. Rice, department of political science, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52241 ([email protected]).

Doctoral students in political science are understandably concerned with job placement. Most students enter graduate school with an eye to academia and want to know what they must do to secure their ideal academic position. Faculty members readily offer guidance on how to increase students' likelihood of obtaining an academic job. And PS has published many articles that focus on this topic, ranging from empirical descriptions of the job market to personal accounts of job-hunting experiences. Unfortunately, graduate students often receive anecdotal or contradictory advice. To help rectify this, we undertook a more systematic examination of the qualities department hiring committees seek when granting interviews to job applicants.The authors would like to thank John Coleman, Katherine Cramer Walsh, Charles Franklin, the anonymous reviewers at PS, and the survey respondents.

The battle over lesbian and gay rights has gained increased prominence in the political arena. Discrimination against homosexuals may have been widely accepted in the past, but today such discrimination is strongly debated. In 2004, the presidential candidates as well as members of Congress squared off on whether to enshrine a ban on gay marriage into the Constitution. Analyzing the 106th–108th Congresses reveals that member and district characteristics greatly influence the level of support for gay and lesbian rights. Democrats are far more supportive of pro-gay and -lesbian initiatives than Republicans. Region similarly plays a key role. Southerners are more tepid in their support for gay and lesbian rights than their northern colleagues. At the same time, New England representatives are even more liberal than other northerners. Despite strong opposition to gay marriage within the churches of their communities, African-American and Latino representatives are especially likely to support gay and lesbian rights. Church membership also guides representative behavior, though not always as conventional wisdom might indicate. Catholic representatives are not more hostile to gay and lesbian rights than other representatives. Moreover, the influence of religious affiliation on congressional voting behavior is declining. Constituency characteristics, such as urbanicity and education, also shape representative behavior but play a secondary role.

Based on George Bush's net approval rating of −1% in the final Gallup Poll in June, a 3.7% growth rate for real GDP during the first two quarters of 2004, and the fact that the Republican Party had controlled the White House for only one term, the time-for-change model predicted that Mr. Bush would win reelection with 53.7% of the major party vote. This forecast was made in late July, before the Republican National Convention and more than three months before Election Day.

I must first confess that I was long a skeptic about the use of simulations in the classroom. I had, after all, gotten along quite fine without them. My courses were full, my teaching evaluations good.Bruce A. Wallin is associate professor, department of political science, Northeastern University. He is author of From Revenue Sharing to Deficit Sharing: General Revenue Sharing and Cities (Georgetown University Press, 1998), winner of the 1999 APSA award for Best Book on Urban Politics. Most recently, he edited a symposium on “Tax and Expenditure Limitations: A Quarter Century after Proposition 13,” published in Public Budgeting and Finance (vol. 24, no. 4, winter 2004).For more information on this simulation, including the class syllabus and detailed examples, visit PSOnline at www.apsanet.org/ps/wallinonline.pdf.

On Labor Day, 57 days before the election, using the Gallup poll's division of likely voters and GDP growth during the second quarter of the year, the trial-heat and economy forecasting model predicted that George W. Bush would receive 53.8% of the two-party popular vote (Campbell 2004a). Out of concerns about relying too heavily on a single poll and the possible complications associated with the Republican Convention running right up to the Labor Day weekend, a companion model based on the pre-convention Gallup poll, the net convention poll bump, and the economy was constructed. It forecast a slightly closer election, with a Bush vote of 52.8%.

Canada's June 28th, 2004, federal election was an exciting and, in several respects a surprising contest. One major surprise was the election campaign itself. Rather than being the predictable, boring event many commentators had anticipated, the campaign was a closely fought battle between a longtime governing party and a new opposition party that had been formed only six months before the election was called. A second surprise, at least for some observers, was turnout, with participation in a national election falling to the lowest level in Canadian history. A third, potentially very significant, surprise was the success of the separatist Bloc Québécois, accompanied by a resurgence of support for Quebec sovereignty. After the election, the future of Canada's national party system, indeed, the future of Canadian democracy, appeared more problematic than had been the case only a few months earlier.

