Editorial cartoons do not just mirror politics, but are also themselves a part of politics. They are more than single-panel graphical commentaries on daily policies, for they construct their own claims on truth. The cartoonist can use the polysemic nature of visual signs and present a distinct framing perspective. Editorial cartoonists with certain ideological stances can become an actor in “the struggle for cultural supremacy,” in Tarrow's (1998) term. This struggle refers to efforts by the state, media, and social movements to influence the interpretative processes by which individuals negotiate the meaning of events. This paper analyzes the editorial cartoons in Turkish daily newspapers in terms of their competing framings of contemporary Turkey's secularist-Islamist division. Secularism and Islamism refer here to political projects that seek to transform and reinstitute a sociopolitical order on the basis of some constitutive norms (Çınar 2005, 8–9).

Jonathan Shapiro, better known as Zapiro, is South Africa's most influential and widely published political cartoonist. His work is featured in several national daily and weekly newspapers. His cartoons have also appeared in international publications and he or his work has been featured in everything from highbrow newspapers to the front page of real estate advertisement magazines. A member of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, he exhibits a bias toward a progressive, Left-liberal conception of what political life ought to be that sits uncomfortably with the increasingly Africanist tonality pulsating through the veins of South African political life. His work touches upon the history of oppression, the reactions of those in and now out of power, and, in more recent years, on the issues that arise from the “underbelly” of the liberation movement. He has brutally caricatured the foibles of liberation movements leaders, be it their AIDS denial, individuals' cases of corruption, or the hypocrisy of ethnic or racial mobilization in the context of the new, non-racial dispensation. His particular wrath is reserved for African National Congress (ANC) figures who have, in his view, defiled the principles of the liberation movement. In the last two years, Zapiro has busied himself with a series of cartoons about the trials and tribulations of the former deputy president and leader of the ANC, Jacob Zuma.

Inglehart based the theory of values change on the concepts of scarcity. He argues that people “place the greatest value on those things that are in relatively short supply” (1981, 881). ‘Materialist’ concerns about economic and physical security are desired by the public in times of depression or warfare. Emphasis on ‘Post-materialist values’ such as freedom, self-expression, and quality of life increases as demands for clean drinking water, food, and shelter are met (Abramson and Inglehart 1995). In this regard, values represented beliefs that are derived from human needs gratification (Inglehart 1971).

Did voters in Durham, North Carolina divide along racial lines in the high-profile May 2, 2006, primary election for Durham district attorney? The results of an analysis of the primary vote by race suggest there were not major racial divisions: winner Mike Nifong received about the same percentage of support from African-American voters as from voters who are not African American. However, it seems likely, and I argue here, that Nifong used the high-profile prosecution of the Duke lacrosse rape case to win over some African-American and White voters in what otherwise might have been a low-key, low-information local election. This case and its allegations are sordid and appalling, and have garnered substantial national media attention. I contend that Nifong aggressively pursued prosecution as a way of representing what he perceived was his constituents' interests in justice for the alleged victim (though some have subsequently questioned his prosecution of the case); this aggressive prosecution's public nature likely had electoral ramifications. Further, supporting recent work on race and electoral politics, I show that traditional racial cues were critically important in other concurrently held Durham elections, though not in Nifong's race for district attorney. Nifong, a White candidate, defeated another White candidate and an African-American candidate in a county that is 51% White and 40% African-American (based on those identifying as only one race in the 2000 census).

