As part of its mission to address issues of recruitment, retention, and integration of women and people of color in the profession, the APSA Task Force on Mentoring periodically publishes articles on some aspect of mentoring that will help political scientists move successfully through the profession. This brief symposium on “Publishing Your First Book” is just one such example of this initiative. For more information about the Task Force and its ongoing projects, contact Linda Lopez, APSA Director of Education and Professional Development Programs, at llopez@apsanet.org.

The right contract can make or break tenure and promotion. The following article presents pearls of wisdom from David Meyer, Clyde Wilcox, Susan Clarke, Terri Givens, Carol Swain, Robert Spitzer, and Peter Labella. We divide these suggestions into two parts—those on obtaining and those on negotiating a contract.

There are two components to my model of presidential election forecasting: Given the enormous amount of work on voting behavior that finds prospective assessments of the economy to be strongly related to vote choice (e.g., Abramowitz 1985; Kuklinski and West 1981; Lewis-Beck 1988; Lockerbie 1992), I make use of a prospective economic item from the Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior that asks if the next year will be better, worse, or the same for the respondent. I take the average of the negative responses to this question from the first quarter of the election year as my economic measure. These data are available in late April.

I am a strong believer in using praxis as an educational tool (Jentleson 1990, 435–6). Even though I have taught college political science most of my adult life, I had always been periodically directly involved with politics. In 1997, I received an opportunity to deepen my commitment to praxis when I accepted a position as a policy analyst with the Democratic caucus of the Michigan State Senate. The following is a brief account of my experiences from November 1997 until August 2001.

Teachers usually turn to experiential education when they are dissatisfied with the so-called traditional classroom. At its worst, conventional teaching dissects the political world into an array of component parts. Sometimes students read the latest scholarship, but the treatment of politics is often either blandly descriptive or too abstract. This type of teaching can rob politics of its pulsing energy, which, ironically, attracted many political scientists into the field. While most political scientists find politics exciting, the norms of the discipline can enervate the importance and drama of politics. Student calls for more “current events” are a frequent response to these academic experiences.

Over the last 10 years in the discipline of political science, there has been a flourishing discussion about the role of departmental assessment. Clearly, one fear has been that these external mandates are infringements on academic freedom at worst, and make extra work for faculty at best. In an early article published in PS: Political Science and Politics, a survey of political science departments discovered that frequently the response to assessment was one of ignorance and often animosity.

As part of its mission to address issues of recruitment, retention, and integration of women and people of color in the profession, the APSA Task Force on Mentoring periodically publishes articles on some aspect of mentoring that will help political scientists move successfully through the profession. This brief symposium on “Publishing Your First Book” is just one such example of this initiative. For more information about the Task Force and its ongoing projects, contact Linda Lopez, APSA Director of Education and Professional Development Programs, at llopez@apsanet.org.

Getting a book published represents the intersection of mutual self-interest between author and publisher. I have a few suggestions on how to combine these.

The track on Global Perspectives/International Models brought together faculty working in a variety of settings, including high schools, two- and four-year colleges, and research universities in the United States as well as overseas. But this diverse group was firmly rooted in the shared experiences of similar problems and goals and a commitment to undergraduate education. The track provided an opportunity for instructors of political science to exchange information, develop a series of recommendations, and lay the groundwork for a network of scholar-teachers.

In presidential elections over the last several decades, observers have noticed two patterns involving Latinos. The first, according to DeSipio and de la Garza (2002, 398), is that “With each presidential election, the media and the punditocracy discover Latinos anew.” As Jorge Ramos (2004) pointed out, “Without fail every four years, many politicians in the United States rediscover Latinos, only to forget them all over again for the next three years…It is a phenomenon so predictable that I have dubbed it the ‘Christopher Columbus Syndrome.”’

