Dianne Pinderhughes, the President's Distinguished Professor and Full Professor in the Departments of Africana Studies and Political Science at Notre Dame University, became the Association's 104th president on September 2 at the close of the Association's Annual Meeting. Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan, APSA's outgoing president, symbolically passed the gavel to Pinderhughes at the Association's Business Meeting on September 1. Joining Pinderhughes in guiding the Association are six new officers. Eight new members of the council will be elected in an all-member election during the month of October. Details on the results of the election will be available on the web and in the January issue of PS.

It is a great honor for the American Political Science Association to have Robert Axelrod as our current president. Axelrod combines a devotion to rigorous science as well as a deep concern with policy issues, particularly those of international peace and the threat of nuclear war. His fascination and distress about threats to peace is a major source of the fantastic energy he has brought to his work. Simultaneously, his insistence on rigorous exploration on the processes that enhance cooperation in complex settings has ensured that his theoretical breakthroughs have been widely recognized across the social sciences as well as in biology and computer sciences.I wish to thank Michael Cohen, Robert Keohane, Rick Riolo, Robert Putnam, Carl Simon, and Leigh Tesfatsion for their input and comments on this biographical essay and Nicole Todd and Patty Lezotte for their help in preparing this essay.

The APSA journals, American Political Science Review, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Perspectives on Politics, began using the web-based editorial management system Editorial Manager in July 2007 to accept new manuscripts; invite and receive peer reviews; and edit and manage the journals. Authors should use Editorial Manager to submit new manuscripts to APSA journals; they can be accessed at www.editorialmanager.com/apsr, www.editorialmanager.com/ps, and www.editorialmanager.com/pop. Reviewers will be invited via email to review and will be directed to Editorial Manager to express their their willingness to review and to access manuscripts.

A Look at the Centennial Center for Political Science & Public Affairs

This essay is the first of a planned three-part series dealing with quantitative indicators of continuity and change in the political science discipline, focusing on the period since 1960. The series is inspired by the work of Somit and Tanenhaus (1967) which presented reputational rankings of both departments and individuals. For this series of essays, we created a unique database in which we recorded cumulative citation counts between 1960–2005 for all regular faculty members of U.S. Ph.D.-granting institutions ca. 2002. In addition to identifying the department at which the individuals in this data set are presently employed, we have also collected information on their date of Ph.D. and the institution from which their Ph.D. was awarded.The authors would like to thank Robert Axelrod, Nathaniel Beck, Russell Dalton, James Fowler, Ronald Inglehart, Margaret Levi, Michael Lewis-Beck, Jean Oi, Dorothy Solinger, Don Wittman, 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 Hans-Dieter Klingemann's 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.

Pi Sigma Alpha, the National Political Science Honor Society, proudly announces the following award winners for 2007.

Washington insider.

Marketa Valkova is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Brandeis University and is currently working on her dissertation, entitled Agenda-Setting in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of Human Rights in U.S., British, and French Foreign Policies (1991–2006). Her dissertation examines crossnational differences in agenda-setting dynamics of international human rights issues and her cases include the foreign policy processes of the U.S., Britain, and France in the post-Cold War era.

The disastrous invasion of Iraq has shed a stark light on the limitations of military interventions. Much of the ensuing skepticism is quite healthy. But there is a risk that “the lessons of Iraq” will be learnt to the exclusion of lessons that can be drawn from the more than two dozen other interventions of the post-Cold War era.

In an effort to increase graduate student participation in the Annual Meeting, the Association awarded 77 Advanced Graduate Student Travel Grants for the 2007 meeting in Chicago. The names and institutional affiliations of the 2007 winners follow.

Even before the 2006 presidential election dissolved into a nasty street battle, it was widely perceived as strongly polarized. The two leading candidates, Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), staked out starkly different positions on key economic issues. Calderón promised continuity with Mexico's free-market reforms, focusing on investment as the engine of growth. López Obrador, in contrast, argued that the neoliberal strategy would benefit only a few and he instead promised to alleviate poverty through state spending on infrastructure and social welfare. Unlike in prior presidential elections where the PAN and PRD candidates downplayed their differences to challenge the authoritarian dominant PRI with broad pro-democracy appeals, in this first post-transition election, the candidates made their differences clear.

