Scholarship, Publications, and Meetings Cluster

Since APSA is foremost a learned society, the direct advancement of knowledge is at the core of APSA activities. These activities include supporting publication of the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, and PS, and the conduct of the Annual Meeting. All of these efforts are healthy and at the forefront of the field.

APSA Journals

APSR. The report of the Editor of the American Political Science Review is published elsewhere in PS and can also be obtained from the APSA offices and web site. It is worth noting several developments here involving the journal as reported by Editor Lee Sigelman. First, as readers will readily have noted, the book reviews have moved from the Review to Perspectives on Politics; this transfer will open up additional pages for scholarship in APSR. Additionally, following vigorous outreach, submissions to the APSR have increased dramatically, directly supporting the editor's goal to publish the “best article-length work across the full range of the discipline.” And, in response to a related goal to attract “not only a greater number, but also a greater variety of submissions,” Lee Sigelman reported demonstrable increase over previous years in submissions of papers based on “small N” research (for example case studies) as well as increased submissions of those focusing on comparative politics and international relations. Manuscript turnaround time has been reduced, even, in the face of increased submissions.

The APSR editorial board organized a program review of the journal's management this year that in interim form has affirmed the evidence of positive management and editorial direction for the APSR. Editors are appointed for three-year terms, with a two-term limit. The APSA Council has renewed Lee Sigelman's editorial appointment for one additional year without further review, following which the Council will then conduct its own program review if Sigelman requests the additional two-year term extension.

Perspectives on Politics. APSA's newest journal, Perspectives on Politics, published its inaugural issue in March 2003. Perspectives is edited by Jennifer Hochschild and a small team of associate editors and carries APSA's book reviews. As Hochschild puts it: “Perspectives on Politics has a somewhat different editorial structure and review process of the usual journal.” As described in the call for papers, the journal seeks to provide political insight on important problems, to draw from authors and readers including journalists, policy analysts, public officials and their staff, and other social scientists along with political scientists, and to publish articles that clarify the political significance of accumulated research regarding a particular area of the world, an important policy problem, a deep normative conflict, or a significant institution or process.

PS: Political Science and Politics. PS remains APSA's journal for symposia and articles on current developments in politics and political science, forum for professional development and teaching issues, and journal of record for developments in the Association. Now that Perspectives on Politics is in place, and the APSR has reevaluated its directions, the PS Editorial Board will begin a review of the focus and emphasis of PS and will report to the membership its findings.

APSA journals are now published by Cambridge University Press, who has also assumed responsibility for managing institutional and library subscriptions and for advertising. Cambridge also places APSA's current journals online for member and institutional subscriber access. These are difficult financial times in academic publishing and we are facing cutbacks both in institutional subscriptions and reductions in advertising for scholarly books. Cambridge is still in transition on these issues; next year we hope to have a better sense of how much growth may be possible in these two areas. As a separate change for members, we are now distributing one journal per month to members, rather than bundling journals to arrive in a single package.

Other Publication Initiatives

Several other major APSA information initiatives are also underway or in development. APSA was a pioneer in the operations of the JSTOR archive, and all APSA journals are available through JSTOR up to the most recent three years. (The most recent three years, in turn, are available to APSA members through their myAPSA account and the Cambridge University Press web site.) JSTOR receives extensive access from APSA members and the academic public.

APSA conference papers continue to be accessible online through PROceedings. PROceedings, in turn, is evolving into a much larger project that will eventually provide the entire political science community access to large quantities of prepublication scholarship, such as working papers, conference papers, and institute reports. This project, preliminarily named PROL for Political Research On-Line, is a developing collaboration of the major political science associations, including, at this stage, the Midwest PSA, the Western PSA, the Southern PSA, the International Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association.

The Association's centennial edition of The State of the Discipline is also now in print. This is the third in the series of publications relating to an overview of the state of scholarship in all areas of political science.

Annual Meeting Policy and Planning

The annual meeting remains the single largest meeting for exchange of political science scholarship in the world. Annually, 6,000 attendees meet for scholarship, professional development, research planning, teaching, and exchange of research and teaching resources. At the latest meeting in Philadelphia 2003, 739 distinct panels were organized involving 4,003 participants. Planning of the meeting also is highly distributed, with over 54 persons involved on the annual meeting program committee alone. It is not always recognized that the APSA annual meeting provides space for panel organized by groups related to political science other than the APSA program committee and organized sections themselves. This year 52 such related groups presented panels at the meeting, organizing 84 of them.

Locations for the meeting are limited by the hotel size and meeting room requirements, but the transition recently from meeting strictly in hotels to meeting in combination sites involving hotels and related convention centers has opened up new venues. The recent meetings in Philadelphia and Boston have exploited these arrangements, providing venues APSA has attended only infrequently in the past.

