In the interest of providing graduate students with information andadvice concerning their graduate careers, APSA has begun a series ofefforts to identify “good practices” or “best practices” withrespect to a number of aspects of graduate education. The thought isthat faculty, junior and senior, may serve as sources of usefulinformation that supplements what departments provide to their ownstudents, At a minimum, from these efforts, students would be ableto learn of a variety of perspectives, some of which might bedifferent from those to which they had already been exposed by theirown advisors and other faculty with whom they have studied.

For at least two decades, it has been conventional wisdom among political guras that our system of choosing presidents through electoral votes, accumulated state by state, offers Republicans a substantial edge. Representative is a comment by a Democratic strategist to Newsweek (7/27) in the summer of 1992: “It's the same map we've had to deal with for years—and the results haven't been good. You need all the breaks with a map like that….”

The notion that Republicans have an “electoral lock” on the White House has been received wisdom among pundits ever since Horace Busby, a former aide to President Lyndon Johnson, coined the phrase. The idea is that even if Democrats fare well in the popular vote, the electoral map is skewed against them.

There is only one problem with the idea. The election numbers just don't support it.

It is obvious that, in presidential contests of the 1970s and 1980s, major regions went overwhelmingly Republican. From 1972 through 1988, the Democrats did not once carry a single state among the eight of the Mountain West. They did little better in the South: Jimmy Carter dominated the region in 1976, but Democrats carried a total of just one old Confederacy state in the other four elections. Clearly these have been regions of deep Democratic weakness at the presidential level.

When I was looking for a quotation to garnish the introduction to mydoctoral dissertation on Senate committees, I turned, like hundredsof graduate students before and since, to Woodrow Wilson'sCongressional Government. “Congress in sessionis Congress on public exhibition,” he wrote (1885) and I quoted(1972), “whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress atwork.” But the book deserves better than simply to be mined forquotations. As Wilson's doctoral dissertation, it offers insightsinto his developing political thought. It illumines the operationsof the national government during what was indeed a period ofcongressional and standing-committee ascendancy, although Wilson'saccount was neither objective nor totally reliable. And it promptsreflection on certain recurring dilemmas in the practice of Americandemocracy.This essay is adaptedfrom a presentation at the Woodrow Wilson International Centerfor Scholars, November 14, 2005.

Editorial cartoons do not just mirror politics, but are also themselves a part of politics. They are more than single-panel graphical commentaries on daily policies, for they construct their own claims on truth. The cartoonist can use the polysemic nature of visual signs and present a distinct framing perspective. Editorial cartoonists with certain ideological stances can become an actor in “the struggle for cultural supremacy,” in Tarrow's (1998) term. This struggle refers to efforts by the state, media, and social movements to influence the interpretative processes by which individuals negotiate the meaning of events. This paper analyzes the editorial cartoons in Turkish daily newspapers in terms of their competing framings of contemporary Turkey's secularist-Islamist division. Secularism and Islamism refer here to political projects that seek to transform and reinstitute a sociopolitical order on the basis of some constitutive norms (Çınar 2005, 8–9).

The first day of class is always a challenge (Vile 1985). An instructor has several objectives: to convey a sense of what the course will entail, to begin convincing students that what they are about to study is important, and to leave the impression that the class will be a stimulating experience. I remember my first class during my initial semester of teaching, a section of introductory American government. Fresh from graduate school, I lectured on how the study of politics could be scientific and dazzled the students with a tour through social science terminology—norms, roles, institutions, and so on. The response was, to be charitable, restrained.

Fortunately for my students, I've moved on to other approaches. One that has been particularly successful in basic American government classes is to place the students in a you-be-the-judge situation through consideration of a Supreme Court case that raises issues of substantive importance to which introductory students can readily relate. The case must have resulted in a non-unanimous decision that is not widely known among undergraduates. (There is no problem in meeting these criteria.) The legal background and facts of the case are presented, as are highlights from the majority and dissenting opinions, but without indicating which is which. The students are then given the opportunity to put their thoughts about the case on paper and to discuss their opinions with their colleagues, first in small groups and then with the whole class.

