In 2008 journalist Bill Bishop achieved the kind of notice that authors dream about. His book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, was mentioned regularly during the presidential campaign; most notably, former president Bill Clinton urged audiences to read the book. Bishop's thesis is that Americans increasingly are choosing to live in neighborhoods populated with people just like themselves. In turn, these residential choices have produced a significant increase in geographic political polarization. Bishop does not contend that people consciously decide to live with fellow Democrats or Republicans; rather political segregation is a byproduct of the correlations between political views and the various demographic and life-style indicators people consider when making residential decisions. Whatever the cause, Bishop contends that the resulting geographic polarization is a troubling and dangerous development.

Will President Obama lose votes in 2012 because of racial prejudice? For 2008, we estimated, via a carefully controlled, national survey-based study, that on balance he lost about five percentage points in popular vote share due to intolerance for his race on the part of some voters. What about 2012? There are at least three possibilities: (1) the presidency has become postracial, and the vote will register no racial cost; (2) intolerance has increased, and the vote will register an increased racial cost; and (3) intolerance has decreased, and the vote will register a decreased racial cost. Our evidence, drawn from an analysis comparable to that carried out for 2008, suggests Obama will pay a racial cost of three percentage points in popular vote share. In other words, his candidacy will experience a decrease in racial cost, if a small one. In 2008, this racial cost denied Obama a landslide victory. In the context of a closer election in 2012, this persistent racial cost, even smaller in size, could perhaps cost him his reelection.

In this article, we use a multimethod approach to shed light on the strategic use of presidential pets. We draw on primary source materials to demonstrate that pets are an important power center in the White House. Then we turn to presidents' strategic use of their pets in public. We present a theoretical framework and statistical evidence to explore the conditions under which presidents are most likely to trot out their four-legged friends. We show that presidents carefully gauge the best and worst times to conduct a dog and pony show. In times of war or scandal, dogs are welcome public companions, but not so in periods of economic hardship.

Trend plus inaction equals drift. When a trend has external causes and no one can act to intervene, that inaction leads to drift—the unimpeded trajectory of change. Drift in the United States produces the domination of American democracy by business interests. Drift in international decisions produces global warming. Specific institutional designs for government, such as the US separation of powers, can cause the inaction that facilitates drift. More fundamentally, ingrained patterns of thinking can cause inaction. Here I argue that the long and multifaceted resistance tradition in the West contributes to inaction by focusing on stopping, rather than using, coercion.

How relatively good or bad were the economic performances of our past presidents? The answers to this question remain unclear. Most evaluations of presidential performance cloud the issue with partisan bias and subjective judgments or mix economics together with other policy areas. To address these shortcomings, this article uses new data from the Measuring Worth Project to calculate the relative economic rankings of the United States presidents who served from 1789 until 2009. It analyzes up to 220 years of data on economic growth, unemployment, inflation, government debt, balance of payments, income inequality, currency strength, interest rates, and stock market returns to estimate an economic grade point average for each president. Then, these estimates are used to test for correlations with other variables to generate hypotheses regarding the conditions for superior and inferior economic performance.

I investigate one mechanism through which financial institutions could have used political influence to receive preferential treatment in the US Department of the Treasury-administered “bailout.” I find that neither proxies of political influence nor other political variables, such as public interest in specific deals, can explain variance in the sale price of warrants (a type of financial asset) Treasury acquired through TARP's Capital Purchase Program. Moreover, I find that the more politically active the firm is, the more likely Treasury is to auction its warrants (thereby receiving fair market value). This conclusion is not consistent with recent studies investigating the role of such variables in the initial administration of TARP and can be interpreted as good news for American taxpayers.

The articles in this symposium are peppered with numerous recent incidents of political incivility ranging from physical scuffles at town hall meetings to the now-infamous accusation shouted at president Barack Obama during a nationally televised address before a joint session of Congress. Name calling and ad hominem attacks that were once associated with talk radio and cable television pundits have made their way into the halls of governing institutions, which no longer serve as sacred spaces one-step removed from bare-knuckled politics. Indeed, divisive views have even made inroads into “safe” topics for discussion—the weather and sports. Forget the intensity of debate over climate change. Democrats were actually 10% more likely to claim that the 2012 winter season was warmer than were their Republicans counterparts (Newport 2012). Sports no longer offers a neutral conversation starter, as 27% of Republicans view Tim Tebow as their favorite quarterback compared to only 9% of Democrats (Public Policy Polling 2011). Vitriol, combined with legislative gridlock and the uproar of protestors—not only in Washington, DC, but also in state capitals and prominent cities across the country—has shifted our discipline's attention to the role of political civility in sustaining a healthy democracy.

The title of this lecture refers to organizations, politics, and public purposes to emphasize developments in the analysis of public organizations and their management and the need for that analysis to include politics as an influence on those organizations. The Gaus Award recognizes contributions in the joint tradition of public administration and political science. Organizations serve as essential components of the administrative branch of government and of virtually all other aspects of human life and many other forms of life. Social scientists that I call “organization theorists” have developed theory and research about organizations and the people in them. This body of work provides concepts and insights useful for the analysis of the organizations in government, which I call “public organizations.” Organizations play crucial roles in the pursuit of values and goals shared by large aggregates of people. “Organizations, Politics, and Public Purposes: Analyzing Public Organizations and Public Management” refers to these shared values and goals as public purposes. Organizations are essential to public administration and we cannot effectively analyze organizations in public administration without concepts developed by political scientists; we need to draw on political science.

