Although in recent years there has emerged a renewed interest in teaching and learning issues in the APSA, relatively little attention has been paid to the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum. In this article we conduct a broad survey of articles that appeared in the APSR from 1906 to 1990 and find that (1) in the past the association paid much attention to the undergraduate political science curriculum; (2) over time attention shifted from a conception of the major as promoting substantive knowledge to a conception that emphasized skills; and (3) current concerns regarding skills, sequencing, and capstone experiences were all discussed several decades before the appearance of the “Wahlke Report” in 1991. We offer an explanation for the ebb and flow of the attention curricular issues received historically in the APSA, and suggest what the future may hold for current efforts to reexamine the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum.

In any scholarly field, some works are widely acknowledged as classics, whereas the rest—indeed, the great majority—are little noted nor long remembered. Indeed, according to the “Iron Law of Important Articles,” the number of significant articles increases only to the extent of the square root of the number of published articles (Holub, Tappeiner, and Eberharter 1991). It follows that as a research literature grows, important articles constitute an ever-decreasing proportion of the total output.

The year after the 1961 publication of Robert Dahl's Who Governs?, “Two Faces of Power” criticized the treatment of power in this about-to-become classic work. Offering a third way neither elitist nor pluralist, Bachrach and Baratz made no defense of Floyd Hunter's reputational approach and they largely by-passed the literature on social stratification. Instead of revisiting past controversy, they sought to identify a fundamental feature of the political process, offering the second face of power as a wide view of how the game of politics is played.

I began working on “Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy” in 1974, delivered the paper at the August 1975 meetings of the World Econometric Society in Toronto and the APSA in San Francisco, and shortly thereafter submitted it to the Review, where it languished for more than a year before it was accepted (just barely, I sensed) after a change of editor. The article's title is somewhat misleading because the evidence pertained to the influence of government partisanship on macroeconomic outcomes.

Jack Walker was the author of three of the 100 most cited articles in the history of the Review. Nowhere is his creativity and imagination more on display than in his “Diffusion” article. Comparing the three articles allows some conclusions about why “Diffusion” had such a great impact and illustrates the thinking of a great scholar, mentor, and colleague.

Gerald Kramer, Steven Brams, Peter Ordeshook, Samuel Popkin, and I were MIT undergraduates interested in political science in the late 1950s. Kramer, after taking a job at Rochester under the new chairman, William Riker, spent 1966–1967 at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University studying econometrics under Marc Nerlove. He began investigating the question of whether macroeconomic fluctuations had any effect on voting behavior. After discovering, somewhat to his (and Nerlove's) surprise, that there did seem to be some effect, he began exploring the question in depth, developing a more formal theoretical framework and also using several different econometric approaches, which jointly led to this article.

In just 13 pages, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes's “Constituency Influence in Congress” established the agenda for the next half-century of research on congressional representation. Along with its sister paper, “Party Government and the Salience of Congress” (Stokes and Miller 1962), “Constituency Influence” famously documents the general impoverishment of voters' knowledge of Congress and its members. Of at least equal importance is its analysis of congressional behavior as a response to oft-ambiguous constituency views, incorporating rich interview data of the sort not seen since. It is no wonder that Miller and Stokes' paper is among the most heavily cited—and influential—of all papers that have graced the pages of the Review.

The request to interpret the meaning of the historical record of citations for our article on the “New Institutionalism” is in the tradition of asking successful entrepreneurs to explain their successes, and is probably equally misguided. We interpret the charge as an invitation not to describe the real mysteries of fashion in citations but rather to explore why this article might have been cited if citation counts reflected valid judgments of scholarly significance. The context for the article is a long history of intellectual struggle between partisans of two logics for taking, describing, or assessing human action. The first logic is one of consequences. It is a logic that sees human behavior as driven by anticipation of its consequences and evaluation of those consequences by some kind of utility function that reflects the desires of the actor. In discussions of political systems, scholars attracted to such a logic talk of the pursuit of interests and rational choice. They emphasize incentives and the complications of understanding rationality in an ecology of rational actors.

“Some Social Requisites of Democracy” is, by official count, the seventh most cited article the Review has published. If we include citations to it as it was reproduced in Political Man (published the following year), we would surely find it to be one of the most influential political science essays of the past half-century. I suggest five reasons why.