Any examination of newspaper editorials and reform group positions will indicate that the most commonly perceived problem with U.S. elections at the moment is that they are rarely competitive. This absence of competition has prompted recent proposals in several states, most prominently in California and Ohio, to reform the redistricting process to increase the frequency of competitive elections. These propositions failed, but that is unlikely the end of such attempts. The reason for these proposals is obvious. Political education in the U.S. indoctrinates us at a young age to believe that competition is good. In economics, market competition provides social benefits, and, by analogy, political competition must provide similar benefits. This argument is frequently made explicitly, such as by Schumpeter (1942), and it has its roots as far back as the often-assigned Federalist Papers #10 and #51. Of course, the economic definition of competition has little to do with the political definition of a competitive election. Broadly speaking, there are two economic definitions of competition: (1) competitive behavior, which generally means innovation, and (2) competitive market structures, which means many buyers, many sellers, and perfect information. In contrast, a competitive election generally means one in which the candidates' vote shares are roughly equal, or similarly, one in which each candidate has a roughly 50% chance of winning. The only obvious relationship between these definitions is that we might equate vote shares with market shares, but the benefits of a competitive market accrue regardless of whether sellers have equal market shares—they simply must charge the same price for the same goods, as determined by the intersection of the supply and demand curves. In fact, in a competitive market, each firm should have such a small market share that no firm is a price-giver, and the idea of an election for a single-member district in which there are so many candidates that no candidate has a significant vote share seems untenable. Alternatively, we might draw an analogy between pressure on sellers to charge the same price for the same good and pressure on candidates toward policy convergence, but the idea of all candidates offering the same bundle of policies makes many people uncomfortable as well. So, the analogy between the efficiency of a competitive market and the benefits of a competitive election falls apart. Of course, Schumpeter's (1942) argument was that political leaders should compete for votes by innovating with respect to policy based on the first definition of competition, but again, that means that the economic analogy has little to say about whether elections should be uncertain and decided by narrow margins. The fact that we happen to use the same word for different circumstances does not logically allow us to say the following: because competition is good in the marketplace, close elections are good. Free market economics cannot be used to defend the drawing of competitive districts without straining the analogy beyond its limits, regardless of how intuitively appealing the analogy is.

Who publishes in the discipline's leading journals is a matter of intrinsic interest to political scientists. Indeed, any discipline is first and foremost about the people who practice it. A focus on who publishes also raises important questions concerning the relationship between the characteristics of authors, such as their gender, seniority, institutional affiliation, and nationality, and the knowledge they produce. Is who publishes associated with what is published? Moreover, publications in leading journals are an important marker of professional status and a key conduit for the diffusion of ideas. This points to a further question: Do the top journals differ in terms of the authors and research they publish?We are grateful to Angela Hawken for her advice on the construction of the data set, to Matthew Lieber for his assistance with data collection, and to PS's two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions.

How well are women authors represented in the most-recognized journals in political science? To what degree does the presence of women authors mirror women's presence in the discipline? Although a few studies have sought to provide data on the presence of women authors in political science journals (Young 1995; Kelly et al. 1994), more recent work on the visibility of women in the discipline has focused on gender and authorship of edited volumes (Mathews and Andersen 2001), on the participation of women in the APSA annual meetings (e.g., Gruberg 2006; 2004), and on the status of women in the discipline (Sarkees and McGlen 1992; 1999; Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession 2001). All are useful endeavors. This paper analyzes the presence of women authors in six volume years (1999–2004) of eight prestigious political science journals—American Political Science Review (APSR), American Journal of Political Science (AJPS), Journal of Politics (JOP), World Politics (WP), International Organization (IO), Comparative Politics (CP), Comparative Political Studies (CPS), and International Studies Quarterly (ISQ).

Participation by women in the roles of chairpersons, papergivers, and discussants on the panels and roundtables, as well as the poster sessions, that convene at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) has long been tracked by Gruberg (see, for example, but not inclusive, Gruberg 1992; 1993; 1994; 1995; 2001; 2002; 2004; 2006). His reports provide a welcome record of women's increasing presence at the APSA's annual meetings. This study seeks to supplement Gruberg's efforts by providing a comparative perspective with data from the most recent annual meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA). The ISA's annual meeting provides a useful comparison for two reasons. First, a very large percentage of its members are political scientists, thus offering a comparison to an association consisting of people with comparable training and research agendas as represented at APSA. Second, the APSA has in recent years sought to forge international connections, making ISA an increasingly relevant sister organization.