In this article results are presented from a conditional logit model of vice presidential selection that correctly predicts Mitt Romney selecting Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate in 2012. The model, which correctly predicts 14 of the 20 contested major party vice presidential nominations from 1960 through 2008, suggests that media exposure, political experience, having served in the military, age, and gender/racial/ethnic diversity are significant factors in selecting a vice presidential candidate in the modern era.

Who will win the next French presidential election? Forecasting electoral results from political-economy models is a recent tradition in France. In this article, we pursue this effort by estimating a vote function based on both local and national data for the elections held between 1981 and 2007. This approach allows us to circumvent the small N problem and to produce more robust and reliable results. Based on a model including economic (unemployment) and political (approval and previous results) variables, we predict the defeat, although by a relatively small margin, of the right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of the French presidential election to be held in May 2012.

From World War II to the present, prominent scholars placed their hopes in the presidency to protect the nation from outside threats and deal effectively with domestic crises. Their theories weakened the constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances by reviving an outsized trust in executive power (especially over external affairs) that William Blackstone and others promoted in eighteenth-century England. The American framers of the Constitution studied those models with great care and fully rejected those precedents when they declared their independence from England.

Congressman Alan West (R-FL) passed the incivility duck test when he described his fellow Floridian Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D) as “the most vile, unprofessional and despicable member of the House of Representatives.” That read like incivility, sounded like incivility, and was universally interpreted to be uncivil, thus it probably was.

This symposium presents 13 articles forecasting the 2012 US national elections. Included in this collection are the eight national and one state presidential vote forecasting models published in PS: Political Science & Politics during the 2008 elections along with three additional forecasts and one article offering a composite of the forecasts. Although the focus remains on the presidential contest, as in past years, several articles extend their scope to cover the congressional elections as well.

To answer the question posed by the title of this article, we sketch what we mean by the concepts of civility and argument and engagement; note the ways in which the rise of partisan media menaces civil engaged argument; and close with analysis of an exchange between a prominent Democrat and Republican that illustrates the importance of common definitions and sources of trusted evidence.

This symposium consists of three papers written after a small mentoring conference, New Research on Gender in Political Psychology, which was held in New Brunswick, New Jersey, March 4–5, 2011. As junior scholars, we received a grant from the National Science Foundation (#SES-1014854) to organize a conference for the purposes of mentoring pretenure faculty and promoting scholarship on gender in political psychology. Each of the three articles in this symposium focuses on a different aspect of the conference.

The article examines short-term effects of terror on trust and civic engagement in Norway. Prior to the July 22, 2011 attacks, Norway ranked among the nations with the highest levels of trust and civic engagement in the world. How does a nation of trusters react to terror? Based on two web surveys conducted in March/April 2011 and August 2011 short-term effects on trust, fear, and political interest and participation are analyzed. Two competing hypotheses are explored: first, the “end-of-innocence hypothesis,” which assumes that the attacks have disrupted trust and instilled a new culture of fear, and second, the “remobilization hypothesis,” which assumes that the attacks have led to a reinforcement of trust and of civic values. Our results show increased interpersonal and institutional trust as well as a modest increase in civic engagement, especially among youth. Moreover, there is little increase in experienced fear within the population. Our study therefore supports the remobilization-of-trust hypothesis. Contrary to the intended aims of the attacker, the structures of trust and civic engagement seem to have been reinforced in Norwegian society. This study in part corroborates findings concerning short-term effects after September 11, 2001.

It is fair to say that a great swath of forest was sacrificed for the study of negative campaigning. As we might hope and expect, a great deal has been learned since our initial assumptions that negative ads would be the downfall of our republic. (For an excellent review of this literature, see Geer 2006). This PS symposium and a spate of recent work (for example, see Herbst 2010; Shea and Fiorina 2012; Sobieraj and Berry 2011), suggest growing interest in a somewhat different form of negativity: the tone of political discourse, or what we might call levels of civility in politics. Much of this work has centered on the impact of nasty politics on individuals (Forgette and Morris 2006; Mutz 2007; Mutz and Reeves 2005; Fridkin and Kenney 2008). Might vitriol turn off citizens and lead to increased levels of distrust and cynicism?

Within the subfields of political psychology and the study of gender, the introduction of new data collection efforts, methodologies, and theoretical approaches are transforming our understandings of these two fields and the places at which they intersect. In this article we present an overview of the research that was presented at a National Science Foundation (NSF) (#SES-1014854) funded conference “New Research on Gender in Political Psychology” at Rutgers University in March 2011. This scholarship represents the expanding questions and approaches that enhance our understanding of gender within political psychology. As a result, we suggest that further innovation is needed with regard to theory and methods to understand better how gender shapes the political attitudes and actions of individuals. Our discussion here covers the use of data, interdisciplinary methods, and intersectionality to study gender. We conclude with thoughts about the theoretical implications of this recent scholarship and the future of political science research on gender.

Democrat Barack Obama is going to defeat Republican Mitt Romney by a comfortable margin in the 2012 presidential election. This forecast comes from a statistical model that uses the primary performance of the candidates and a cycle in presidential elections to predict the presidential vote. In plain English, Obama has history on his side as well as the fact that he was unchallenged in the primaries. The model, called The Primary Model because of its heavy reliance on primaries, covers elections from 1912, the beginning of presidential primaries. Since 1952, however, only the New Hampshire Primary is used; we justify the choice of New Hampshire at some length.

Redistricting received substantial attention in the popular media in 2011, as states redrew state legislative and congressional district boundaries. Many reformers continue to argue for a de-politicization of the redistricting process, claiming that partisan redistricting is responsible for declining electoral competition and increasing legislative polarization. Our analysis of evidence from state legislatures during the last decade suggests that the effects of partisan redistricting on competition and polarization are small, considerably more nuanced than reformers would suggest, and overwhelmed by other aspects of the political environment.