The January 2005 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics carried a report compiled by the APSA Task Force on Graduate Education which provides numerous suggestions to political science programs nationwide on preparing graduate students for professional careers, improving mentoring and advising, and revising financial package/plans to support ABDs in their final stretch (Beltran et al. 2005). Among those proposals was a section specifically designed to address unique problems international students, international graduate assistants (IGA), and international graduate student instructors (IGSI) face at U.S. institutions:

In every contested election there are inevitably winners and losers, both among the candidates and among the voters. Some candidates will take their seats as elected officials, and others will not. Some voters will be happy with the outcome, others will not. Here I seek to better understand the relationship between whether a voter casts a ballot for the winning candidate in U.S. House elections and that voter's evaluations of her representative. I build on a burgeoning literature on the relationship between voters and their elected governments to derive and test a theory about this connection. The data will show that voters whose preferred candidate wins a seat in the House of Representatives are systematically happier with their representative than those voters whom did not vote for the winning candidate. While this finding is not especially groundbreaking, the implications for the way in which we draw congressional and state legislative district lines are quite provocative. Specifically, since district lines in the House are necessarily an artificial construct, I argue that map makers ought to “pack” districts with as many like-minded partisans as possible. Trying to draw “competitive districts” effectively cracks ideologically congruent voters into separate districts, which has the effect of increasing the absolute number of voters who will be unhappy with the outcome and dissatisfied with their representative. I discuss the benefits of fundamentally rethinking the way in which we draw congressional and state legislative districts, as well as address likely concerns that might be raised about drawing districts this way.I would like to thank Jim Adams, Valerie Brunell, Bruce Cain, Geoff Evans, Bill Koetzle, Bernie Grofman, Sam Hirsch, Michael D. McDonald, Iain McLean, Sam Merrill, Glenn Phelps, David Rueda, Alec Stone Sweet, Chris Wlezian, and the Politics Group at Nuffield College for their comments.

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.

No—this is not what it seems. This is not a discourse on statistics, but it is a discussion of a type of methodology—that of how, when they are writing, political scientists can better approach their audience. Put differently, this article is related to the more general proposition that scholars need to demonstrate not only that they can conduct research but also that they can communicate it effectively to a wide audience. And, although critical of some social science writing, it carries a suggestion for increasing your range of publication options.

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.

“Here is a telling statistic. One hundred fifty-three of California's congressional and legislative seats were up in the last election, and not one, I repeat, not one, changed parties. What kind of democracy is that?”

In recent years, a number of prominent political commentators have raised concerns about the lack of ideological diversity on college campuses (Shapiro 2004; Black 2004; Kors and Silvergate 1999; Kimball 1998). Among other accusations, they claim that liberal college professors may actually penalize students for expressing conservative opinions by assigning them lower marks on exams and assignments (Horowitz 2003; Hebel 2004). Their concern is not without merit. Researchers have found that, when evaluating a colleague's research, college professors are more critical of work that contradicts their own views (Mahoney 1977). It is logical to assume that the same bias influences professors' evaluations of students' arguments. It is also reasonable to expect that students, charged with the important task of evaluating their professors, are vulnerable to their own ideological biases.We thank Markus Kemmelmeier and Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier for their helpful suggestions and valuable guidance. We also acknowledge the valuable support of research assistants Jessica Defenderfer, Cristina Ciocirlan, and Kathleen Winters. Finally, we would like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the dozens of political science faculty throughout the country who took the time to distribute our survey to their undergraduate students. This project would not have been possible without their generous assistance. This research was funded through a Faculty Research Grant from Elizabethtown College.

