This article discusses some of the challenges and lessons for teaching undergraduate-level courses related to terrorism. The author outlines some of the primary issues that instructors can expect to face, and provides strategies for dealing with several of these challenges. The goal is to relay useful information to those teaching, or planning to teach, courses on terrorism, with the larger hope of strengthening the community of terrorism scholars and possibly developing some best practices for teaching courses on terrorism.

The great political philosopher John Stuart Mill once asked, “Was there any domination which did not appear natural to those that possessed it?” (Mill 1984, 269–270). For same-sex couples seeking access to the institution of marriage, the public sense that marriage is naturally and obviously meant only for opposite-sex couples has been a formidable barrier. The first state supreme courts to rule on same-sex marriage, in the early 1970s, simply relied upon dictionary definitions to hold that marriage was obviously a heterosexual institution. Politicians mostly ignored the issue altogether until the courts of Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts forced public debate of the issue.

For the fifth time in its last six tries, the Democratic Party has managed to parlay its massive lead in party identifiers into another presidential election debacle. One shameless Democratic apologist, groping for a face-saving excuse, has hit upon the bizarre idea that the Democrats lose presidential elections time after time because, being rational political calculators, they find it in their partisan self-interest to do so (Erikson, 1988). This tortured theory overlooks the obvious: Democrats are too stupid to calculate their self-interest.

Although this conclusion may seem unduly harsh, science has proven that Democrats are significantly dumber than Republicans, even when the differing social bases of the two parties are held constant (Sigelman, 1988). This intellectual deficit helps explain why, time and time again, the Democrats find themselves hopelessly out-organized, out-strategized, and out-maneuvered—in short, out-thought—by the wilier Republicans.

“To arrive at some understanding of what is going on is hard enough,” says Abraham Kaplan, “without having also to meet the demand that we anticipate what will happen next” (1964, 351). Despite Kaplan's warning, attempts at forecasting American elections by political scientists have grown in recent years. Foreshadowing election results is not just a casual interest for political scientists. It both sparks interest in the work of our discipline, and serves as a pedagogical tool. We admit that many challenges present themselves when we attempt to predict complicated social phenomena; but if we, instead, limit our research to description and explanation, the danger is that repeated analysis of the same datasets will track patterns again and again that do not exist in the reality outside our samples. One guard against this is to take theories about politics and employ them to predict future events. In this spirit, this paper utilizes well-known patterns of congressional elections to predict those of the 2006 Senate.

The number of political scientists registered in the National Register of Scientific and Technical Personnel increased 25% from 1968 to 1970, from 5,176 to 6,493. This reflects a “natural” growth of perhaps 15–20%, over the two years while the remaining increase can be attributed to the greater scope of the American Political Science Association survey of political scientists in 1970. This growth in the political science section of the Register occurred despite a more restrictive definition of “professional political scientist” than had been used in 1968. Insofar as the APSA membership list can be used to gauge the completeness of the response, it would suggest that the Register is substantially complete for political science, allowing for the non-professional members of the Association and a probable residue of non-respondents. Political scientists comprise 2% of the total number of United States scientists (313,000 in 1970) in both years. More than half of National Register scientists are in three disciplines, chemistry, biology and physics.

The last vote was counted in the 2004 presidential election and olddebates began anew about the causes of low turnout of those betweenthe ages of 18 and 24. Despite an unprecedented amount of time andeffort spent on turning out the youth vote, the data suggest thatonly about half of the eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 24cast a vote for president. The good news is that, indeed, thisyear's figures reverse a downward trend in voter turnout amongst theyouth; the bad news is that every age bracket increased in votingand youth voting still lagged behind other age groups by significantmargins. Scholars have once again cited evidence of political apathyand alienation among young people; they have referred to studiesthat reveal widespread ignorance of American politics and history inour nation's high schools and colleges. Dire predictions willcontinue about the bleak future of American democracy due to theostensible lack of knowledge and interest in the American politicalsystem among our newest voters. Despite studies showing increases involunteerism, service, and civic engagement, the low voter turnoutwill dominate the debate about civic education.The authors would like to thank David A. Caputo,president of Pace University, for funding PC2004.

