Presidential candidates frequently tout their political experience on the campaign trail, telling voters that it has prepared them to deal with complex problems, make weighty decisions, and show leadership. The value of that argument was put to the test in the 2008 presidential campaign by Hillary Clinton against her opponent, Barack Obama. This paper uses a multilevel model to analyze the value of national and state political experience on overall presidential greatness, as judged by seven surveys of academic experts. Overall, there is no evidence that political experience improves the likelihood of strong presidential performance, and even some weak evidence that political experience in certain political positions, most notably mayor and member of Congress, leads to poorer performance. In the end, great presidents are not great simply because they have spent their lives in politics and learned important lessons. Other personal and historical factors are likely to be more important.

When I reflect upon Peter Bachrach's political theorizing from the perspective of the heated primary battles of 2008, I am struck by the unusual character of his political insights and commitments—and of how relevant and compelling they are in the current political climate. Peter might be appropriately considered a radical liberal democrat—who focused very sharply on the tensions between radicalism and liberalism as political ideologies, but sought to maintain a close and continually flowing circuit between radicalism and liberalism as bodies of philosophical understanding that could mutually nurture and sustain each other. Under his hermeneutical gaze, Hobbes was not only the father of modern philosophical liberalism but the theorist who instigated the formation of participatory democracy. By clarifying for us the extent to which we lacked foursquare rational props to support our judgments across a whole spectrum of human experience from everyday practical affairs to science, religion, and metaphysics, he cleared a tremendous space for human beings to actively participate in structuring their own lives and shaping their own destinies. In addition to his explicit statements concerning human equality (whose political payoffs would be mostly unusable by a contemporary democrat), there was implicit in Hobbesian theorizing a massive re-inflection of human limitation and possibility that could make participation seem like a plausible complement to his theorizing.

Scholarly publication in peer-reviewed journals is widely regarded as the road to scholarly success. However, in a diversity of fields such as sociology, economics, and political science, it has been shown that the rate of publication is much lower for women than for men. The question of whether a systematic relationship exists between gender and research methods has also frequently been debated. In this paper, we explore patterns of authorship and scholarship in two influential interdisciplinary journals, Political Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics, over the last decade. A systematic content analysis was conducted to determine the gender ratio of authors, the methods and theories employed, and the ratio of quantitative to qualitative research studies. In addition, we tracked the use of primary or secondary data sources and the prevalence of research funding by gender. Overall, we find that while women are publishing less than men, their rate of publication is somewhat higher than their representation in the field.

The rise of sustainability rhetoric, curriculum, infrastructure, and marketing on college campuses is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, college presidents are pledging to eliminate their campuses' global warming emissions; colleges and universities are building wind turbines, composters, and green buildings; and sustainability coordinators are the latest surge in new staff hires. However, the greening of college campuses has a less welcome side as well, and examination of the campus sustainability movement suggests an unsettling lack of theoretical and ideological analysis. In this article, I praise what is being done well, identify the political analysis that has been avoided, and provide arguments for what has yet to be addressed. I argue that the trend toward campus sustainability, while praiseworthy in some significant ways, has left some troubling theoretical assumptions largely undisturbed.

For the APSA panel commemorating Peter Bachrach, I was asked to speak to the “notions of inequality and inequity” in his work. For a while the topic stumped me. Then I realized why. Talking about inequality in Peter Bachrach's work, I decided, is much like talking about just distribution in Marx. It misses the point.

This article focuses on South Korean attitudes toward the South Korean-U.S. alliance by comparing three political groups. Using a nationwide survey of South Koreans conducted in 2007, it performs two quantitative analyses: cluster analysis to identify distinct political groups and regression analysis to test hypotheses drawn from literature about what influences public attitudes toward the alliance. This study draws four major conclusions about attitudes toward the alliance: (1) There is strong support for the alliance among South Koreans, including anti-American progressives. (2) For conservatives and centrists, the traditional rationale for the alliance—deterrence of North Korean aggression—remains a basic foundation for the alliance. (3) Among the three groups, there is a developing consensus on a new rationale for the alliance of promoting inter-Korean reconciliation. (4) The younger generation, which constitutes a large majority of the voting public, exhibits moderation and pragmatism in its ideological orientation, contradicting the commonly held view that it heavily slants progressive. These findings can offer important guidance for the future of the alliance.