The dramatic expansion of democratic regimes throughout the world has produced a boom in the field of survey research. There are at least six reasons for this boom. First, democracy brings with it elections, and with elections, parties and candidates who want to know where and how to campaign and contributors who want to know on which “horse” to place their bets. Second, democratic governments care very much about public opinion since not only does their reelection depend upon the public will, but their ability to govern depends to a great degree on how well they are able to gauge public reaction to their policies. Third, democratic governments want objective information to help them plan their programs and to be able to gauge their impacts once implemented. Fourth, international donors increasingly carry out surveys of “users” or potential users of public services to help them plan their investment strategies. Fifth, international donors regularly examine program impacts as a means of evaluating project success and as a means of targeting future grants and loans. Finally, within the field of political science at least, there is a growing consensus that political culture matters for sustaining democracy and that the entire “democracy game” goes beyond finding the right institutions to having citizens believe in democratic principles. There is, of course, no unanimity on this point, raised so forcefully years ago in Dahl's “Preface to Democratic Theory,” and there will be those among the “new institutionalists” who entirely dismiss the role of what Dahl called the “consensus on the polyarchal norms” (1956, 135). Yet, broadly speaking, it is fair to say that most democracy experts would agree that in democracies, the public matters; publics vote, protest, and even rebel, and to exclude them in the calculus of the study of democratic consolidation is to risk missing an important part of the story.

As part of its mission to address issues of recruitment, retention, and integration of women and people of color in the profession, the APSA Task Force on Mentoring periodically publishes articles on some aspect of mentoring that will help political scientists move successfully through the profession. This brief symposium on “Publishing Your First Book” is just one such example of this initiative. For more information about the Task Force and its ongoing projects, contact Linda Lopez, APSA Director of Education and Professional Development Programs, at llopez@apsanet.org.

I am an acquiring editor for the Higher Education group within Oxford University Press—that is, the books I am most likely to sign are explicitly intended to be used in courses. Nevertheless, most of the following nostrums are applicable in many different publishing situations.

I am not going to talk a lot about my career (I have written about it.) I started working at the age of 16 and retired early at the age of 58. So I worked for 42 years, including several years as a secretary in academia before I was able to go to school and get a graduate education; I got my Ph.D. at the age of 34. I taught for 25 years at Georgia State University.

From February 19–21, 2005, several hundred political scientists met at the second annual APSA Conference on Teaching and Learning in Bethesda, Maryland. To facilitate an atmosphere of intensive interaction and mutual learning, the conference was conducted in the “European format” where topic-specific Tracks worked as a deliberative community over three days rather than the format of American conferences—paper, paper, paper, comment, question, then on to a different session. Track Five's task was to exchange ideas about teaching methodology with the goal of formulating proposals that could be disseminated to the discipline. Interestingly, the topic was taken up by contributors in Track Five from two angles: first, “teaching methods” as a pedagogical issue and second, teaching research methodology.

APSA is pleased to recognize political science faculty members who received campus-wide and department awards for teaching excellence during the 2004–2005 academic year. APSA, Rowman Littlefield Publishers, and Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society, recognize award-winning faculty members each year at the Reception Honoring Teaching at the APSA Annual Meeting. Recognized faculty members receive a certificate noting their accomplishment and their awards are announced in PS and on the APSA web site.

Elections are the chief mechanisms of popular consent and political accountability in democracy. As recent history attests: “elections in the democratic context can have significant implications for the makeup of a nation's ruling circle and the character of its policies” (Ginsberg 1982, viii). While American elections are undeniably consequential, they fail on the democratic standard of equality. The American electorate is class biased—and more so than in other advanced democracies. Research for more than 50 years has shown that large numbers of Americans don't vote and that voters and nonvoters are drawn from different income and educational strata (Leighley and Nagler 1992). The burning issue of American elections is how to make the electorate more representative of the population as a whole. Courses on American elections, however, devote little time to turn-out and still less on how to mobilize non-voters. Instead, the lion's share of the typical syllabus is devoted to the presidential campaign process. The emphasis on “hoopla” (Patterson 1980) cannot help but feed student conceptualization of politics as a game, rather than an essential social enterprise. If our goal as teachers of political science is to bring students into the world of constructive democratic citizenship, then we must discuss with our students what is at stake in American elections.