Ph.D.-granting institutions want students to complete their doctoral degrees. Most graduate departments in political science focus their training on preparing students to pursue academic careers. We provide valid and reliable empirical data about the factors that affect students' prospects for successfully completing political science doctoral degrees and finding academic jobs. Because National Science Foundation data (2002, Table 53) reveal significant differences in the number of doctoral degrees awarded to women compared with men, we test a series of hypotheses based on the existing literature that may account for these differences. Our paper applies knowledge gained from previous studies, such as in the area of mentoring (Wasby 2001; Andersen 2001; Benesh 2001), to explain observed gender differences in doctoral degree completion and success in gaining academic employment thereafter.The research was commissioned and funded by the Executive Council of the Midwest Political Science Association; additional funding was provided by the department of political science at the University of Iowa. Barbara Burrell of Northern Illinois University oversaw the data collection for round two of the panel study. Kimberly M. Lewis of the University of Iowa provided research assistance.

Beginning in March 1942, three months following the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, and lasting until as many as 16 months following the end of World War II, slightly more than 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were excluded, detained, and held in “relocation centers” by the United States government, ostensibly because they were considered a threat to national security. Nearly 70% were American citizens by birth; the rest were Japanese nationals who were legally barred from naturalization because of the de jure racist policies of the time (Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano 1991). Despite this treatment, over 1,200 individuals volunteered to serve in the U.S. armed forces while several thousand others were drafted from the relocation centers. Most served in a segregated unit in the European Theater, while others served as interpreters in the Pacific Theater, all while their families remained behind barbed wire in relocation centers. These individuals served with great distinction within some of the most highly decorated units of the U.S. Army (Crost 1994).

Internationalization is a hot topic on college and university campuses today. It is also one of the hot button topics facing the APSA (see Varshney 2004; Breuning 2005). Although relatively recent to APSA, internationalizing the higher education curriculum has long been a concern of educational scholars. Arum (1987) identifies three areas in which campuses can pursue internationalization: promoting the international content of curricula, tracking the international movement of scholars and students, and providing technical assistance and educational cooperation programs that engage American education in efforts abroad. Rivers (1994) adds a fourth dimension: promoting awareness of other cultures and ways of thinking through extracurricular cross-cultural experiences, which would ideally include outreach to the surrounding community.

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.

In “Don't Blame Redistricting for Uncompetitive Elections” in this issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning (2006) argue that redistricting is not responsible for the decline in the number of competitive districts, defined as a district with a near balance of partisanship. Further, the authors claim that non-partisan redistricting institutions are not correlated with the number of competitive districts. The relationship between redistricting institutions and competitive districts is of importance not only to academics who study redistricting and elections, but also to policy makers and reformers who advocate redistricting reform. If these claims are true, then policymakers are expending much misguided effort to enact redistricting reform to treat the greater problem of the decline of electoral competition in recent U.S. congressional elections.

College teachers are increasingly using instructional technology to supplement or substitute for face-to-face instruction. The incentives and arguments for doing so are many, including facilitation of higher education for non-traditional students and changing student demographics, skill building to improve student preparation for workplaces that are likely to use computer technology, space restrictions in universities with growing enrollment, the opportunities that Internet classrooms provide for organizing and monitoring student work and assignments, and so on. However, little is known about how online instruction affects the learner. Online instruction is, in many ways, fundamentally different from face-to-face instruction (see, for example, Lee 2003; McCormack and Jones 1998; Palloff and Pratt 1999). For instance, instructors are unlikely to simply post their lecture notes online in the hope that the students will read, take notes, memorize, and retain the information, which would be the closest equivalent to a traditional lecture classroom. Consequently, it cannot be assumed that different instructional modes (such as lectures or online instruction) necessarily have the same learner outcomes. This lack of knowledge concerning the effects of online instruction on learner outcomes also extends to the question of gender equality.Authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order. We gratefully acknowledge financial support for both the redesign and the evaluation of the course from the Pew Learning and Technology Program, Center for Academic Transformation, Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign.

