The cartoon, comic, or—as influential cartoonist Will Eisner called it—“sequential art” is an art-form that is cognitively friendly to contemporary notions of individualistic-liberal-democracy. Whereas traditional forms of art have rather hierarchical standards of aesthetics, which then enforce customary notions of power and the conventional hermeneutic pecking order, the iconography of comics and cartoons is supportive of a kind of pluralistic democratic individualism. If, as some thinkers suggest, the world is understood by cognitive images in the brain, then—as the work of C. S. Pierce, Scott McCloud, and others support—comics is an art that allows for the individual self-creation that subsequently supports democracy.

The aftermath of the 2000 election has been a time of constant learning in regards to election administration in the United States. Both scholars and policy makers initially focused primarily on voting technology and on which voting technologies were best at capturing votes. In early 2001, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project developed the “residual vote” metric; numerous studies have since examined residual vote rates across different voting platforms. Congressional reform of elections—exemplified in the “Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002” (P.L. 107-252)—also focused largely on voting technology, with HAVA imposing new standards for voting equipment and providing states with one-shot funding to aid in its purchase.Authors are listed alphabetically. The data collection in Cuyahoga County, Ohio was funded by the Election Science Institute (ESI) through a contract with the Cuyahoga County Commission. We are grateful to Steven Hertzberg of ESI for his assistance in the data collection. The Utah poll-worker survey was funded by the Institute of Public and International Affairs (IPIA) at the University of Utah. Steven Snell of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy (CSED) at Brigham Young University provided valuable research assistance for this project.

I argue in this paper that one possible way of addressing the critical issue of preparing students for their future role as citizens in a global society is to integrate active learning exercises such as case studies and problem-based learning scenarios that focus on international issues and events and significant global conditions. These provide an opportunity for students to practice the skills that are essential for participation in modern democratic societies. In this brief discussion paper, I present two very practical strategies for introducing students to global realities and exposing them to different cultural and ideological ways of “seeing the world.” Both strategies emphasize skills that are essential for analysis, evaluation and, eventually, problem-solving.

The conduct of war is among the most important acts of the state. In the last century alone, failure in this undertaking has toppled governments and imposed hostile occupation under a conqueror's rule for hundreds of millions from Paris to Warsaw and Tokyo to Jakarta. Military failure in World War I destroyed the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires and created a host of new states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in their stead. Allied military victory in World War II made global superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, and split Germany into two countries; the success of Soviet arms ended Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian independence, and resulted in a generation of subjugation under Soviet satellite rule for the peoples of Eastern Europe. Pyrrhic victory in two world wars exhausted Britain and brought an end to its global economic hegemony. Failure in internal war has toppled governments from Afghanistan to Vietnam; variations in the conduct of such wars can mean the difference between decades of misery in grinding stalemates as in Lebanon or in a rapid, decisive conclusion as in Rwanda's.

The current condition of Army manpower, like the situation in Iraq, is grave and deteriorating. The January 2007 decision by the George W. Bush administration to send additional ground combat and support troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has thrown the Army's manpower shortages into stark relief. This latest escalation, however, not only runs the risk of breaking the all-volunteer Army but also undermines our national security. Several questions must therefore be addressed: Is an all-volunteer Army desirable? What are the current difficulties facing Army recruitment and retention? What consequences have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had on the service? Before engaging a more substantive discussion which includes the present demographics of the force and the recruitment process, one point should be made clear. We believe the all-volunteer model is the right one and should be maintained if at all possible.

The 2000 presidential election was a wake-up call to elected leaders, public officials, and election scholars. The electoral fiasco—most prominent in Florida, but also taking place in states like New Mexico and Ohio—revealed many deficiencies in voting equipment (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). In addition to faulty equipment, registration mix-ups and problems with absentee ballots led to the loss of as many as six million votes (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 2001). Confusing ballots, like the butterfly ballot in Florida's Dade County, were found to have led voters to vote incorrectly (Wand et al. 2001). While these problems have, no doubt, existed for a long time, the closeness of the 2000 presidential race and the fact that the number of lost votes had the power to change the election outcome have brought election administration questions to the forefront of policy making.Results were first presented at “The Future of Election Reform and Ethics in the States,” hosted by Kent State University, Department of Political Science, Columbus, Ohio, January 16–17, 2007, and the following paper was presented at the Midwest Political Science Association's Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, April 12–15, 2007. Data were collected by monies generously provided by the University of New Mexico's Research Allocation Committee. We'd like to thank Luciana Zilberman, Lisa Bryant, Alex Adams, David Magleby, and the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University for their assistance with this project. Of course, any errors are our own.