The WCPS of the APSA recognized and publicly honored, very early, the debt that we all owe to our mentors. In part in response to the activities of members of the WCPS and those of the APSA's Committee on the Status of Women, currently chaired by Kristen Monroe, the Association, in turn, has come to value and support a more formal structure of mentoring.

Service learning is most often touted as a vehicle for creating and reinforcing civic-minded citizens and generating democratic responsibility among our students while serving and empowering communities. Equally as important, service learning is pedagogy. Service learning track participants discussed ways to develop the best practices and pedagogies, focusing on both the outcomes we hope to achieve through a variety of applications of service learning, and on the necessary components—or ingredients—that comprise service learning as a method of instruction. Papers covered a broad range of inter-related themes including service learning at large research universities, research-as-service projects, the impact of service learning on student health, the challenges inherent in assessing active forms of learning, and engaging youth with political humor. Participants were equally as diverse and included faculty and administrators from large universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and public high schools.

“One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science” (Arendt 1994, 171).

At the first APSA Teaching and Learning Conference (TLC) in 2004, 11 professors and graduate students gathered to discuss and evaluate the role of assessment in political science. Excited by the impact of assessment in their classrooms and departments, the working group concluded their session with a declaration of the positive role assessment could have in the discipline and an articulated concern that APSA needs to “play a greater role in assessment.” At the 2005 conference, 32 faculty and graduate students again gathered to discuss “Student Assessment and Learning Outcomes.” Six of us bridged both years' experiences. While the 2005 participants were less unified, the discussion and debates that emerged built upon the discoveries of year one and attempted to expand the conversation from among the converted to the wider discipline.

What does it take to be an effective teaching assistant in political science? This is a subject of interest not only to first time graduate teaching assistants, but also to the professors who make use of them, the directors of undergraduate studies who must live with their results, and the directors of graduate studies who must help prepare them for their first teaching jobs. But while the subject of training graduate students to teach is of live interest to numerous people, comparatively little direct attention has been accorded it. While 83% of graduate students say that “enjoyment of teaching” was one of the factors that lead them to enroll in graduate school, a significantly smaller percentage believe that their departments adequately prepare them to serve as teaching assistants, much less to take up the responsibilities of full-time college professors (Golde and Dore 2001). And while research on teaching has exploded since 1998, the chief focus of this research and publication has tended to be on civic education, curriculum development, and the use of technology in the classroom (Kehl 2002). Indeed, no article in PS since its inception in 1968 has ever directly taken up the topic of what sort of characteristics and practices, in general, contribute to making an effective teaching assistant.The author would like to thank the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Notre Dame for providing the initial spark to this article by inviting him to participate in a panel discussion on becoming an effective teaching assistant. He would also like to thank Walter Nicgorski for encouraging him to turn his presentation into an article and for reading and commenting upon several drafts. Finally, he would like to thank Steve Yoder of PS and the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions have considerably strengthened the final product.

My philosophy is to love everyone you meet and treat everything as an adventure. I am a political activist and by a political activist I mean that I am committed to social justice in this world now. That is what I do and have done most of my life. At the moment I am involved with four different international groups. Diverse Women for Diversity has its headquarters in India and Women For Life on Earth has its headquarters in Germany. People's Global Actions has no headquarters because we don't believe in it; it operates on the basis of a manifesto that whoever meets and calls themselves PGA gets to add to or rewrite within our hallmarks. Locally I work with Western Massachusetts Global Action Coalition. I have also worked closely with a number of local groups, Western Mass Coalition against Domestic Violence, Stop the War Coalition, Arise for Social Justice, and other groups of similar ilk.