Positive turnout rates in the United States and elsewhere are widely considered “an embarrassing limitation of the economic approach to politics” because, for any one voter, “the costs of casting a ballot in any large election are almost always greater than the potential benefits, which are dependent on the unlikely occurrence of casting the winning or tie vote in an election” (Knack 1992, 133). Green and Shapiro (1994), whose scathing critique of the rational choice field centers on the work of Anthony Downs (1957), trenchantly put it: “Rational choice theorists have trotted out an astonishing variety of conjectures about the costs and benefits of voting, in the process generating an enormous literature, possibly larger in terms of academic citations and sheer bibliographic length than any other rational choice literature in American politics” (47–48), yet they still have no answer as to why people vote when, according to their arguments, reason says they ought not. Grofman (1993), paraphrasing Morris Fiorina, has referred to the failure of rational choice theory to explain turnout as the “paradox that ate rational choice.”We are indebted to Clover Behrend-Gethard for bibliographic assistance.

Judicial decisions are an integral part of American politics and, despite the presence of written and explicated opinions of federal judges, the internal deliberations and decision making processes of judges themselves remains a mystery to many. A burgeoning body of literature focuses on the use of simulations to engage students and bridge theory to practical application. Few simulations target the judicial component of politics, despite its natural disposition for group participation in a simulation project.Richard J. (Rick) Hardy is the director of the Institute for Leadership in Civic Education, director of the National Institute for Advanced Civic Studies (sponsored by the Center for Civic Education), and assistant director of the Honors College at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He regularly teaches courses in American politics, constitutional law, and the Supreme Court. His publications include: Government in America (Houghton Mifflin), Missouri Government and Politics (Missouri Press), Civic Education (Pearson), and Politics: The Art of Drawing Dividing Lines (Thomson). Hardy also serves as a political commentator for numerous national outlets and is a presidential elector in the Electoral College. Chapman Rackaway teaches courses in American government, political campaign management, political parties, and voting behavior at Fort Hays State University. He is the director and advisor for the Political Campaigns and Management tract at FHSU. He has published in the Journal of Politics and has consulted on numerous state and national political races. Laurie E. Sonnier currently teaches social studies courses at St. Martin high school in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. She earned her B.A. in political science at the University of Southern Mississippi and her M.Ed. in Education from Bowie State University. Laurie has won numerous teaching awards and has been actively involved with the National Council for the Social Studies and the Center for Civic Education. She is the co-editor of Voices of Advocacy in American Democracy (Pearson).

In this paper we compare the August 1st forecast of the 2004 presidential election generated with the fiscal model with those made with the seven models of what we call the “Campbell Collection,” after James E. Campbell, the editor or co-editor of several forecasting symposia that have appeared in the American Politics Quarterly (October, 1996) and in successive issues of PS: Political Science and Politics (October, 2004 and January, 2005). For reasons that will become evident, Ray Fair's “presidential vote equation” (Fair 2002a, 2002b) is also included in the comparison. First, given space constraints, we present only a brief summary of the theoretical model. (For a more extended discussion, interested readers are encouraged to pursue the relevant references.) Then, as we did pursuant to issuing a forecast for the 2004 election, we estimate the model over the 22 elections held between 1916 and 2000, showing the out-of-sample results. Finally, we evaluate the model relative to the Campbell Collection on operational and substantive criteria.

The forecasting model I wrote about in the October 2004 issue of PS (Holbrook 2004) is best described as a referendum model. It incorporates presidential approval (Gallup polls averaged from June through August), a measure of aggregate satisfaction with personal finances weighted by the tone of economic news (averaged from June through August), and a dummy variable coded “1” for years in which the incumbent party had held the White House for at least two consecutive terms and “0” for all other years. The first two variables are intended to capture the political and economic performance of the incumbent administration, while the latter (borrowed from Abramowitz 1988) is based on the idea that it may be easier to convince voters that it is “time for a change” if the incumbent party has held the White House for at least two consecutive terms.