American society has witnessed an extraordinary widening of economicinequality in the period since World War II that is unmatched amongadvanced industrialized countries. In 2003, the most affluent fifthreceived 47.6% of family income, the middle class (the third andfourth fifths) earned 15.5% and 23.3%, respectively, while thebottom two quintiles each received less than 10%. (Twenty-onepercent of family income went to the top 5%.) In other words, therichest 20% obtained nearly half of the country's income. Thatincome (and wealth) is unevenly distributed is neither new nornecessarily disturbing. What is remarkable is the large andunmistakable increase in the concentration ofincome at the top (Mishel, Bernstein, and Allegretto 2005).

Exponential functions, widely used in the physical sciences, also have been used to model political phenomena. To our knowledge, however, this tool has not been used to replicate the electoral survival of the government or administration in several democracies. This article reports that an exponential survival model is a good fit for the reelection rate of the party that controls the executive office in states, territories, or provinces in three countries: Australia, Canada, and the United States.

Botswana is frequently depicted as a major success story on acontinent where political and economic success stories areunfortunately few and far between (Acemoglu,Johnson, and Robinson 2001; Leith2005; Samatar 1999; Sarraf and Jiwanji 2001). In many ways, itis. In contrast to many resource-dependent countries, Botswana hasavoided civil war, held regular elections, and produced some of thefastest sustained economic growth in the world. Yet, on February 18,2005, President Festus Mogae declared the country's most famouspolitical scientist, Kenneth Good, a Prohibited Immigrant and gavehim 48 hours to leave the country. On May 31, 2005, after losing alegal appeal against this order, Good was held in a police cell fortwo hours, given 30 minutes to pack, and put on a flight toJohannesburg, South Africa (see timeline below). This articleexplores the background to Good's deportation and addresses some ofthe fundamental questions it raises about academic freedom.

This article provides additional information on community collegetenure-track opportunities for job candidates in political sciencewho might be considering expanding their searches to include postsat two-year colleges. I write from the perspective of the successfulcommunity college job-search candidate, and provide reflections andadvice relating to three areas of the community college job searchand teaching environment. In the first section I discuss my decisionto seek a position at a two-year college and I address the dilemmasof professional self-image that may face new Ph.D.s consideringcommunity college employment. The second section recounts keystrategies and practices that I found successful as a candidate onthe community college market. In the final section I describe what Ihave learned during my first year as a community college instructor,focusing on the specific adaptations I have made in creating aclassroom environment that is academically challenging for advancedstudents yet not rigidly inaccessible to students with limited basicskills.

The current debate in political science over methods and fundamentaltheoretical stances recalls similar debates in other fields. Part ofthe debate focuses on the merits of the use of statistical methodsor the use of mathematics and quasi-mathematical reasoning, as ingame theory and much of rational choice. Among the critics of thosewho use these approaches are many who focus more on interpretiveapproaches to understanding social institutions and behavior. Insome ways, the debate seems dated in that the largest and mostcompelling body of quasi-economic work is broad studies of therelationships between political and economic development. Such work,often with relatively sharply defined statistical models, spans morethan two generations of scholars in political science. Such work hasgiven compelling answers to many questions about the workings andworkability of democracy. It typically abstracts from culture and itfits congenially with rational choice theory in its focus onmicrofoundations for various claims.

Woodrow Wilson told us that the federal-state relationship is thecardinal question of our system that is destined to be reformulatedfor each generation. His prophetic words aptly characterize thechallenges federal and state governments face in satisfying both therequisites of an increasingly global economy and nationalizedpolitical culture while at the same time reflecting the differentialvalues and interests of states. States need to retain theirdiversity and capacity to innovate and respond to different valuesand interests that may not get a hearing in Washington; conversely,Washington needs to be alert and reactive when states proveunresponsive to key values and interests or collectively incapableof solving national economic or social problems.

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.