Our collective experience as academics has led us to fear that departmental assessment plans will just sit on some anonymous shelf; our hard work will disappear into the black hole of administrative demands; and the lack of university response will become one more chip on our faculty's shoulders as yet another example of wasted effort. The question thus facing the departmental chair is: How do we ensure that our work benefits our programs? In other words, how do we make mandated assessment plans meaningful?

Media are not politically neutral and political cartoons are no exception. Political viewpoints can be made clear through explicit argumentation, and through the more implicit use of visual elements. One prominent example that unites argumentation with the visual to produce political persuasion is America's first political cartoon, created by Benjamin Franklin in 1754, which frames the socio-political climate of the time with an image urging the British colonies to “Join, or Die” (Katz 2004, 44). The themes of political cartoons, despite technological progress, remain unaltered by way of their continual incorporation of “domestic politics, social themes and foreign affairs” (Kemnitz 1973, 83). While members of the academic community, such as Lester C. Olson (1987), support this connection between cartooning and persuasive rhetoric, there is much we don't know about how the persuasive arguments within political cartoons work.

If disciplines can be likened to living things, then perhaps political science is best characterized not by familiar symbols—e.g., the elephant, the donkey, or the eagle—but by a small sea creature: the hermit crab. Rather than generating its own protective cover, the hermit crab adopts the foreign shells that it comes across; it makes a home for itself by utilizing the previous works of other crustaceans. For many years, the discipline of political science—like other areas within the social and behavioral sciences—built its own frameworks using the analytical tools found in outside disciplines. Borrowing heavily from econometrics, psychometrics, and biometrics, political scientists examined empirical data as they tested theories about individual behavior, organizational dynamics, and governmental processes. The substantive ends were of primary interest, and therefore less attention was paid to the means of inquiry.The authors wish to thank Michael Brintnall for sharing the American Political Science Association's data on job postings, and David Campbell, Tom Carsey, Suzanna DeBoef, Jeff Gill, John Jackson, Jonathan Nagler, Herb Weisberg, and Sarah Wilson for helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article.

Originating in the late nineteenth century, the editorial cartoon began as a mutually beneficial partnership between cartoonists and publishers. Publishers hoped to capitalize on the cartoon's popularity to increase revenue while cartoonists received job security and access to broad audiences. Recently, the future of the editorial cartoon in the United States has been a topic of much debate. Monitoring the decline of employment opportunities, growing editorial controls, and the greater use of syndication gives the impression of a medium in decline. Matt Davies, the head of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), recently stated that in any given interview he is “invariably asked about the demise of the editorial cartoonist” (Nieman 2004, 6).

In 2000, Arizona and Maine implemented full public funding for state legislative elections, and Connecticut will do so in 2008. Candidates who opt to accept public funding receive grants that pay for the entire cost of their campaigns. Advocates of these so-called clean elections argue that the programs reduce quid pro quo corruption, increase electoral competitiveness, and open up the process to candidates who lack access to traditional fundraising networks (Phelps 2004). Critics respond that the Maine and Arizona public funding programs have achieved nothing, save for imposing unjust burdens on candidates who refuse to participate (Basham and Zelder 2005).

“What Kinds of Guns Are They Buying for Your Butter” was the subtitle of a 1982 “People's Guide to National Defense.” It needs updating 25 years later. This essay cannot offer a comprehensive catalogue of U.S. weaponry; its goal is to outline what every citizen should know about the range and capabilities of our arsenal.

American politics is dominated by two major parties and has been for a century. The duopoly enjoyed by the Democrats and Republicans is largely the result of Duverger's Law: the tendency of a single-member district system to produce two-party competition (Duverger 1963). Minor parties ultimately fail in a single-member district system because (1) the winner-take-all approach does not reward candidates who finish third and (2) citizens vote strategically to avoid “wasting” their votes on hopeless candidates and spoiling the election (Cox 1997; Riker 1982). Because the U.S. two-party system is so dependent on its majoritarian electoral rules, one might suspect that other election regulations would have little effect on the number of parties.A longer version of this paper was presented at the conference, “2008 and Beyond: The Future of Election and Ethics Reform in the States,” Columbus, OH, January 16–17, 2007. I thank Richard Winger of Ballot Access News for comments and information.

