Eight new members of the APSA Council have been elected in APSA's fourth contested election in recent years. The new Council members are: Lisa Baldez, Dartmouth College; Susan R. Burgess, Ohio University; Dennis Chong, Northwestern University; Michael W. Doyle, Columbia University; Kerry L. Haynie, Duke University; Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan; Anna Sampaio, University of Colorado, Denver; and Melissa S. Williams, University of Toronto. André Blais, Université de Montréal, was not elected. Under APSA election rules, the APSA Nominating Committee proposes one name per open seat and additional nominations, sponsored by at least 10 members, may be made from the membership. This year, Susan Burgess, Ohio University, was nominated from the membership and was elected. The election was conducted by electronic ballot, with a 31% turnout—similar to other recent APSA elections. Detailed results can be found at http://apsanet.org/section_710.cfm.

Organized section update.

Larry D. Terry died in Atlanta, Georgia on June 17, 2006, of respiratory arrest due to an allergic reaction. At the time of his death, he was vice-president for business and professor of public administration at the University of Texas, Dallas (UTD). He was 52 years old.

Deepa Khosla, a young and vital student of international responses to armed conflict in the Third World, died on November 21, 2005, shortly after beginning a tenure-track position at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. Johns. The immediate cause of her death was a brain aneurysm.

On Saturday, September 2, 2006, I staffed an event by my member at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia. So what, you say? Congressional Fellows are supposed to staff events, right? Yes, but three years after my fellowship ended? To be sure, I have continued to be part of the Congressional Fellowship Program (CFP) in the last few years by continuing to work with staffers who were my colleagues in Congress, giving talks to interested groups about my experiences such as the recent presentation I gave on “How a Bill Really Becomes a Law” at the Dirksen Congressional Center, attending CFP events at conferences and in D.C., and generally keeping in touch with the director of the program, Jeff Biggs, and other fellows. Despite all of this, I never imagined I would end up staffing another event after I left Capitol Hill.

In 1995, I wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education outlining the problems of publishing scholarly books in literary criticism and explaining why the Penn State University Press could no longer afford to remain active in this field. Of the 150 books about literature the Press had put out in the previous decade, 65% had sold fewer than 500 copies, 91% fewer than 800 copies, and only 3% more than 1,000. The pattern of sales in this discipline had eroded to the point where a press without much of a subsidy from its parent university could not sustain a publishing program in it anymore. It seemed clear even then that what we scholarly publishers have come to call the problem of “endangered species” would be spreading to other disciplines over time. Five years later, in an article I wrote for the newsletter of APSA's Organized Section on Comparative Politics (2000), I analyzed data that seemed to show that field to be heading in the same direction as literary studies, and I concluded with not a great deal of hope for the future. Recently, at the invitation of the Association for Political Theory, I turned my attention to the subfield of political theory and offered this paper as background for the session on book publishing at the conference in November 2006. While many of the same pressures remain in place to bedevil university presses, and it would be premature surely to claim that we are out of the woods yet, there have been some significant changes that give reason to think the future may not be quite as gloomy as it appeared back at the turn of the millennium.This article was initially prepared as a background paper for the Association for Political Theory conference plenary session, November 4, 2006.

The authors of the previous papers offer the following learning objectives for internationalized curriculum specific to their sub-fields.

Competition came to Mexico's new democracy with unexpected fury in the nation's 2006 presidential election. Until recently Mexico was the bastion of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), where opposition parties could rarely hope to gain half as many votes as the PRI. But in the July 2 presidential election, Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN) edged Ándres Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) by a mere 233,831 votes, or 0.58% of the more than 41.5 million cast. The PRI's candidate, Roberto Madrazo, finished a distant third. Calderón took this razor-thin margin after a fiercely competitive campaign marked by lavish media spending and the use of negative attack ads. López Obrador has contested the outcome from the time the polls closed until the present, calling his supporters into the streets on several occasions to put pressure on the electoral authorities to recount the votes; staging an “election by acclamation” in which those present at a rally on Mexico's Independence Day “elected” López Obrador by a show of hands; and holding an “inauguration” ceremony on November 20, the anniversary of the onset of the Mexican Revolution. While López Obrador challenged the preliminary outcome, Calderón had to wait patiently until the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TRIFE) declared him elected on September 5, fully two months after the ballots had been cast.

Symposium authors' bios.

Since the end of World War II, a strong transatlantic partnership has been a cornerstone of Western geopolitical strategy. This does not mean that transatlantic relations have always been cordial. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was beset by periodic crises and disagreement throughout the Cold War and into the 1990s. Recent disagreements centered on the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe during the 1980s, and on NATO involvement in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, NATO enjoyed a brief resurgence as its member nations voted unanimously to activate their mutual defense commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty (see Kaplan 2004). However, this was soon eclipsed by the subsequent dispute over U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq, the rancor rising out of which has struck such seasoned observers as Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell as being an order of magnitude worse than from past NATO crises (cited in Pond 2004, ix). Kaplan (2004, ix) describes it as a “near death” experience that threatened “to dissolve an entity that had survived over half a century.” Others argue that the alliance can and should be “saved” from a crisis that “need not be terminal to the political vitality of Atlanticism” (Hodge 2004, x). We suggest that this diplomatic crisis is doubled by a crisis in European confidence in the U.S. which may also be of unprecedented magnitude, and of some duration.