This note questions both some of the premises and some of the conclusions of Theodore J. Lowi's diagnosis, in the March 1992 American Political Science Review, of the state of the political science discipline. Since I am given a prominent, if undeserved role, in his analysis of historical trends, perhaps I may be pardoned if it begins by refuting that part of his argument.

Surely one should feel great (and devilish) delight at learning that one has exercised diabolical influence over the shaping of political science. Alas, I am wholly lacking in the power that Professor Lowi attributes to me in his paper. Alas also, if I were armed, my gun was not aimed in the direction he supposes it was. I am not at all in sympathy with the Third American Government whose (confused) economics-based ideology he presumes I created, as anyone will recognize who has read the foreword to the recent re-issue of the Simon-Smithburg-Thompson textbook, Public Administration, or the earlier work, Administrative Behavior (AB), or the more recent Reason in Human Affairs. Are these books written so obscurely that Professor Lowi could not see that the rationality celebrated in them (if any rationality is celebrated at all) is a weak, muddled, bounded rationality that is rejected out of hand by the economists who espouse public choice and neoclassical laissez-faire theory?

As many political humorists remind us regularly, politics “inside the Beltway” is not always of interest or relevance to the rest of the world. Yet for political scientists interested in the ongoing evolution of America's health care system, what goes on inside the Beltway has great import. For any proposed reform, there are three basic steps: getting the issue on the political agenda, securing passage of pertinent legislation, and implementation (although we intend to narrow our discussion to the first two).

A common criticism of academic political science is the disparity between the textbook portrayal of policymaking and the reality of what happens in Washington. In this article, we use abbreviated case studies to inject a dose of “inside the Beltway” reality into the images of policymaking. Included in our discussion is an account of how one issue—catastrophic health insurance—reached the political agenda and then more general comments on how health legislation has been considered and passed in recent years, with particular emphasis on the use of the budget reconciliation process. While cursory, we think these reflections provide a thumbnail sketch of how Washington is attending to important issues of health policy.

Douglass C. North, co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993, became a major leader in historical and comparative political science and in the study of institutions more generally. His work proved particularly relevant for those interested in questions of state building, state variation, development, and long-term secular change.

Graduate students seldom know how to navigate the publishing process, yet a growing expectation is that new hires are capable of immediately producing publishable research as well as teaching. Considering the current state of the job market, graduate students should plan early to take advantage of the opportunities to publish early in their graduate career. This article provides suggestions for beginning the publishing process.

Doing queer theory as political scientists enables us to approach central questions of the discipline in new and productive ways. This work makes possible innovative theoretical investigation of core concepts in political science such as power, justice, freedom, equality, and democracy. Queer theory can deepen the study of power by focusing on the lives, experiences, and institutions of GLBT people and communities. In the process, new frameworks are developed for the study of political theory more broadly. When done well, queer theory draws on the field's interdisciplinarity by bringing political scientists into conversation with other scholars on key matters that are best not bound by disciplinary borders. Similarly, queer theory at its best draws on the multiple perspectives developed in fields such as post-colonial, ethnic and critical race, feminist, class and ability, religious, and cultural studies.

This article introduces how to teach an interactive, one-semester-long statistics and programming class. The setting also can be applied to shorter and longer classes as well as introductory and advanced courses. I propose a project-based seminar that also encompasses elements of an inverted classroom. As a result of this combination, the seminar supports students’ learning progress and also creates engaging virtual classes. To demonstrate how to apply a project-based seminar setting to teaching statistics and programming classes, I use an introductory class to data wrangling and management with the statistical software program R. Students are guided through a typical data science workflow that requires data management and data wrangling and concludes with visualizing and presenting first research results during a simulated mini-conference.

Helicopter parenting is a phenomenon that is attracting sizable attention from university administrators and instructors. We examine the implications of helicopter parenting for both the political science classroom and for public opinion. Using a survey conducted at multiple universities in the United States, we find that helicopter parenting has a significant impact on the policy attitudes of college students. Specifically, students with helicopter parents are more likely to express support for both government surveillance and nanny state policies than are students without helicopter parents. Given the growing trend of helicopter parenting, these findings will likely have substantial implications for both the political science classroom and public opinion in the near future.