In recent decades, the scientific forecasting of election outcomes has made great strides in a number of advanced industrial democracies. One country that has not received much attention to date is Canada. In this article, we present a vote function model to forecast Canadian federal elections. We explain our model's theoretical underpinnings and assess its statistical properties and forecasting capabilities against all federal elections held between 1953 and 2008. We then explore potential ways for improving the model's accuracy. We conclude by discussing the forecast of different hypothetical scenarios for an upcoming federal election.

As part of the ongoing work by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession (CSWP), we offer an empirical analysis of the pipeline problem in academia. The image of a pipeline is a commonly advanced explanation for persistent discrimination that suggests that gender inequality will decline once there are sufficient numbers of qualified women in the hiring pool. The CSWP believes that it is important to ask whether this phenomenon is actually occurring, because the implication is that we can explain inequality as a function of insufficient numbers of trained women in the pool, rather than as a result of ongoing discrimination that requires alternate remedies. Data from the American Association of University Professors suggests that merely increasing the pool of qualified women has not led to a commensurate number of women rising to the top in academia. Women are still ending up in lower paid jobs, and they continue to earn less than men in comparable positions. More aggressive policies to end discrimination are required.

Women's political action committees (PACs)—those committees founded by women to raise money for women candidates—have been and will likely continue to be an important part of American electoral politics. In this article, we investigate the impact of EMILY's List, because it is the standard bearer of women's PACs and is commonly cited as crucial to women's electoral success. Empirical studies of EMILY's List impact to date have largely assumed causal inference by using traditional linear models. We use a propensity score–matching model to leverage on causality and find that an EMILY endorsement helps some candidates and hurts others. Our findings set the stage for further and more nuanced investigations of when, where, and how EMILY's List can enhance the likelihood of electoral success for women.

The breadth of material covered in introductory U.S. government and politics survey courses creates a situation in which the textbooks used may serve as the primary source of information students receive about the country's political system. At the same time, their content represents a conscious choice by the authors, editors, and publishers of these textbooks regarding what topics and content are necessary and worthy of publication, which socializes students to accept particular viewpoints of the formation and operation of the U.S. government. Oftentimes, the information presented in textbooks across subdisciplines ignores the political experiences and influence of racial, ethnic, and other minority groups. We test this premise by engaging in a study of 29 introductory U.S. government and politics textbooks to assess the level of coverage and treatment of Latinos/as, the fastest growing racial/ethnic group in the country. We find that the discussion of Latinos in these textbooks is incredibly brief and often limited to the civil rights chapters. Furthermore, Latinos are primarily mentioned in the discussion of immigration, while their overall contributions to the political development of the United States are largely ignored.

Peter Bachrach had a remarkable impact on those who encountered him in person and on generations of readers. Judith Baer vividly captures, among other things, his inspiring, emboldening influence on his students and the sheer fun it was to be with him. My recollections are of exciting, forward moving, intense, and probing arguments, in private and public settings, with an infectiously warm, buoyant, generous friend.

In October 2009, political scientists learned of a Senate amendment sponsored by Tom Coburn (R-OK) that would eliminate political science funding from the National Science Foundation budget. The American Political Science Association condemned the proposed amendment, and concerned political scientists contacted their senators to urge the amendment's defeat. On November 5, 2009, the amendment was defeated 36-62 after little debate. This article examines the vote on the Coburn Amendment to understand the role that senators' personal, constituency, and institutional characteristics played in their votes. Logit analysis reveals that even after controlling for party, several factors significantly predict the vote, including the number of top-tier political science Ph.D. programs in the senator's state and whether the senator graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science.

In July of 2008, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AACSU) selected a handful of public universities to begin an initiative to promote civic engagement among students, faculty, and wider communities regarding the issues of the national debt and budget deficit issues. Named the America's Future Initiative, the project developed pilot programs on university campuses as part of AASCU's American Democracy Project, an effort to promote civic engagement on America's public university campuses. Moreover, the initiative linked the participating universities to Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization aimed at raising awareness about a number of public policy issues. The universities selected to participate in the America's Future Initiative varied tremendously in terms of geographic location and student enrollment.