In recent years, arriving on the job market with published work has shifted from a desirable condition to a necessity. Even middling universities can afford to ignore applications from job applicants without peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals. Thus, it is important for graduate students to focus as early as possible on publishing their work.I wish to thank Brian Brox, Jonathan Hartlyn, and Nancy Maveety for comments on an earlier draft.

The civic engagement track participants represented research institutions, four-year liberal arts institutions, and secondary schools. Although our teaching experiences, pedagogical approaches, and subject matter specialties varied greatly, we embraced this diversity as an opportunity to share common concerns about teaching civic engagement.

As part of its mission to address issues of recruitment, retention,and integration of women and people of color in the profession, theAPSA Task Force on Mentoring periodically publishes articles on someaspect of mentoring that will help political scientists movesuccessfully through the profession. This brief symposium on“Publishing Your First Book” is just one such example of thisinitiative. For more information about the Task Force and itsongoing projects, contact Linda Lopez, APSA Director of Educationand Professional Development Programs, at [email protected].

Making a realistic assessment of your goals in publishing a book, andmatching a publisher with the text and with your goals is the firststep in bringing your research effort to completion. Socialscientists write books hoping to influence an election, change thepolitical debate, shift an academic focus, get tenure, or get a job.A good book, well-published, can help achieve someof these goals—but there are other ways to work toward them. Authorsand publishers will be happiest, and readers best served, if authorstake stock of the possible, and then market their books topublishers who are best suited to help with the goals they'vechosen. Beyond writing the book, the author has three clear tasks:deciding on realistic goals for the book; executing due diligence infinding the right publishing house; and making the gist of the bookaccessible to an educated, but not necessarily expert, reader bywriting a good proposal. Matching expectations to the book will helpidentify the most appropriate presses.

For all the signs of a dead heat in the horserace polls and strong hints of a victory for Senator John Kerry in exit polls on Election Day itself, the reelection of George W. Bush proved predictable from a model with a leading indicator available as far back as January. The forecast published in the October 2004 issue of PS was initially posted on January 29, 2004, the day after the New Hampshire Primary. It claimed, with 95% certainty, that President George W. Bush would defeat Democrat John Kerry in November. The forecast, which was not subject to any revision throughout the remainder of the election year, gave Bush 54.7% and Kerry 45.3% of the major-party vote. It missed the actual division of the major-party vote by a little more than one unit of the forecast error (2.7). All in all, a satisfactory performance of the model.

Rapidly changing technology has created countless new opportunities for political scientists in teaching and research. One such innovation is the development of web surveys. Web surveys are accessed online by respondents and the data can be downloaded directly into a statistical program such as SPSS. While web surveys require respondents to have Internet access, which precludes conducting general population surveys via the web, in fact many of the populations of interest to political scientists such as interest groups, elected officials, and bureaucrats have near universal access to the web. The purpose of this article is to review the advantages and disadvantages of this technique and to outline important design and implementation considerations relevant to political science.

In the 2005 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference's Diversity Track, some 30 participants representing a wide range of colleges and universities came together to discuss issues related to teaching and learning about diversity. Diversity-focused pedagogy recognizes commonalities of individual and group experience defined by race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, age, and ability, but it touches much broader circles. One of the most important aspects of the track was the diversity of its participants—not usually one of the discipline's strong points. The wide range of backgrounds and experiences reflected by the track's participants highlighted the value of diversity to the profession, as well as the fact that political scientists carry different burdens at a wide range of institutions. Participants in this track found that our senses of what defines diversity, the importance of teaching about diversity, and what teaching techniques effectively illustrate diversity were, well, diverse.