The traditional process of educating undergraduates is often relegated to the passive lecturing format. One means of engaging students in active learning is through the use of simulations. Students were asked to take on the roles of United States senators and a Supreme Court nominee during a United States Supreme Court confirmation hearing simulation. Each student participated by researching a sitting senator and the nominee selected and engaged in a question-and-answer session as is done in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Students came away from this valuable experience by not only learning a great deal about the operation of the confirmation hearing as well as the substantive material learned but participating in a process that few people will ever actually experience.

It is easy enough to rattle off numerous categories of social identities long of interest to political behavior scholars—race, sex, state or nation, party, ideology, social class, etc. But, a precise definition and measurement strategy for examining these identities is more elusive. This article discusses the conceptual foundations of a recently developed approach to measuring identity and focuses on its specific application as a new measure of partisanship in the United States.

Despite having transitioned to democracy, the governments of many developing countries still deliver poor public services as measured by social outcome indicators. Recent literature frames these issues of governance and public service delivery as a two-part principal-agent problem: civil servants are the agents of politicians and politicians are themselves the agents of the voters (Olken and Pande 2011). Much of this literature explores the determinants that drive citizens to demand better services (Pande 2011). Less attention, however, has been paid to understanding the behavior of the agents themselves and the interventions that can lead local politicians and civil servants to deliver better services.

At its most basic level, this forecast of the 2012 presidential election performed successfully. The model forecasted the reelection of President Obama. With 53.8% of the two-party vote; he ended up with 51.8% (as of November 28, 2012), yielding an error of 2.0 percentage points. Prior to 2012 the average out-of-sample forecasting error was 3.34 points. Here, the model does better than the average of the previous years by almost a point. Running the model with the added data point does not change matters appreciably. The economic item increases slightly and the logged time in the White House item weakens slightly. The overall fit of the model is just a bit lower.

The Fiscal Model of presidential elections not only failed to predict that President Obama would win reelection handily, but the error incurred in the forecast of the incumbent share of the two-party vote was such (46.9% vs. 51.8% or more) as to warrant a rating of “inaccurate” or “quite inaccurate” in Campbell's table of benchmarks for evaluating forecasts (Campbell 2012, 611). This recap is a preliminary assessment of what went wrong.

One of the shortcomings of the implicit racial attitudes literature is that it relies almost exclusively on white subjects. Arguably, there are two possible reasons for this. First, these measures were created to address issues of social desirability among whites who harbor negative racial attitudes toward blacks. Second, social desirability pressures and antiblack affect were not viewed as significant among black respondents (see Craemer 2008). This assumption is problematic because it treats black racial attitudes as a monolith. Rather than examining black racial opinion as a complicated and multivalenced set of evaluations about their own group and others, there has been an over emphasis on measures of group solidarity (e.g., linked fate). Understandably, bloc voting and cohesive policy opinions have partially justified this focus; however, the black community is more diverse than presidential election turnout suggests. Price (2009) argues that linked fate, the most common measure for black racial identity, is not adequately problematized as a potentially positive or negative measure of psychological attachment. Here, we hope to build on this literature by using an implicit black identity measure.

Many political science subfields use classroom simulations. Public law, however, suffers from a lack of such activities. Many mock trials exist, but these games focus on jurisprudence and not on the more institutional aspects of the subfield. This article presents the Settlement Game, an original simulation that takes 15 minutes to complete and helps teach important institutional theories such as adversarial legalism, “bargaining in the shadow of the law,” and “haves” versus “have-nots” concepts heretofore overlooked by the simulations literature. I introduce relevant theories and describe how the simulation works, discussing preclass assignments, its operation, and debriefing about its connection to theory. I close with comments about assessment of students and explain why the Settlement Game is useful.

The arrival of Hurricane Sandy within a week of the 2012 presidential election caused unprecedented disruption to the final days of the campaign and Election Day in areas that were affected. The precise impact of the storm on those areas hit hardest was not necessarily clear. Contrary to prior research on the effect of disasters on electoral outcomes, we find that the president's vote share was ultimately increased in storm-affected areas by about four percentage points, plus or minus two points. While those states most heavily affected were unlikely to give their electoral vote to Romney because of other factors, we present counterfactual analyses that show that such a storm could have had a significant impact on swing states: although the storm only affected some areas, we show that Virginia would likely have been won by Romney were it not hit at all, whereas North Carolina would likely have gone for Obama had it been directly in the storm's path.

Although political science instructors increasingly recognize the advantages of incorporating active learning activities into their teaching, simulations remain the discipline's most commonly used active learning method. While certainly a useful strategy, simulations are not the only way to bring active learning into classrooms. Indeed, because students have diverse learning styles—comprised of their discrete learning preferences—engaging them in a variety of ways is important. This article explores six active learning techniques: simulations, case studies, enhanced lectures, large group discussion, small group work, and in-class writing. Incorporating these activities into an introductory, writing-intensive seminar on globalization and surveying students about their engagement with course activities, I find that different activities appeal to students with different learning preferences and that simulations are not students most preferred activity. Bringing a broader range of active learning strategies into courses can improve teaching for all students, no matter their learning style.

Political knowledge today is studied primarily at the explicit level. Measures of political knowledge often rely on testing whether voters are aware of various “facts” about political life, such as the names and offices of prominent political actors, the institutional structures of the political system, and the ideological or policy differences between the major political parties (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). These various kinds of political information are considered to be important by political scientists and other social scientists because they facilitate the informed voting decisions that are needed to hold elected leaders accountable (e.g., Lau and Redlawsk 2006; Pande 2011).

