We read with interest David C. Earnest's recent (July 2006) PS article about the pedagogical challenges surrounding the statistical computation of pseudo-random numbers (PRNGs). We write to clarify some issues regarding the testing and setting of PRNG seeds, and to direct readers' attention to a set of resources for configuring computationally accurate simulations and statistical analyses.

Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham resigns after pleading guilty to bribery. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is indicted and forced to relinquish his leadership position, and later resigns from Congress. House Democrat William Jefferson is stripped of his position on the Ways and Means Committee after an FBI raid of his congressional office and amid reports that he hid $90,000 in alleged bribes in a freezer at his home. Stories of wrongdoing in government surface almost daily as members of Congress come under a microscope for close ties to lobbyists. As the 2006 congressional elections approach, Democrats have made corruption a central theme in their campaigns, arguing that a series of scandals adds up to a full-blown culture of corruption. In response, Republicans have rejected this characterization and attempted to point the finger back at Democrats, suggesting that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.We thank Rosie Clawson and Bert Rockman for helpful comments.

While not the worst of political pathologies, corruption is the one most likely to be found thriving in electoral democracies. Not as dangerous as war, nor as urgent as terrorism, some have even argued that the little bit of corruption that comes with democracies makes them work better—by lowering transaction costs, reducing the inefficiencies of cumbersome rules, and generally making things happen (Anechiarico and Jacobs 1996; see also Leys 1965; Huntington 1968).This article draws on Warren (2004).

“Don't Vote—It Only Encourages Them!”

The words appeared on a chalkboard outside a London pub the day after Margaret Thatcher called the 1987 general election, but they might just as well be the motto of half or more of the American electorate in 2006 as well. Deep into a midterm election campaign in a time of war and economic worries—a campaign that could change control of one or, conceivably, both houses of Congress, and that will set the stage for the next presidential election—disenchanted voters far outnumber political enthusiasts. Between 60–70% of poll respondents say the country is “on the wrong track,” and roughly the same percentages say they are “dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States.” “Wrong track” responses are more common among non-registered voting-age respondents than in the population as a whole. Neither party in Congress enjoys a net positive assessment by the public. The Pew Research Center regularly asks, “Regardless of how you feel about your own representative, would you like to see most members of Congress reelected in the next congressional election, or not?” In June of this year 29% answered “yes” and 57% “no”—a major change from October of 2000 when 40% said “yes” and 34% responded “no.” Despite these levels of apparent alienation, and the sizeable stakes in play this year, there are few signs that voter turnout in 2006 will rise above the dismal levels traditionally associated with midterm federal elections.

The last symposium on Canada in PS was published in 1993, but little seems to have changed in the attitude of American political scientists toward this nation. To quote from the previous symposium introduction:

Canada's 23rd general election was held on January 23, 2006. Only 20 months earlier, on June 28, 2004, the governing Liberals—in power continuously since 1993—had been reduced to a minority in Parliament, winning 135 of 308 seats and 37% of the popular vote. Minority governments in Canada typically have quite short half-lives, and the Liberal government formed in 2004 was no exception. After narrowly avoiding defeat on its budget bill in May 2005, the government lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons on November 28, and Canadians faced the prospect of a winter trek to the polls. And, since the holiday season was fast approaching, Election Day was deferred until late January, making the campaign an atypically long one by Canadian standards. It also proved to be a very exciting one.

On September 11, 2001, the turbulence that is characteristic of the post-Cold War international system came to bear fully on the Canadian-American relationship. Rumors that the highjackers entered the U.S. from Canada put Canadians immediately on the defensive. Though erroneous, these rumors reflected a willingness on the part of Americans to see the Canadian border as a source of vulnerability. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, American officials intensified their criticism of Canada for the laxness of the latter's immigration and refugee policies and for their failure to adequately police the country's borders.

