American foreign policy decision makers altered their understanding of the sovereign territorial state on September 11, 2001. The loss of lives and property in New York City, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania reversed America's general belief that the oceans and superpower status guaranteed “home security.” That dramatic act of violence against civilians and symbols of U.S. culture crystallized the distinction between the ideologies of democracy and terrorism, which in turn forced geopolitical horizons to expand beyond traditional thinking.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, a group of social scientists at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) gathered to consider how they might employ their talents to help the country after the shocking events of that morning. The group included economists, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, demographers, and survey methodologists. Based upon their previous research experience, each of them proposed hypotheses on aspects of American life and individuals' morale and behavior that were most likely to be affected. While they were relatively confident about expected relationships in the short term, we were uncertain about how temporary or permanent these changes might be or how intertwined and mutually reinforcing they could become.

This article looks at changes in the size of American news audiences during the 1990–91 Persian Gulf Crisis and the more recent period surrounding the 9/11 attacks. Like the current situation, the Persian Gulf crisis started suddenly, when Iraq launched a surprise invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Since there are clear starting points for both national crises, comparing the percentage of adults watching television news broadcasts before and after each precipitating event should show whether the respective crises prompted changes in levels of popular attention to the news.

In this article, I examine how 9/11 and the subsequent efforts to combat terrorism have affected what people know about politics. My analysis suggests three main differences between knowledge before and after 9/11. First, knowledge of 9/11 and the “war on terrorism” shot up to uncommonly high levels, just as common sense and our theories would predict. The second point is less intuitive: Heightened interest spread to issues not directly related to the terrorist attacks and appears to have increased knowledge of politics more broadly. Finally, a comparison between knowledge related to 9/11 and general political knowledge reveals that some of the usual obstacles to learning did not matter in the aftermath of 9/11. A low sense of civic duty, lack of faith in government responsiveness, and a full-time job all kept people from getting informed about politics in general, but not from learning about the terrorist attacks and the war on terrorism.

There has been much debate over whether the United States has changed in any lasting and fundamental manners since September 11, 2001. Immediately following the carnage, editorialists and pundits proclaimed a national loss of innocence, the end of American exceptionalism, the new globalization of terror, and other cataclysmic shifts. One year later, it is still too early to be certain which claims will stand the test of time, and which will eventually come to seem overblown or simply off the mark. Our concern in this symposium is limited to civic engagement in the aftermath of the assaults, and this note will be narrower still in focus. Here, I attempt an early, mid-rally assessment of public approval of, and trust in, government and political figures.

Observers of American life have seen a silver lining in the dark clouds that billowed from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Along with the horror wrought by the terrorist attacks came an outpouring of solidarity and patriotism—a sudden change of heart for many Americans who, prior to that fateful day, had seemed to be drifting inexorably toward individualism, self-absorption, and cynical disinterest in public affairs. As Stanley Greenberg (2001) aptly puts it, suddenly the “we” mattered more than the “me.” People reached out to family members, neighbors, and friends, while proudly declaring their membership in the American national community.

In this article, we report on the incidence of punch-card and other voting equipment by ethnicity, incomes, and other variables, combining county-level demographic data from the Census Bureau with county-level data on voting equipment collected by Election Data Services, Inc. Our findings, reported in the national print and electronic media in early 2001, provide remarkably little support for the view that resource constraints cause poorer counties with large minority populations to retain antiquated or inferior voting equipment.

Since the mid-1980s, academic communities have hosted an ongoing debate about the relationship between speech rights and hate speech. Many colleges established codes prohibiting speech ranging from displays of old fashioned racial bigotry to “inappropriately directed laughter” (Heyman 1996; Schiell 1998). These codes soon grew to prohibit other forms of offensive expression, including vilification based on gender, sexual preference, and some other categories comprising those described as historical victims. Stigmatizing or “assaultive” words were described as civil rights violations. Abstract rights of free expression had to be tempered with “the principle of anti-subordination;” that is, rights had to be weighed against harms to the most disadvantaged (Delgado and Stefancic 1997; Lawrence 1995).

The Isle of Ted Simulation is a successful teaching tool that is disarmingly simple yet repeatedly captivates participants. Although I originally designed the simulation to explain collective-action problems in American politics, almost all recent uses of the simulation have been in international relations and international organization classes. The simulation is an effective teaching tool for a wide variety of issues including:

1. collective goods and free riders (e.g., Olson 1971)

2. international organizations versus international organization and global governance versus global government (e.g., Rosenau and Czempiel 1992)

3. regimes and the effects of transparency (e.g., Keohane 1982, 1984; Krasner 1982; Mitchell 1994; Young 1989, 1994)

4. relative and absolute gains (e.g., Grieco 1988)

5. constructivist approaches to international relations (e.g., Wendt 1992)

6. rational choice models of decision making (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita 2000; Lave and March 1993; Monroe 1991)

7. and how the shadow of the future can engender cooperation in the present (e.g, Axelrod 1984; Hardin 1982; Shubik 1970).