This article reports on an Internet-based quasi-experiment that took place during the French 2012 presidential election. We designed a website where French voters could vote under different voting rules. Based on the observation of more than 8,000 participants, we find that a substantial minority (10% to 15%) vote differently under the different systems, with 17% of the voters not voting for their preferred candidate in the one-round election, this percentage dropped to 12% in the alternative vote (first choice). Compared to the two-rounds election, at the aggregate level, the top two candidates get slightly more votes under one round, while the minor candidates obtain more first choices under the alternative vote. These findings are consistent with what the literature suggests about the impact of these voting systems on voters' choice.

Perhaps the major story in forecasting the 2012 election is the growing awareness of the benefits of aggregating multiple sources of data for improving prediction. Most prominently, polling analysts including Simon Jackman, Drew Linzer, and Nate Silver made the strong case, ultimately validated by the election results, that combining information from multiple polls gives a better picture of the electorate than any poll analyzed in isolation.

During political campaigns the spread between the popularity of the candidates is a common metric capturing the state of the horse-race feature of the campaign. One candidate is said to be ahead of another by an indicated number of percentage points. If the difference is less than the margin of error, the race is considered too close to call. In two-person races, however, the spread corresponds to a much smaller confidence level than is usually reported because the two numbers used to compute the spread are not independent. The size of the confidence interval that is typically reported is incorrect by a factor of two. Therefore, some spreads that are reported as decisive are races too close to call.

Instant-response technologies, or clickers, are student response devices that help address some of the challenges involved in teaching large classes, namely student motivation and engagement with the material. This article evaluates a diverse set of teaching and learning strategies enabled by clicker technology and their impact on student learning. We highlight five aspects of teaching that are enhanced by the use of clickers, describe an experiment comparing student performance in traditional and clicker lectures, and report results of a survey of student perception about the effects of this technology on motivation, learning, and engagement. We argue that while the use of clickers is time-consuming for the instructor and presents a steep learning curve, clickers improve teaching effectiveness in large classes and hold promise for increasing student learning.

For the second presidential election in a row the prediction of the “Klarner Model” was within half a percent of the actual result. This model forecast that Obama would receive 51.3% of the two-party vote, while he actually received 51.8%. The model also called all states correctly, with the exception of Florida, which was predicted to be narrowly lost by Obama with 49.7% of the vote. These forecasts were made on July 15, 2012. This success does not indicate the model is better than the other models in the symposium as luck is a major determinant of which model gets closest to the mark. Although the Klarner Model correctly called 49 out of 50 states, that means little in an election where merely calling states on the basis of 2008 results would have called all but two correctly.

In May 2012, political scientists learned of efforts by representative Jeff Flake (R-AZ) to eliminate political science funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) budget. The American Political Science Association (APSA) was caught off-guard, and concerned political scientists scrambled to contact their representatives and urge the amendment's defeat. Flake's initial effort to cut funds overall from the NSF was defeated, but a second measure, specifically to keep the NSF from funding political science, passed only hours later. This was the second time in three years that legislators targeted the NSF Political Science Program. Although these measures have been sponsored and widely supported by Republicans, some Democrats have supported these measures as well. This article examines the vote on the Flake Amendment to understand why individual representatives voted for or against cutting NSF funding for political science research.

After the 2012 Republican New Hampshire primary, 159 poll results were released prior to the subsequent nomination contests in the Republican presidential primary. More than two-thirds of these polls relied on interactive voice response (IVR) software to conduct the interviews. We evaluate the ability of polls to predict the vote-share for the Republican candidates Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich. We find no overall difference in the average accuracy of IVR and traditional human polls, but IVR polls conducted prior to human polls are significantly poorer predictors of election outcomes than traditional human polls even after controlling for characteristics of the states, polls, and electoral environment. These findings provide suggestive, but not conclusive, evidence that pollsters may take cues from one another given the stakes involved. If so, reported polls should not be assumed to be independent of one another and so-called poll-of-polls will be misleadingly precise.

One hundred and forty two days before the 2012 US presidential election our final State-by-State Political-Economy Model gave an advantage to Barack Obama with 51.6% of the popular vote (error margin ± 4.47) and 324 electoral votes (Jerôme and Jerôme-Speziari 2012). On November 6, 2012, with 51.6% of the vote and 332 electoral votes, the Democratic incumbent wins a second term. Regarding certainty of an Obama plurality, the model gave a probability of victory by 64%. In 2012, it seems that this was enough to ensure a good predictability.

Previous research indicates that undergraduate research activities promote student-faculty collaborations and have a positive impact on students, faculty, and institutions. A review of 13 active undergraduate political science journals indicates that these publications take a variety of approaches in format, frequency, and submission requirements. Further, a survey of undergraduate political science journal editors shows that the role of students and faculty and the sources of support for journal publication vary considerably. Finally, case studies of the undergraduate journal experience at three different institutions suggest that political science journals promote student engagement and student-faculty collaboration.

A persistent challenge for minority candidates is mitigating negative effects attributed to their unpopular group identity. This was precisely the case for Mitt Romney, a Mormon, as he sought and captured the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. We draw on existing public opinion data about the tepid reaction to Romney's Mormonism from within Republican ranks. Then, we review our own experimental data to examine a potential mitigation strategy, “God Talk,” and its emotional costs to the GOP. We find that Romney and similar candidates may avoid direct penalty by party rank-and-file for their minority attributes when using God Talk, but the associated affective response supporters direct at their party may carry yet-unknown putative costs for both party and candidate.