Awards, Funds, and Lectures

APSA awards are also a way to recognize, and indirectly encourage, excellence in scholarship. APSA directly presents 19 awards; organized sections administer another 75. Currently, $814,567 are held in endowed funds to support APSA awards. APSA's Centennial Campaign and the development of the Centennial Center and its related programming has substantially broadened the role that APSA can now play in recognizing and supporting new scholarship. The Campaign has raised $3.2 million dollars in 16 different funds.

Additionally, the Teaching Award Recognition program allows APSA to recognize outstanding teachers in political science nationwide by acknowledging those who have won campus-wide awards in their own institutions. A special reception is held at the annual meeting to acknowledge these teachers.

Education and Teaching Cluster

The effective teaching of political science is another core mission of the Association, both as a component of functioning as a learned society and in support of the professional interests of a large majority of our members. There are in turn numerous dimensions to this component of our work—concern with how graduate students of political science are prepared in doctoral institutions, interest in professional education through Masters and related degrees, attention to undergraduate education both as a major area of study for students and as a core requirement for all students gaining a basic education, and concern with the place of civic education throughout educational systems and more broadly in understanding public policy.

APSA has long played a strong role in support of education and teaching, with key reports on teaching personnel in 1934, civics education in wartime in 1940, and so forth. News for Teachers of Political Science was published as a separate teaching newsletter in 1978, and is now incorporated as an integral part of PS. APSA was a leader in preparing instructional materials relating to the U.S. Constitutional Bicentennial and in producing the telecourse Congress: We the People in the 1980s.

Much of this work is now institutionalized in the form of continued series of teaching materials—especially syllabi collections and Setups volumes, and the so-called Teaching Saturday at the Annual meeting which emphasize panels and workshops on teaching strategies for undergraduate and graduate education and career placement. APSA's teaching page on the association's web site remains highly visited.

One of the most significant developments in APSA's approach to teaching issues crosses over into our efforts in professional development. The Association has been an active participant in the Preparing Future Faculty initiatives in partnership with the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). APSA has awarded grants to support the “Preparing Future Faculty” programs of four Ph.D. departments working with political science departments in (a combination of) non-doctoral universities, colleges, and community colleges to provide professional preparation for academic careers to advanced doctoral candidates with a focus on preparing them for a future role as educators in undergraduate programs.

Graduate Curriculum Task Force

In 2002, then President-elect Theda Skocpol proposed an APSA Task Force to explore issues facing doctoral education in the field.¹

In the words of the draft Task Force report: “[the Task Force represented] a striking variety of institutions, political science subfields, scholarly backgrounds and methodological viewpoints. She asked its members to report on ways to strengthen graduate education in political science.” While readily acknowledging that no single structure of graduate training would be appropriate for every circumstance or perspective, there is a set of core principles for graduate education in the field upon which all members of the task force could agree. In its forthcoming report, the Task Force lays out these principles and their rationale and then suggests a program of action for departments and for the Association to help us achieve these goals. The spirit of the report is captured in part in the following one-sentence excerpt, that: “Teaching, public service, and research all require a breadth of training in intellectual traditions and open-mindedness about methodological tools.”

Over the course of the year, APSA will be following up on recommendations in the report to strengthen resources on the web site for students seeking graduate study, to provide better tools for students deciding about doctoral programs, to help improve the fit between program offerings and student interests, to promote even stronger minority recruitment efforts to doctoral study, and to explore how the discipline could develop a system for a longterm panel study of the careers of political scientists that will allow us to better understand the relationship between doctoral recruitment and training to career outcomes.

Future Directions for Education and Teaching Initiatives

APSA is poised to strengthen its activities in support of education and teaching goals in two major ways: the introduction of a new major annual conference on teaching and learning, and the implementation of a new generation of work in support of civic education and engagement.

Teaching Conference. In spring of 2004, APSA will hold the first in what is expected to be an annual program of conferences on teaching and learning in political science. The first conference will be limited in size to 40 invited participants to allow more time for planning a larger meeting and to explore format and interest. The objectives for the conference are simple—to provide a sustained and structured environment for political scientists to address pedagogy, new teaching technologies, and the marriage of political science content and presentation. We do not intend to reduce the coverage of teaching at the APSA Annual Meeting and we fully intend to assure that the teaching conference brings together faculty from all sizes and types of institutions. We will report more fully to the membership as this program develops.

Civic Education and Engagement. APSA has played a central role in improving civic education for many years. There is a specialized civic education web page, a listserv actively managed by Mel Dubnick, and a collection of syllabi and other resources resulting from recent participation in the Campus Compact Service Learning Project and other activities. Last year, the APSA Council established a standing committee on Civic Education and Engagement. The committee is initially staffed as a task force and has taken a new direction for the Association—linking civic engagement to public policy design as well as to education programs. It thus crosses over significantly into APSA's cluster of activities related to the public presence of political science, as discussed below. But once these policy studies are completed, the Committee will continue in normal fashion to guide APSA in activities in support of civic education.