This short article outlines why the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for the final 71 years of the twentieth century, not only lost the 2006 presidential election, but posted a miserable third place finish by taking only 22.7% of the national vote versus 36.7% for the winner, Felipe Calderón of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) and 36.1% for the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). It also explains why, despite its recent electoral results, the once-hegemonic party will continue to play an important, but reduced political role: as a coalition partner with the governing PAN to create majorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

This is the 35th year that I have been monitoring participation by women at our Annual Meeting. These PS reports have documented the ascent of women in our profession. While some are sanguine in believing that women have achieved sufficient advancement and that my annual assessments are no longer necessary, there was a plenary roundtable at the 2006 meeting with a premise that there is still a problem of continuing underrepresentation in the discipline (see Table 1).

Here's a preview of some of the articles that will be published in the April 2007 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics:

When the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency in 2000, the central cleavage that defined Mexican politics in the last 15 years of the twentieth century—pro-regime vs. anti-regime—could no longer guide voters on Election Day. With no PRI to vote out of office (or to defend), Mexicans were impelled to turn their political attention to non-regime issues, such as economic policy, social policy, relations with the United States, and crime control. As Kathleen Bruhn and Kenneth Greene make clear in their contribution to this symposium, Mexican political elites are seriously divided on these issues, while the views of their bases are not far apart.

Scholars who study American political institutions have tended to specialize in a single body such as the U.S. Congress or the federal courts. However, a growing movement among judicial scholars argues that the courts cannot be understood in isolation, but instead must be understood as a part of the larger system of government. As Neustadt (1980, 26) has reminded us, in reality the U.S. system of government features “separated institutions sharing powers.” Alexander Bickel (1962) was one of the first voices in what one could label the Governance as Dialogue movement. Bickel said that the courts must engage in a “continuing colloquy” with the more political branches of government and with other political actors, refuting the judicial supremacy approach that was popular at that time. In Constitutional Dialogues (1988) and in his other writings, Louis Fisher has argued that the courts, and especially the U.S. Supreme Court, do not have the sole responsibility of interpreting the U.S. Constitution, but that constitutional interpretation involves a very complicated dialogue among various political actors. Others, such as William N. Eskridge (1991a; 1991b), have argued that the interactions between the courts, the executive, and Congress are a highly complex multiple-player game. Recent literature on the interactions between courts and Congress has been growing steadily, and includes, among others, works by Geyh (2006); Devins and Whittington (2005); Barnes (2004); Pickerill (2004); Miller and Barnes (2004); and Lovell (2003).

Pressure to assess student learning more carefully and systematically is clearly mounting. Federal and state agencies are increasingly calling for solid, compelling evidence of student learning, while higher education leaders are challenging faculty to improve the quality of curricula and pedagogies. Efforts to assess student learning thus serve two ends: one, to demonstrate the worth of our programs to external constituents and, two, to inform our understanding of the effectiveness of our teaching strategies.

The relationship between scholars and practitioners is a continuing source of concern to both communities. Each side complains about the insularity of the other and routinely points to gaps that separate them. Alexander George and other scholars found weak interest and lackluster capacity on the part of academy-based social scientists to contribute knowledge deemed useful to the policy community (George 1993; Nincic and Lepgold 2000). For their part, leading policy practitioners have bitterly complained about what they see as the growing irrelevance of scholarly work to the design and conduct of statecraft (Newsom 1995–1996).

Iris' written work has been very widely admired; she has obviously helped shape the field of democratic political theory; she has deeply influenced students. The discussion of this work will go on in books and articles until her ideas have been fully absorbed. Here I will say a little about my particular experience of her collegiality. I was Iris' junior colleague at Chicago for six years. I met Iris eight years ago this week, under a portico outside a large hotel like the one in which you are all gathered, not too long after I had first read Democracy and Difference and shortly before my first APSA paper presentation on, as it happened, deliberative democracy. I had no way of knowing then how directly and deeply she would affect my intellectual life. She was already for me a standard, even before I met her. But how that fact deepened over time is what I want to render here.

The increasing recognition of a global interdependence among our economies and societies places a significant amount of pressure on educational institutions to prepare future citizens for successful participation in this “new world order.” While there might be general agreement that globalization or internationalization is a “major trend in education” or a “worldwide phenomenon,” there are barriers to internationalization, some of which can be individual—resulting from faculty and student attitudes; some institutional—caused by long-standing policies, practices, and traditions; and some reflecting the attitudes and culture of the wider American society (Green 2003, 11). There are different ways that institutions of higher learning can respond to this phenomenon most effectively, including, for example, changes at the curricular level, broad institutional policies that involve recruitment of foreign students, experiential partnerships with foreign institutions of higher learning, and the creation of campuses in other countries (see Altbach 2002).

Ten days after graduation for the Class of 2006, I'm at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery about 50 miles southeast of Louisville, Kentucky. I come here every year at this time for three or four days, usually in the company of one or two of my colleagues at Rhodes College. The Abbey is a place of extraordinary serenity and beauty, both the buildings and, especially, the grounds. In secular terms, I'm here to decompress from the academic year and recharge my batteries for the summer. But I am a Christian as well as an academic, so I'm also here in hopes of stepping briefly outside linear time and into sacred time, where every day recapitulates the monks' centuries-old cycle of prayer, song, study, and work.This article is the second of a four-part series.