In “Drawing the Line on District Competition,” Michael McDonald (2006) challenges our conclusion that redistricting is not responsible for declining competition in House elections. McDonald claims that this conclusion is incorrect largely because our measure of district partisanship in 1992 is flawed. According to McDonald, using the normalized 1992 major party presidential vote as a measure of House district partisanship in 1992 seriously overstates the competitiveness of House districts in that year because of the impact of the vote for Ross Perot. McDonald recommends instead using the 1988 presidential vote to measure district partisanship in 1992, or using a procedure developed by Gelman and King (1994a) to estimate the partisan bias of House districts. With either of these methods, McDonald claims that a significant proportion of the decline in competitive districts between 1990 and 2002 was caused by redistricting. In addition, contrary to our finding that nonpartisan redistricting commissions have failed to produce increased competition in House elections, McDonald claims that nonpartisan redistricting in Arizona provides a positive example of what can be accomplished by nonpartisan redistricting commissions elsewhere.

Requiring a short research paper in introductory political science courses can prove challenging for instructors, in part because of the diversity of student grade levels and majors in such courses. This is particularly the case with Introduction to Comparative Politics, as, at most universities, this course is not only required for the political science major, but often also fulfills multicultural requirements and can be used to complete lower division social science requirements. In deciding whether to include a research paper assignment in this course, one must weigh the benefit of catching majors early in order to begin building strong research skills, as well as the benefit of immersing students in key issues affecting the larger world, against the challenge of underdeveloped writing and research skills among the typical student in such a course. Another factor to consider is the grading load of reading large numbers of papers, given that most introductory courses have high enrollments. When choosing to require a research paper under these circumstances, then, one must also commit to working with students to hone their research and writing skills. In a collaborative, mutually beneficial partnership, college and library faculty can work together to identify ways to integrate information literacy concepts into course content and to design effective learning assignments addressing these important skills. This approach was undertaken by the authors, who revised a significant portion of the Introduction to Comparative Politics course at the University of West Florida to integrate information literacy activities in support of a semester-long, content-based research and writing assignment. This article explores using information literacy exercises as a tool to produce higher quality research papers in lower division political science courses.

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.

Many assume that young Americans are apathetic, self-absorbed, and indifferent to civic matters. It is a turned-off generation, we are told. But nothing could be further from the truth. A host of data suggests young Americans give their energy, time, and money to their schools, community, and nation. A recent report by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), for example, suggests young Americans volunteer at higher rates than do older Americans (Lopez 2003). The frequency of pitching-in has also increased: In 1990 some 65% of college freshman reported volunteering in high school, and by 2003 that figure had risen to 83%. Rates of volunteer work for those under 25 are now twice as high as for those over 55. Perhaps this is the activist generation.

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning's (2006b) rejoinder to my critique of their article appearing in this same issue entitled “Don't Blame Redistricting for Uncompetitive Elections” (2006a). We should have had a scholarly debate that informed the profession and raised interesting questions in one of the widest read journals. Instead, Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning mischaracterize my arguments as if this was a political talk show debate, and it is telling that they never directly quote me in their rejoinder. The few sources cited in support of their methodology, upon close inspection, provide no support to their measurement choice or findings. I hope that fair-minded readers will carefully evaluate all material, including cited sources, to reach their own judgment. I conclude this article with some thoughts that I hope shed light on the low levels of electoral competition that Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning and I agree characterize current congressional elections.

Undergraduate classroom presentations of the scientific method in the social sciences usually involve a lecture on the nature of the scientific enterprise: the discovery of the “truth” (if such a thing even exists) about the relationship between some set of concepts, events, or phenomena by means of generating falsifiable hypotheses and testing them against data. The tendency of faculty, however understandable, to convert the presentation into an abstract discussion of the philosophy of science often obscures the basic issues for students. I present here a simple, active learning classroom exercise which sensitizes students to the difficulties of hypothesizing about and testing unobservable phenomena by appealing to students' intuitive understanding of the nature of knowledge and reality. I first describe the purposes and objectives of the activity in more detail, then discuss implementing this specific activity. Suggestions for activity adaptation and development by other instructors follow, and a brief discussion of sources and resources concludes.