Over 40 years ago, Leon Epstein (1964) published a comparative study of Canadian political parties in the American Political Science Review that still merits a careful read. His aim in that essay was to juxtapose the Canadian experience against the American in order to learn something of the latter, but in doing so, he provided a succinct analysis of important dynamics structuring the Canadian party system. His account reminds us that, like the United States, Canada is “a diverse nation in a large land area,” has “developed a structural federalism,” has an “American-style social and economic class structure,” and uses “a single-member, simple-plurality election system.” Perhaps reflecting these underlying similarities, Canadian parties' (like their American counterpart's) “extra-parliamentary organizations are loose and non-doctrinal at every level” and structured federally.

Political representatives in Canada have traditionally been selected using a first-past-the-post electoral system. The major problem with this process of determining “who governs” is that larger parties are often rewarded the majority of seats in legislatures without winning a majority of popular support. Recently, the debate on electoral reform in Canada has begun to gain steam, as several provinces have started to look more seriously at alternatives (Milner 2004). Declining voter turnout may explain why even governments that benefit from the current electoral system are finding it increasingly difficult to simply sideline this issue. But what accounts for the Canadian public's more recent frustration with their traditional electoral system?We would like to thank Nicki Doyle for her research assistance and Concordia University for its financial support.

Because of its mix of institutions and practices, the fundamental nature of the government of Canada is a problematic case for scholars. A reconsideration of the Canadian polity needs to be undertaken because of events over the past quarter century, such as the development of executive federalism; the repatriation of a revised Constitution from the supervision of the United Kingdom over the objections of Quebec; the rejection of the constitutional settlements in the Meech Lake Accord (1990) and the Charlottetown Accord (1992); increased attention to the claims of Aboriginal peoples; increased movements for relaxing party discipline in Parliament and for a more proportional electoral system; increased controversy over the use of judicial review in interpreting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; and, above all, the ongoing problem of national unity, especially stemming from the Quebec separatist movement.An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference of the Association of Canadian Studies, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Thanks to Arend Lijphart for data and comments.

In A Nation Too Good to Lose, former Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark worried that the future of Canada was by no means guaranteed: “I am surprised by the number of thoughtful Canadians, particularly outside Québec, who assume that Canada will stay together in the future simply because it has stayed together in the past” (1994, 50). He noted that, “There is no rule that says every country should succeed, and none that requires failed countries to stay together. Divorce is acceptable in international relations. So no one argues that Canada should stay together just because it is here” (125).

“To arrive at some understanding of what is going on is hard enough,” says Abraham Kaplan, “without having also to meet the demand that we anticipate what will happen next” (1964, 351). Despite Kaplan's warning, attempts at forecasting American elections by political scientists have grown in recent years. Foreshadowing election results is not just a casual interest for political scientists. It both sparks interest in the work of our discipline, and serves as a pedagogical tool. We admit that many challenges present themselves when we attempt to predict complicated social phenomena; but if we, instead, limit our research to description and explanation, the danger is that repeated analysis of the same datasets will track patterns again and again that do not exist in the reality outside our samples. One guard against this is to take theories about politics and employ them to predict future events. In this spirit, this paper utilizes well-known patterns of congressional elections to predict those of the 2006 Senate.

“To arrive at some understanding of what is going on is hard enough,” said Abraham Kaplan, “without having also to meet the demand that we anticipate what will happen next” (1964, 351). Political scientists have been taught to describe and to explain phenomena rather than to predict them. Kaplan, for one, appeared to think that this was enough. But within the rich soil of explanation, Kaplan admitted (346), lay the seed of prediction. Indeed, Carl G. Hempel and Paul Oppenheim (1948, 138), whom Kaplan took to task for saying so, flatly stated that “an explanation is not fully adequate” unless it also served as the basis for prediction (quoted in Kaplan, 346).

With the 2006 midterm election fast approaching, Democrats' chances of regaining control of the House of Representatives remain unclear. On the one hand, national political conditions appear to be more favorable for Democrats than at any time since the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. A pickup of only 15 seats would give Democrats control of the House in 2007 and, since the end of World War II the average midterm seat loss for the president's party is 24 seats. Moreover, when the president's approval rating is below 50%, the average midterm seat loss is 38 seats and, according to data compiled by pollingreport.com, George W. Bush's average approval rating during the month of June was only 37%.