For the past three years, the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University has hosted short courses at the American Political Science Association's Annual Meeting on the topic of teaching about campaigns and elections. These efforts are part of the “Improving Campaign Conduct” project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Our experience shows that professors teaching American politics have an interest in keeping their classroom materials relevant and timely, while also preserving a strong analytical framework. Here, we hope to offer some advice and guidance to professors teaching courses that cover campaigns and elections in whole or in part.

The analysis and discussion in this article are based on the preliminary results from a study of a redesigned American National Government course funded by a $200,000 grant from the Pew Program in Course Redesign. One of the central goals of this grant is to evaluate the effectiveness of the partial replacement of face-to-face classroom time with web-based interactive assignments. (We refer to the redesigned courses as “reduced seat-time” or RST.) The grant supported the development of pedagogically appropriate uses of the Internet for an introductory general education program (GEP) course, and it funded the evaluation of the impact of the redesigned course on student attitudes and learning outcomes.

In this article, we examine the impact of syllabi wording on how students assess a hypothetical instructor for an introductory political science course at a medium-sized state institution. Student participants were recruited from political science classes at this institution and randomly assigned to two groups. The groups were asked to review a sample syllabus from an introductory political science class and answer a number of questions regarding the instructor, as well as a few demographic questions. The syllabi were identical except for the wording of the requirements. For one group, the requirements were expressed in “rewarding” terms; for the other, the requirements were expressed in “punishing” terms.

This paper suggests one reason for the weak empirical results relative to civic engagement is that many service and volunteer programs have failed to sufficiently address development of fundamental civic skills such as expressing opinions and working collectively to achieve common interests as part of their design. As a result, while some studies of service learning participants show enhanced compassion and interest in social problems generally, those attitudinal changes do not consistently translate into behavioral changes (Eyler, Giles, and Braxton 1997; Perry and Katula 2001). This paper reviews recent empirical studies of community service, service learning, and volunteering, and then frames the consistently strong evidence that participation in clubs and organizations during adolescence leads to higher levels of civic engagement during adulthood within the political participation model developed by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995).

In a New Republic cover story published three years ago entitled “Irrational Exuberance: When Did Political Science Forget about Politics?” the journalist Jonathan Cohn (1999) lamented the disappearance of a certain kind of academic—typified by the Harvard professors James Q. Wilson, Samuel Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann—from contemporary political science departments. Wilson “was more than just a scholar,” Cohn wrote, “he was a public intellectual” whose “byline was as apt to appear on some policy-related article in the New York Times (or The New Republic) as it was on a peer-reviewed paper in the American Political Science Review.” Huntington, “arguably his generation's most influential student of international relations,” helped to start a popularly read foreign-policy journal. And Hoffmann, whose scholarship spanned “political theory, comparative government and international relations,” still found “time to write regularly for the New York Review of Books.”

After debating whether to go on the job market, I finally decided to make that move. After only four years of graduate school, I knew that I was hitting the market early. Still, members of my committee were confident that I would obtain my doctorate in time to assume an academic position the following year. After all, I had taken my preliminary exams, written and defended my prospectus, as well as completed the last of my coursework in one single semester. Did I really need the time off? My committee had faith in me. Why shouldn't I? Hence, I began by gathering my teaching evaluations, drafting my job letter, updating my curriculum vita, and searching for job announcements in hopes of securing an academic position before the end of my fifth year. In this article I describe that process. I offer practical and sound advice about developing a dossier that will get job candidates noticed, including suggestions for both the telephone and campus interviews.

The scene is a familiar one: two graduate students, alike in most respects, but headed down divergent paths. Both students entered the Ph.D. program in political science at the same time with similar credentials and similar goals. While having coffee one day, the two reminisced about their graduate experiences and their respective futures. Graduate Student X was lamenting that after four full years in the Ph.D. program, he still hadn't reached the dissertation stage. Graduate Student Y, on the other hand, was in very good spirits—she had finished the dissertation and secured the job of her choice. What distinguishes these two very similar individuals who achieved very different results?

Activities, Administrative Appointments, New Appointments, Promotions, Visiting and Temporary Positions, Awards, Other Award Winners

Dante Germino, by George Klosko and Kenneth W. Thompson, University of Virginia

Joseph Pois, by Ed Kiely

Frank L. Wilson, by Rolf H.W. Theen, Purdue University

It is an honor to provide my first annual report as executive director of the American Political Science Association. The vital signs for APSA are healthy ones: membership at near record levels and growing; a vigorous agenda; new electronic services for members; and a positive financial status. Before recounting these details, and reviewing active and proposed initiatives on our agenda, however, I think it is useful to reflect about different aspects of the field, and about the place of APSA and of the national office in the larger world of political science.

As I started working on the placement report, I asked myself—as well as many friends and colleagues—what do we want to know about the job market and why do we want to know it? I rapidly followed with the questions, “Are there enough data to answer these questions?” and “How can we have better data so that future answers will be better than what I can provide here?” But we'll come back to those last two questions at the end.