Public Presence Cluster

APSA, by design, stays out of the public policy fray. The APSA Constitution states explicitly that the Association “will not commit its members on questions of public policy nor take positions not immediately concerned with its direct purpose [to encourage the study of Political Science.]” However, the APSA Constitution also encourages “in its membership and its journals, research in and concern for significant contemporary political and social problems and policies, however controversial and subject to partisan discourse in the community at large these may be.”

There are a number of areas in which the Association has programs in place to support such engagement in public issues among the membership, and it is an active area of discussion within the Association about how to do more. Robert Putnam organized a Task Group of the Association on this subject during his presidency, followed by a Council sub-committee formed by Theda Skocpol to continue the discussions of ways the Association can more effectively support political scientists engaging in public issues. These discussions have encouraged two separate strategies: better equipping political scientists to engage in public issues and initiatives the Association itself can undertake in regards to public issues.

The first strategy is to equip political scientists to be more active in the public arena. This strategy takes several forms. Forums at annual meetings and in PS have often addressed both strategies for engagement and topical issues of public interest—with debate on the merits of policies to provide free public access to college education as the most recent example. Many academics are infrequently cited in the press as a resource for interpreting public issues. PS has begun documenting instances of this public exposure; a short course of techniques for effective media communication is in preparation for next year's annual meeting. Finally, Perspectives on Politics has an explicit purpose to advance discourse about the applications of political science scholarship to pressing public issues, and among scholars and practitioners.

In a major commitment to strengthening the role of the Association in facilitating contributions by political scientists to issues of significance to the public, the second strategy named above, the Association is committed for the next several years to the establishment of annual task groups on a key public issue. Each year the President-elect, with the advice and consent of the Council, will select an issue important to both political scientists and the public and bring together a working group of members to explore solutions and develop innovative ways to present those findings to policy makers and the public. The first of these is currently examining issues of inequality in America. The Russell Sage Foundation has provided operating support for this task group.

Notably, the Committee on Civic Education and Engagement is currently working in a similar manner, developing reports that can help in diagnosing the implications of alternative public policy designs on civic engagement. In addition to formal APSA initiatives mentioned above, the Association is also an active partner with other societies on issues helping to apply social and behavioral science to public policy. The Decade of Behavior project, of which APSA is a part, is a collaborative effort to celebrate such past accomplishments and to build public support for a stronger academic role. We are also exploring partnerships with the White House Historical Society and the Supreme Court Historical Society on initiatives that will provide scholars access to and a voice in policy research relating to core American institutions.

Congressional Fellowship Program

The APSA Congressional Fellowship program, now 50 years old, represents the Association's preeminent effort to link political scientists with active public life, therein strengthening research careers, teaching, and public policy. The CFP began in 1953 with the naming of five political scientists to serve as interns in Capitol Hill offices for a year.²

The initiative was supported by a grant from the Edgar Stern family of New Orleans, which represented radio and television interests in the city, and helped marry the program with journalism from the very start, with a journalist also named in that first year. Since that time, the program has expanded to include a growing number of international fellows supported by various foundations, an annual Native American Hatfield fellow named after former Senator Mark Hatfield, fellows sponsored by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, Robert Wood Johnson health policy fellows, domestic and foreign policy specialists from government agencies, and journalists sponsored by a range of supporters. In 1991, the MCI Communications Corporation endowed the fellowships with a $5 million grant that has been the backbone of its continued successful operations.

The CFP provides an annual stipend for its participants, an intensive preparatory training series on Congress and American politics, and a year-long placement in a Capital Hill office to its participants. For 50 years, the Congressional Fellowship Program has been, as Program Director Jeffrey Biggs puts it, “one bridge” connecting those who teach about politics, those who write about politics, and those who work in politics. Since its inception, 371 political scientists have received intensive hands-on training in the work of politics through the CFP, and overall 1,840 scholars and practitioners have benefited from this initiative.

Centennial Center and Programs

APSA's newest venture into linking political science with public resources and issues lies in the opening of the Centennial Center for Political Science in the APSA building in Washington. The foremost purpose of the Center is to support research scholars needing access to international and domestic political and policy resources in Washington by providing workspace and collegial interaction. We anticipate, however, that the Center will also play a significant role in linking political science scholarship to the political and policy community in Washington through seminars, speakers' series, workshops, and dialogue. By bringing scholars from different countries, fields, and areas of practice together, we expect that the Centennial Center will expand the boundaries of scholarly and public understanding and practice—building another “bridge” connecting those who teach about politics, those who write about politics, and those who work in politics.

Other Areas of Activity

In a second part to this annual report to be published in the January issue of PS, I will report on APSA's activities relating to professional development, international programs, and internal operations, among other topics. As always please contact me with any comments or questions about APSA activities, at brintnall@apsanet.org.