Assessing the current condition of editorial cartooning invites engagement in a number of potential perspectives: Cartoons may be positioned as journalism, artistic expression, entertaining satire, and political and historical record. A rhetorical perspective examines cartoons as expressions of political discourse positioned within the wider culture that defines, constructs, and frames larger social ideologies as a backdrop to events of the day. Cartoonists accomplish this task not only by devising explicit messages about their subjects, but in the implicit expression of societal norms and values in the conceptual lenses and commonplaces they employ. This essay considers the conceptual lens of gender as it has been used by cartoonists in recent years to frame politicians, and the implications of that framing.

In the first year after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress agreed with President George W. Bush and his administration that the key to national security at home and abroad was enhancing executive branch power. To this end, leaders smoothed the legislative process and members largely consented to the new policies and rapid review pace. By December 2002, Congress passed two major domestic laws related to the new War on Terrorism and two war resolutions. But beginning in 2003, many members, largely but not all Democrats, renewed their interest in legislative powers and prerogatives by mounting small rebellions against these once-popular policies, especially the Iraq War and the Patriot Act. Committees and the chamber floors re-emerged as arenas for heated debate on policy oversight, funding, and implementation and management. While members critical of the war have had a hard time gaining traction to alter the nation's course in Iraq, there was a golden opportunity to recalibrate power and policy on the Patriot Act as 16 of its most controversial provisions were scheduled to sunset in 2005. Although the Patriot Act's second legislative round was far more complex than the first, the result gave even more power to the executive branch. Congress's ambition subsided, again.My thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Louisville, for funding related to this project. A version of this paper was presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association and I thank the discussant, Lilly Goren, for her comments and suggestions, as well as the anonymous reviewers for PS.

On many campuses, the sight of a student in a military uniform is common. On other campuses, the military is a distant institution with few visible affiliations. Why are some students in uniform, what are they doing, what are the costs and benefits to the individual, and what are the implications for the nation? This article will discuss these questions, along with a brief history of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program and its relationship to the often-discussed civil-military gap.

From the time of the conflict in Vietnam until the end of the Cold War, NGOs and the military rarely thought of themselves as having anything in common. In fact, people like ourselves—a career naval officer and a career pacifist—almost never met.The positions presented in this article do not represent either those of the Defense Department or Search for Common Ground.

For more than three decades no commercial nuclear project in the U.S. was ordered that was not later canceled. Recently, the groundbreaking for the National Enrichment Facility in New Mexico in August, 2006, the issuance of the first “Early Site Permit” for a nuclear power plant in March, 2007, and a massive lobbying campaign in Washington, D.C. have been signs that the nuclear power industry still dreams of a renaissance. Nuclear power's momentum was broken in the late 1970s by several factors, including a grassroots anti-nuclear movement that won tightened regulations, thus raising the costs of nuclear power plant construction and operation. Editorial cartoons in the daily press of that time are only one of a number of fields of cartooning that document this nuclear power controversy, and not the one that affords the closest look. Both the nuclear industry and participants in the anti-nuclear movement published entire comic books to explain their views of nuclear power. Besides these special-purpose comic books, editorial cartoonists in the weekly press and representations of nuclear power in mass entertainment provide further bodies of visual evidence for understanding the steps by which nuclear power won and lost the “public acceptance” that it now tries to win back.

As 2010 nears, state governments are preparing for the decennial political ritual of equalizing legislative district population as revealed by the new census. If the past is a guide, legislatures will grind to a standstill as legislators wrestle with the politically charged task of redistricting. But where legislators, party leaders, staff, consultants, and lawyers spend considerable time, effort, and money on their obsession with district boundaries, political scientists come to mixed conclusions about redistricting's effect on electoral politics. About the only consensus reached is on the electoral effects of racial gerrymandering, where debate has shifted to its normative implications.

L. Harmon Zeigler died from a massive heart attack in Tacoma on July 31, 2006. He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Pat; his two children, Mike and Amanda; and three grandchildren, Ben, Zoe and Ruby.