To establish the scope and level of corruption in the contemporary United States, a collaborative project of political scientists is needed. Such a study should start with explicating the definition of corruption various scholars use. Three are noted here: using public goods for personal gains, deflecting public goods to private groups, and making such moves when these are legal although they are still illicit. To assess corruption on these levels, we must consider that various forms that “capture” takes beyond the corruption of the laws themselves. A study of the major differences in the level of corruption among the three branches of government may improve our understanding of the prevalence and causes of corruption. A study of “rent” may help predict that future course of corruption. Other topics whose study warrants collaborative investigation are listed.

This article discusses the benefits and challenges of offering an onsite seminar on Canadian politics and foreign policy and assesses how this format contributes to achieving the goals of the 2011 APSA report, Teaching Political Science in the 21st Century. First, the author describes the development and requirements of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Global Seminar series at Iowa State University, the structure of the seminar, and its operation in Ottawa. Second, several of the pedagogical and experiential benefits, as well as the challenges, for making the seminar successful are identified and discussed. Third, by weighing these benefits and challenges, the author concludes that such a seminar has the potential to serve as an effective model for increasing an understanding of Canadian politics among American students, as well as to meet several important recommendations for improving the teaching of political science today.

Causality in social science is hard to establish even through the finest comparative research. To ease the task of extracting causes from comparisons, we present the benefits of tracing particularities in any phenomenon under investigation. We introduce three real-world examples from 2011: British riots, worldwide anticapitalist protests, and the highway crash near Taunton in southwestern England. Whereas all of these three examples have broad causes, we embark on the quest after specific factors. The Taunton accident can send a powerful message to social scientists, which is about the danger of making general statements in their explanations. Instead of saying much but explaining little, the merit of singling out the specific is substantial. As social scientists, when we are faced with “smoke” but no “fire,” let us then focus on the part that is distinct.

Federalism is a core principle of American government; yet, how much attention is given to federalism beyond introductory courses? A 1969 study described American federalism as the “dark continent” of political science teaching. Based on surveys of chairs of US departments of political science and members of the APSA’s section on federalism and intergovernmental relations in 2013, the authors found that these course offerings have increased markedly since 1969, that the courses cover a range of topics, and that many department chairs are interested in offering these courses in the future. However, the teaching of comparative federalism lags far behind American federalism. Thus, comparative federalism remains a “dark continent” of federalism teaching.

Unlike the massive literature about US Supreme Court confirmation battles, little has been written about lower federal court confirmation fights. However, in the past 20 years much has been written about the lower federal court confirmation process. Here, we take stock of the political science literature in this area and highlight where scholarly interest appears to be going. Believing a contemporary assessment of the state of the field should be of interest and use to scholars of American politics, we dissect the recent empirical literature and offer suggestions for future research. Most importantly, we offer a one-stop shop for recent literature for scholars interested in this topic.

The social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them; from making do with a small number of sparse data sets to analyzing increasing quantities of diverse, highly informative data; from isolated scholars toiling away on their own to larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams; and from a purely academic pursuit focused inward to having a major impact on public policy, commerce and industry, other academic fields, and some of the major problems that affect individuals and societies. In the midst of all this productive chaos, we have been building the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard, a new type of center intended to help foster and respond to these broader developments. We offer here some suggestions from our experiences for the increasing number of other universities that have begun to build similar institutions and for how we might work together to advance social science more generally.

We take advantage of the data set compiled by Masuoka et al. (2007, PS: Political Science and Politics 40 (1): 361–66) on lifetime citation counts of political science faculty at PhD granting institutions in the United States to look for “lucky names,” that is, names parents can give babies that predispose them toward scholarly success in political science. Seeking to test an hypothesis offered by Wuffle (1972, PS: Political Science and Politics (Summer): 290), we also briefly look at the importance of middle initials for citation success in political science.