Political consulting is not a wholly new enterprise. Advisers have provided services informally to politicians for centuries. In recent years, however, political consulting has become increasingly formalized. Sabato (1981) offers an operational definition of contemporary political consultants: a campaign professional who is engaged primarily in the provision of advice and services (such as polling, media creation and production, direct mail fundraising) to candidates, their campaigns, and other political committees. Fueled primarily by developments in the United States, the political consulting industry experienced tremendous growth in the 20th century since the establishment of the first modern political consulting firm in 1934 (Friedenberg 1997; Baumgartner 2000; Thurber and Nelson 2000; Lathrop 2003; Plasser and Plasser 2002). Presidential candidates have sought the expertise of political marketing professionals consistently since Alfred Landon's 1936 campaign (Baumgartner 2000). Since 1969, when Joseph Napolitan (who had worked on Hubert Humphrey's campaign in 1968) founded the American Association of Political Consultants with 25 members, the organization has grown substantially, currently boasting over 4,000 members. (Baumgartner [2000] estimates the number of political consultants across the United States to exceed 35,000.) This proliferation of political consultants instigated the formation of an industry that has become increasingly specialized and professionalized (Thurber 1998; Baumgartner 2000).

In the final days of the 2004 election, independent candidate Ralph Nader hardly resembled the same man who ran for president four years earlier. In 2000, Nader had catapulted himself from consumer activist to Green Party nominee, pledging to build a new progressive alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties. He raised $8.4 million, appeared on 44 state ballots, earned almost three million votes nationwide, and was widely blamed for Al Gore's defeat in Florida. Four years later, Nader had shed his Green Party affiliation, raised only $4.6 million, appeared on just 35 ballots, and earned a meager .38% of the popular vote. The controversial third party candidate who drew so much attention for his pivotal role in the 2000 election outcome had become a mere footnote by 2004.I thank Phil Jones for research assistance, Theresa Amato for Nader travel information, and participants in the Riker Seminar at the University of Rochester for comments.

In the movies, scholarly work is a contact sport. At a conference or during a public presentation, the scholar is always passionate and articulate. He proclaims radically new theses that cause the audience to shout out objections or gasp at his intellectual audacity. Then, he dashes off a masterful proof on the chalkboard or rips open a curtain to reveal a newly discovered dinosaur skeleton. Someone in the back of the lecture hall starts to clap, and soon all his assembled peers break out into raucous applause.

Not long ago, I received a packet of papers, the contents of which explained why my latest article submission was rejected by a well-known peer-reviewed journal. Like everyone else, I've been in this position before, but this time two things led me to more contemplation than usual. First, it was the first rejection since I received tenure, and I noted that job security did little to dampen my disappointment. Second, it came very shortly after I ran into a senior colleague, who noted fairly casually that two of his articles had just been turned down, one of them by a top political science journal.

Giving a job talk has multiple aims. Most important of these: to get a job. But, it also makes sense to think about a job talk as (a) practice that will improve your skills for future job interviews, making it more likely that you will eventually get a job, even if not this one, (b) a kind of initiation ritual into the profession, and (c) a way to broaden your academic network and make new friends. It is your chance to persuade your peers (and perhaps your future colleagues) that you are a promising/accomplished scholar, a potentially good colleague, and a good teacher—not necessarily in that order. Priorities attached to these desiderata will vary from department to department (with major differences to be expected between research-oriented departments and those with a more liberal arts focus), but even within any given department, different members of the department will undoubtedly attach different weights to each of these three concerns. Such relevant information will be conveyed in a job talk.

If anecdotal evidence is to be believed, political scientists are much more heavily burdened with reviewing manuscripts submitted to professional journals than they were just a few years ago, even more than the expanded number of journals and journals that have expanded their numbers would suggest. Young faculty in particular feel this burden; rightly or wrongly, they feel they cannot refuse requests to review manuscripts because it may make it harder for them to publish in those very same journals. More than a few graduate students have also been asked to review papers, a practice one might question both because of the time it takes from budding researchers and because of questions it raises about the quality of reviews.