The articles in this symposium underscore at least three common points about understanding and combatting sexual harassment in the context of social science fieldwork:

I share Gary King and Maya Sen's view that applying the knowledge, approaches, and tools of the social and policy sciences might help us be more intelligent about shaping the future of the American system of higher education and its component parts. I have even been surprised, in turning from the scholarly field of my training and academic field to a professional preoccupation with higher education, to search in vain for sessions at APSA meetings in which my fellow political scientists might focus their analytical eyes on our own sector and institutions. Taking more systematic analytical approaches might certainly be a good alternative to riding the most recent serious source of anxiety—and there have been many in recent decades—or mining a particular strand of data in search of indicators that might serve as tea leaves or life rafts, also known in the trade as “benchmarks.”

Dividing Citizens is an important contribution both to the burgeoning literature on the historical development of the American state and citizenship and to the lively field of work on gender within that corpus. Like the best studies of this sort, Mettler's book ably demonstrates not only how the transforming institutions and practices affected women but also how gender norms and practices were built into the new structures, making gender a basic element of their architec- ture.

Despite considerable research, the theory of gender difference in electoral behaviour remains underdeveloped, especially in accounting for variation across elections. We focus on two aspects requiring particular attention: (1) accounts of gender difference, especially distinguishing between positional explanations, in which gender differences stem from men and women taking the same considerations into account, but having different positions on those considerations, or structural explanations, in which gender differences stem from men and women taking different considerations into account in making judgements; (2) the effects of electoral context in cuing gender as a consideration, thus stimulating or inhibiting the appearance of gender differences. We use a case study of the 1992 US presidential election, often labelled ‘The Year of the Woman’, to explore these problems.

The intriguing thing about the study of political behavior is that it focuses our attention directly on “the people” in a political system. Without the existence and actions of people a political system has no meaning — it could not exist. There have been attempts to break this rule, but they have not been successful. There is a spot under the North Sea off the coast of England, for example, that continued to have parliamentary representation long after the sea had buried what was once the important port of Dunwich. This was one of the famous “rotten boroughs”. This make-believe borough, however, required the political action of real people to have political meaning, even if the real people had to act in rowboats.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing demand by women for political representation of women. This demand points the way toward a number of important problems for political research, many of which remain unsolved primarily because of the segregation of women's studies from the dominant concerns of political science. This discussion focuses on the problem of group interests and representation, drawing on and suggesting further research on public opinion, interest groups, social movements, international politics, political elites, and public policy.

‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry’, was penned by Jeremy Bentham in 1825, but could as appropriately appear in most contemporary treatments of social choice and rationality. Political economists still use the felicific calculus; they search for ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ by exploring means and consequences of aggregating individuals' preferences to form social choices among competing values. The values are assigned equal weight. The origins and processes of development of individual preferences are taken as ‘givens’, i.e. as irrelevant to the problem of social choice. What counts is rational behaviour, which is said to exist when action is ‘correctly’ designed to maximize goal achievement, ‘given the goal in question and the real world as it exists’.

In the late sixties, women in the United States became sensitized to their second-class status and organized to raise their consciousness and change their conditions. At the same time women in academia began to organize within their disciplines to address the problems they faced there. Political science was no exception; in 1969, when women constituted 5 percent of the membership of the APSA and 8 percent of all political science faculty teaching in colleges and universities, the APSA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession and the Women's Caucus for Political Science formed. Numerous reports have revealed a moderate increase in the presence of women in the profession in recent years. As Table 1 shows, the percentage of degrees in political science awarded to women has increased since 1970. By the academic year 1976–77 women constituted 11 percent of full-time faculty and 18 percent of part-time faculty. Twenty-three percent of the students entering Ph.D. programs in 1977 were women, a downturn of 3 percent from the previous year, although an overall rise from the previous decade.