Iattended my first American Political Science Association meeting in 1949. It was an exciting experience for me as a first-year graduate student. I already venerated several established scholars in the profession. Herman Finer and Carl Friedrich were the towering figures on my intellectual landscape in comparative politics, my major field. In American politics, in which I was a teaching assistant, Edward S. Corwin and Carl B. Swisher were giants. And here they were, conspicuous in the halls of the hotel, standing for hours, as I recall, each in his own place, talking with groups of awe-struck students. The greats of the profession were suddenly real people rather than simply names on books. The APSA membership included a significant cadre of political leaders, public figures, and well-known journalists. I was astonished to see Senators Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas, Congressman Jacob Javits, Ralph Bunche, who had just served as acting UN Mediator on Palestine, and Max Lerner, a noted editorial writer and political theorist.

This paper is the second of a three-part series dealing with quantitative indicators of impact and prominence in the political science discipline. In these essays, we assess some of the changes in the discipline since the publication of the Somit and Tanenhaus (1963; 1964; 1967) studies that cover the first 60 years of the twentieth century. In the first paper of the series, published in the January 2007 issue of PS (Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007), we focused on the individual visibility and impact of all regular faculty in Ph.D.-granting departments by using SSCI-based cumulative citation counts to their lifetime work. In particular, we identified the 400 most-cited faculty members in the discipline, and we found that citation counts are strongly influenced by factors such as date of Ph.D., subfield, and gender. This, the second paper in the series, shifts to departmental-level data and details the historical changes in Ph.D. production and placement rates from 1902–2000. The last paper in the series, to be published in the July 2007 issue of PS, will combine the individual-level citation data presented in the first paper with the Ph.D. production and placement data in the second paper to look at the factors that affect reputational rankings of Ph.D.-granting political science departments.The authors would like to thank Russell Dalton, Lee Sigelman, and the anonymous reviewers of PS for their helpful feedback and corrections. We are also indebted to the bibliographic assistance of Clover Behrend-Gethard and to the inspiration of Joe Tanenhaus' pioneering work. Any errors presented in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors welcome corrections to the data that is presented in this series. Comments and corrections can be sent to Bgrofman@uci.edu.

It has now been four years of contested elections for the Council of the Association. In this note we ask: What can we learn about these elections from a political science perspective?

Classes begin today: one section of Rhodes College's celebrated great books course, The Search for Values in the Light of Western History and Religion, and two sections of a new course for me and (surprisingly) for Rhodes, Southern Politics. Today, as on subsequent Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the next 14 weeks, I'll begin at noon with Search and keep going until 2:50 with my other two classes. Over the years I've found that it's easier (not easy, but easier) to teach my classes back-to-back-to-back than to pump myself up for a class, come down afterward, and have to climb that motivational hill again before meeting the next one.

Scholars are sometimes called upon to adjudicate charges of plagiarism, that is, of the unacknowledged “lifting” of one writer's words or ideas by another. When literal copying of whole expressions or sentences is involved, judgments are straightforward. But when the accuser claims that his or her ideas were plagiarized, as in the recent court case against Random House over Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, the situation is much more complicated. Passing judgment in such cases requires a reflection on the meaning of “plagiarism” and the best ways of assessing it, which this brief article seeks to provide.

One day, argues Foucault, we may wonder how “the ruses of sexuality” seduced us to academic inquiry, but that day is possible only “in a different economy of bodies and pleasures” (1976, 159). In such a very different political reality, a genealogical account of the relationship between power and sexuality might not be necessary. But at present, “our discourse, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledge” is “busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment” sexuality so pervasive in our consciousness that it informs much of our political culture and democratic governance. Politicians fear being caught in its seduction, yet conjure it to excite voters. Campaign advisers dance with sexuality, provoking it to publicly bless their candidate and using it to scandalize their opponent. Janus-faced voters charge the state with its regulation while, publicly and privately, celebrating sexual freedoms. The body politic knows well the power of sexuality. The leading professional association of political scientists has yet to formally recognise it. Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. Perhaps that day has come.The authors would like to thank Cynthia Burack and Jyl Josephson for assistance with this article.