I am pleased to be part of this symposium to celebrate the life and work of Peter Bachrach. Although my focus is the relevance of Peter's ideas of power to law, I want to begin with some personal comments as well as raise some final thoughts, drawing on others' contributions. Like so many of Peter's other students, I adored him. Peter's joy in ideas, his passion for participatory democracy, his love of teaching, and his extraordinary capacity to listen to students were infectious. As others have said, he lit up every room that he was in. He inspired me to become a civil rights lawyer and law professor and to teach, write, and advocate about issues that he cared about.

Political scientists hail from large, research-intensive universities like the Ohio State University, regional comprehensive schools like Western Kentucky University, and small teaching-intensive institutions like Mars Hill College. Despite this diversity, most studies of the political science discipline overlook the contributions of individuals from non-Ph.D. departments. To address this oversight, we compare the publishing rates of scholars with four types of affiliations: non-Ph.D. departments, Ph.D. departments, non-U.S. departments, and nonacademic institutions. We focus particularly on whether faculty from non-Ph.D. departments publish in different types of journals than faculty from other departments, and whether the institutional affiliations of editorial board members corresponds to the institutional affiliations of published authors. We find that people from non-Ph.D. departments represent 16% of the authors in our sample of political science journals, and their contributions are particularly noteworthy in certain types of journals. We also demonstrate that the institutions represented on editorial boards generally do not reflect the institutional affiliations of the authors who publish in these journals.

Using the most extensive dataset available on the 2008 election, I examine the impact of dog ownership on presidential vote preference. Canines were elevated to the status of a campaign issue when, during the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama publicly promised his daughters a dog after the election was over, a campaign promise that has since been fulfilled. However, this announcement appears to have unintentionally highlighted the absence of a key point of potential identification between this candidate and voters, and thus to have significantly undermined the likelihood that dog-owning voters would support Obama. I elaborate upon the implications of this finding for future presidential candidates.

In this article, we investigate the graduate curricula of political science programs and 122 Ph.D.-granting political science programs in the United States and how they seek to prepare political science teachers. We first investigate whether the department offers a dedicated political science course at the graduate level on college teaching, and whether the presence of this class correlates with the size of the department, the size of the university, the ranking of the department, and so on. We find that whether a program offers a graduate course on teaching is inversely related to the research productivity of a department, and that departments at public institutions are more likely to offer such courses than are departments at private institutions. Second, we conduct content analysis of a sample of syllabi from departments that offer such courses to ascertain the kinds of topics that are covered. Finally, we briefly describe some model programs that seek to prepare graduate students for teaching careers that integrate graduate student teacher training throughout the Ph.D. program.

Despite nearly universal concern about America's rapidly rising national debt, the United States government was $12.5 trillion in debt by the spring of 2010. Yet, few people—including college and university students—understand why we are in debt, what the many effects and dangers could be, the difficult steps necessary to reduce our deficits and debt, and the critical importance of bipartisanship and compromise. Given that young people are the nation's future and knowledge is power, what better place to raise awareness and stimulate discussion than on college campuses?

I have been extremely blessed in my life to have benefitted from some amazing mentors and friends in both psychology (most notably, Amos Tversky, Phil Zimbardo, and Leda Cosmides) and political science. Inspired by the occasion of Robert Jervis' festschrift, which importantly does not signal his imminent retirement, I was prompted to take advantage of this opportunity to express my deep and abiding appreciation for his advice and guidance over the years. In keeping with Kristen Monroe's model of three, I also reflect here on the critical roles that two additional mentors, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Peter Katzenstein, have had on my career and my life.

This article reviews the results of a discipline-wide survey concerning lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered in the discipline. We find that both research and teaching on LGBT topics have made some headway into the discipline, and that political scientists largely accept that LGBT issues can be fundamentally political and are worth studying and teaching for that reason. Nonetheless, troubling questions about discrimination both against those who conduct research concerning LBGT issues and LGBT individuals themselves remain.