Although Latinos have grown substantially as a percent of the American population to now comprise the largest ethnic-racial minority group in the U.S., whether or not this national population growth can translate into direct political influence in presidential elections has always been unclear (DeSipio 1996; Fraga and Ramírez 2003–04). At least since the 1988 election, however, scholars of Latino politics have argued that Latino voters could serve as key swing voters if certain contextual and strategic conditions existed in specific contests (Guerra 1992). Among these are: a competitive election in states where Latinos are a determinative segment of the electorate; strategic mobilization of Latino voters; active engagement in the election by Latino elected officials, related organizational leaders, and Latino campaign strategists; a viable Latino candidate; and issues of specific relevance to Latino voters (Guerra and Fraga 1996).

The “Autumn of the People” of 1989 was a dismal failure of the predictive power of political science. Any retrospective explanation of the fall of communism must not only account for the historical developments but must also identify those theoretical assumptions that prevented us from anticipating these developments. If we are so wise now, why were we not equally sage before?

As I learned recently, most terminal cancer patients die of pneumonia. Social science is not very good at sorting out underlying causes and precipitating conditions: witness the 50 years of controversies over the fall of Weimar. And the response to the question “why communism collapsed?” is not the same as to “why did it collapse in the autumn of 1989?” It is easier to explain why communism had to fall than why it did.

The theory of “totalitarianism” could not answer either question: it could not diagnose the cancer and hence the vulnerability to pneumonia.

College students are young, have little or no history of voting, and are residentially mobile, which makes them a population in great need of registering to vote. Universities have a civic, pedagogical, and legal obligation to register their students to vote. In 2006, we conducted a controlled experiment across 16 college campuses to test the efficacy of classroom presentations to increase voter registration. The 25,256 students across more than 1,026 classrooms were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) a control group receiving no presentation; (2) a presentation by a professor; and (3) a presentation by a student volunteer. Verifying registration and voter turnout from a national voter database, we found that both types of presentations increased overall registration by 6 percentage points and turnout rates by approximately 2.6 percentage points. These results demonstrated that universities can take simple steps to engage their students in politics.

Publication in scholarly journals is a key to scholarly success. However, previous studies have shown that across many disciplines, including political science, women publish significantly less than men and prefer to use qualitative methodology. In this article, we explore the accuracy of these trends by examining a decade's worth (2000–09) of women's publications in four top political science journals (the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and PS: Political Science and Politics). Using a systematic content analysis, we determine the gender ratio of the authors, funding sources, methods, and the ratio of qualitative and quantitative studies. We find that while women publish less than men in each of these venues, their publication rates resemble their representation in the field.

In November 2006, undergraduate students in a Model United Nations Club (MUN) conducted an exercise intended to simulate a series of crises in the Middle East. In the exercise, a total of 66 undergraduate students role-played cabinet-level officials in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and were required to make foreign policy decisions based on knowledge acquired in the classroom and on information delivered as the exercise unfolded.

The rise of state-mandated standards in public education have allowed legislators to answer the question of what constitutes a proper civic education, a debate that has existed in the United States since the turn of the twentieth century. Through the content they employ in their standards, states may indirectly influence the type of citizenship education students receive in the classroom. The present study focuses on the Virginia Standards of Learning for two courses, civics and economics and U.S. and Virginia government, which are commonly taught to eighth graders and high school seniors, respectively. A content analysis of the essential knowledge found in the standards for these courses categorizes instructional content into seven forms of citizenship: civic republicanism, character education, deliberative, social justice, participatory, transnational, and cosmopolitan. Although the results are specific to the Virginia Standards of Learning, the nature of how citizenship is portrayed within the standards may transfer to other states with similar forms of standards-based education within their social studies curricula.

This essay describes two very different survey projects that investigate the political attitudes, values, and behavior patterns of ordinary men and women in the Arab world. One is the Arab Democracy Barometer, an American-Arab collaborative project being carried out in five countries. The other is a survey in Palestine conducted as part of the fieldwork for a doctoral dissertation. These projects illustrate the emerging opportunities for political attitude research in the Arab world. The essay begins, however, with a brief reflection on the history of political surveys in the Arab world, which is necessary to appreciate the significance of the opportunities now emerging.

Can states afford to protect human rights when facing a terrorist threat? Contemporary academic literature suggests that the answer to this question is no, concluding that states that afford their citizens basic political rights and civil liberties leave themselves more exposed to terrorist attacks (Piazza 2008; Wade and Reiter 2007; Pape 2003; Eubank and Weinberg 1994). American policymakers seem to agree. Both the Bush and Obama administrations regard the curtailment of physical integrity rights as a necessary element of effective counterterrorism policy. The Bush administration responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with policies permitting indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, use of physically abusive interrogation practices, and increased and largely unchecked surveillance and wiretapping of suspected terrorists. Although it banned abusive interrogation and announced plans to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration has maintained the practice of wiretapping, reserved the option of rendition, and dramatically increased unmanned drone attacks against suspected terrorists in Pakistan, which often results in civilian casualties. Both presidents have claimed that these policies are necessary to keep Americans safe from terrorism (Hosenball 2009; “Bush Defends Policy on Terror Detainees” 2005).

Although political campaigns have long been thought to have relatively minimal effects, recent literature suggests a more definitive role for campaigns in determining election outcomes. This articles contributes to this growing body of research by focusing on a campaign that is widely viewed (albeit in the absence of much empirical analysis) as having been decisive—the presidential campaign of 1948.

While many bemoan the increasingly large role rankings play in American higher education, their prominence and importance are indisputable. Such rankings have many different audiences, ranging from prospective undergraduates or graduate students, to foundations and government funders, to university administrators identifying strengths and weaknesses of their school. This diverse audience necessarily has varying hopes for what “quality” is measured in school rankings, and different uses for the rankings themselves. But although there are currently a wide variety of ways to assess graduate school quality, most existing surveys have recognized failings that compromise their usefulness to at least one of these different constituencies.The authors extend their thanks to William Bowen, Derek Bruff, Jonathan Cole, Philip Katz, Gary King, Robert Townsend, Harriet Zuckerman, and two anonymous PS reviewers for their valuable comments on and criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.

The Socially Mediated Internet Survey (SMIS) method is a cost-effective technique used to obtain web-based, adult samples for experimental research in political science. SMIS engages central figures in online social networks to help recruit participants among visitors to these websites, yielding sizable samples for experimental research. We present data from six samples collected using the SMIS method and compare them to those gathered by other sampling approaches such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk. While not representative of the general adult population, our SMIS samples are significantly more diverse than undergraduate convenience samples, not only demographically but also politically. We discuss the applicability of the method to experimental research and its usefulness for obtaining samples of special, politically relevant subpopulations such as political sophisticates and activists. We argue that the diversity of SMIS samples, along with the ability to capture highly engaged citizens, can circumvent questions about the artificiality of political behavior experiments entirely based on student samples and help to document sources of heterogeneous experimental treatment effects.

This lecture was presented at the University of Sheffield on October 22, 2008, inaugurating the Graduate School of Politics; and at Oxford University on October 16, 2008. I have retained the lecture style for this publication, only making minor changes and additions in the text.