Interpretive research methods of various sorts have long been used to study “the political,” but the full range of such methods is not widely known, and many are curious about what they entail. Others, who begin to use one or another of them, have questions about how to proceed. For those just learning about these methods, questions may be as basic as: “What does ethnomethodology mean?” “What is semiotic analysis?” “Are these approaches recognized as legitimate in political science?” Scholars engaging, or perhaps teaching, these methods might ask, e.g., “How do ethnographers overcome problems of accessing their field site, talking to strangers, and turning a year's worth of observational and interview notes into concise text?”We thank 2005 and 2006 Program Chairs Ron Schmidt and Val Martinez-Ebers and Executive Director Betty Moulds and Associate Director Elsa Favila at the Western Political Science Association, and Qualitative Methods 2006 Section Program Chairs Julia Lynch and Melani Cammett, and Michael Brintnall, Rob Hauck, Christina Marmor, and others on the conference organizing staff at APSA. Michael and Rob came to the Café at the Western in 2006 to see for themselves what it was that we were trying to do. We are grateful for their help in making it possible at APSA. And, of course, we thank all those colleagues who have contributed their time and thought to creating the Café with us, including Cecelia Lynch, who saw right at the beginning that it was a ‘café’ and came up with its definitive name.

This article revisits a debate between Jurg Steiner and Paul Johnson (Johnson 1990; Steiner 1990) over the civic implications of teaching rational choice that appeared in PS a little over 15 years ago. That debate summarized key contemporary arguments about the possible civic implications of teaching rational choice that likely still reverberate in department and conference discussions today. Despite numerous books, articles, and conference sessions on the perils and pluses of rational choice in scholarship, very few empirical studies examine the civic consequences of learning rational choice in undergraduate political science courses. This article reports the results of a study that attempts to do just that; to measure rational choice influences on students' civic attitudes.

The Committee on the Status of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and the Transgendered [LGBT] in the Profession has authorized this review of 17 recent editions of top-selling textbooks marketed for use in courses providing an introduction to U.S. politics.

Since the early 1990s, North Americans have participated in a large political-economic experiment in a regional trade bloc called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). With NAFTA now over 10 years old, the non-NAFTA countries have been debating the merits and shortcomings of creating an expanded version of the trade agreement that would encompass virtually every state in the Americas. The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would encompass 34 western hemisphere countries, over 800 million consumers, and a total economy of over $12 trillion. The debate over the FTAA raises a long list of important practical questions for each of the potential member states and their citizens. The debate also raises a host of pedagogical questions for students of the entire region and beyond. This paper describes a student-based simulation that taps into those practical and pedagogical questions. As in other simulations, such as the Model United Nations, students role-play while vicariously experiencing the opportunities and constraints facing each country as they negotiate for policy preferences.

People in Political Science.

Arch T. Dotson, professor emeritus of government at Cornell University, died April 6, 2006, at the age of 85. He had been sound of mind and body virtually until the end, teaching until his voice was too weak to be heard. A “country boy” born and bred in Paris, Kentucky, he worked from his early teens on farms managed by his father. Arch left for World War II just short of earning his B.A. from Transylvania College and joined the Army Air Force as a “check pilot,” becoming a jock in every war plane up to the B-29. Discharged with the rank of major, the GI Bill got him through his Harvard Ph.D. and a post-doc at the London School of Economics. His entire academic career was at Cornell, beginning in 1950, as a dedicated teacher, serving beyond his retirement as a teacher, and, respectively, as director of Cornell-in-Washington, director of Cornell Abroad, and director of the Cornell Institute of Public Affairs.