Stephen Colbert's provocative claims offer a starting point to consider whether and how to broaden the international perspective within undergraduate public policy courses and curriculum. This article discusses whether an absence of international perspectives within public policy courses should be a concern, considers an alternative framework for incorporating a broader international perspective into an introduction to public policy course, and identifies potential assignments and pedagogical tools.I wish to thank Karen Mossberger and Frank Lebo for their help in pulling together information used in this paper.

In recognition of their outstanding academic and personal achievements, APSA is pleased to announce the APSA Minority Fellows for the 2007–2008 academic year. Awards are based on the students' undergraduate course work, GPA, GRE scores, extracurricular activities, and recommendations from political science faculty. A selection committee designated 11 Fellows to receive financial support from the Association. Members of the selection committee for this year's Fellows included Rodolfo Rosales, University of Texas, San Antonio; Mark Q. Sawyer, University of California, Los Angeles; and Janelle Wong, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. This year's Minority Fellows are:

Someone was absent from the 2007 Annual Meeting. Following 34 years of service to the profession, Joyce Williams retired from APSA at the end of August. Many knew Joyce Williams as the mainstay of the Association's professional placement services. And so she was.

Political scientists have long acknowledged the substantial challenges of and obstacles to effective majority leadership in the Senate. As each individual senator, regardless of rank or party affiliation, has the right to object to unanimous consent agreements that govern much of the Senate's business, to offer non-germane amendments to pending legislation, and to engage in extended debate that can only be halted by mustering 60 votes to invoke cloture, the agenda of the Senate leadership can be easily derailed. The tendency of senators to obstruct and delay has been exacerbated over the past half century by the rise of individualism and partisanship in the Senate, which has resulted in commensurate increased challenges for Senate leaders (see, for example, Polsby 1971; Sinclair 2005; Davidson and Oleszek 2006).

This section lists upcoming book publications across the broad field of political science. This list is fully reader-generated. If your first-edition book is scheduled for publication in the three months before publication of the next issue of PS (i.e., if it will be published in the December, January, February, or March months that lay between publication of PS's January and April issues), enter the details of publi-cation in the box found at PS's web site: www.apsanet.org/section_223.cfm. We hope that spreading word of upcoming work will help keep our members even more attune to new scholarship within the discipline. The Booklist is appearing in the Association News section due to spacing problems unique to this issue. It will return to the journal's People in Political Science section in subsequent issues.

In addition to awards conferred at the Association's Award Ceremony on Thursday, August 30, the following recognitions are being made at the business meetings and receptions of APSA's Organized Sections.

APSA Congressional Fellowship Program 2006–2007 office assignments.

The APSA remains a healthy and active association—programmatically and organizationally. We have a rich agenda of continuing programs to support the discipline. Because our forthcoming Annual Report will feature all of our operating programs, I will make only passing reference in this Executive Director's report to many of these core activities. I will focus here on some of the thinking behind how the Association approaches to issues facing scholars and the discipline, on some of the newest developments in our programming, and on APSA's operating status, which remains very strong financially and organizationally.

Early analyses of the 2006 presidential election in Mexico have called our attention to the post-election process, to accusations of fraud, to the extent of partisan polarization, and to the prospects of democratic consolidation, but few have offered an explanation of why President Vicente Fox's National Action Party (PAN) was able to maintain control of the executive office, even by the slim margin of 0.56%. In this article, I argue that the first post-PRI-regime election split the anti-PRI vote into different ideological and policy-oriented camps. This made the 2006 race a choice between policy programs and priorities that reflected economic concerns, and voters' assessments of the economy were a central feature of candidate support. Economic growth in the second half of the Fox administration as well as unusually high oil prices played a crucial role in the election. They enabled the PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón, to appeal for stability and to attack his main contender, PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as a danger to it. Had economic growth remained slow and oil prices at the expected rate, the PAN's chances to keep the presidency would have been slim, especially against a popular leftist candidate who had a lead in the polls, promised to help the poor at the expense of the rich, and voiced harsh criticism against the “neoliberal” policies of the PRI and PAN governments.