Much as we would like to believe that the high citation count for this article is due to the brilliance and clarity of our argument, it is more likely that the count is due to our being in the right place (that is, the right part of the discipline) at the right time. In the 1960s and 1970s, serious quantitative analysis was used primarily in the study of American politics. But since the 1980s it has spread to the study of both comparative politics and international relations. In comparative politics we see in the 20 most cited Review articles Hibbs's (1977) and Cameron's (1978) quantitative analyses of the political economy of advanced industrial societies; in international relations we see Maoz and Russett's (1993) analysis of the democratic peace; and these studies have been followed by myriad others. Our article contributed to the methodology for analyzing what has become the principal type of data used in the study of comparative politics; a related article (Beck, Katz, and Tucker 1998), which has also had a good citation history, dealt with analyzing this type of data with a binary dependent variable, data heavily used in conflict studies similar to that of Maoz and Russett's. Thus the citations to our methodological discussions reflect the huge amount of work now being done in the quantitative analysis of both comparative politics and international relations.

The article started as a long paper on distributional inequality in the advanced capitalist societies that I presented at the 1976 annual meeting of the APSA. Using OECD data on the post-tax distribution of income in 12 countries, I found that the extent of inequality varied inversely with the extent to which Social Democratic and other leftist parties had governed in recent years. Control of government by left-of-center parties was closely associated with the extent of and growth in the extractive capacity of the state, defined in terms of the ratio of all public revenues to GDP, and the extent of and growth in extractive capacity were closely associated with the degree of distributional equality. But there were perplexing anomalies. For example, the Netherlands, where the Left had seldom governed, experienced the largest increase in the ratio of revenues to GDP since 1960 and was the most egalitarian in terms of the post-tax distribution of income. Belgium and Ireland also experienced unusually large increases in the ratio of revenues to GDP despite infrequent control of government by left-of-center parties

I believe that the high rank of this article both indicates its importance for a transnational generation of scholars of comparative politics and international relations and reflects the enormous influence of Karl Deutsch's other writings from that time.

The initial motive for writing “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting” was not the argument that subsequently became the focus of academic discussion, the necessity for positing a D term (“citizen duty”) to render the act of voting rational. Instead, our purpose was to show that people reacted “rationally” (i.e., logically) to an election's competitiveness. Admittedly the data we brought to bear here were weak, but with the addition of D the question arose as to whether we made voting rational only by rendering the concept of rationality a tautology: rational people voted because, with D, we assumed they were rational. However, one response with which I am sure Riker would agree is to note an asymmetry in our thinking about social processes. Few people claim to eat for a reason other than satisfying their own (private) needs as opposed facilitating the (public) objective of diminishing world hunger, and positing a growling tummy as a reason for entering a restaurant is hardly taken as a instance of rationality turned tautology. Yet the argument that the benefits of voting are dominated by a private D term as opposed to some public PB calculation occasions precisely that accusation.

Next to having one's book prominently displayed on the racks of every airport bookstore in the country, receiving recognition for an article written more than half a century ago is a close second. Indeed, for some of us it is the very highest form of intellectual acknowledgment. The Shapley–Shubik power index, invented more than 50 years ago, is a familiar concept in the analytical lexicon of political science. In brief, it is a measure of the ex ante likelihood that an individual will be pivotal in transforming a nonwinning coalition into a winning one. This depends on the voting or decision rule, on the one hand, and on the number of votes or decision weight possessed by an individual, on the other. The “power” of an individual, so determined, may be aggregated to measure the power of a faction, party, proto-coalition, or voting chamber (the latter in a multicameral setting)

”Consensus and Ideology in American Politics” is one of a trio of Review articles in which Herbert McClosky (1958; McClosky, Hoffman, and O'Hara 1960) reported on the early results of his empirical inquiries into the ideological foundations of American mass and elite political attitudes and beliefs. This extremely ambitious research program engaged McClosky (who died March 13, 2006) for the next half-century, producing, among other outcomes, two major books (McClosky and Brill 1983; McClosky and Zaller 1984), numerous doctoral dissertations by his students at Berkeley, and a rich course of study in political psychology that constituted a substantial and lively subfield in his department that attracted a great many of its most promising graduate students.

The importance of citizen trust in government derives from its role in democratic theory. Presumably, the decisions of trusted authorities and institutions are more likely to be accepted as legitimate and worthy of support than are those of distrusted leaders and institutions.

I have long been interested in the question of how cooperation can emerge in a world of egoists without central authority. Over a period of five years, culminating in my book on the Evolution of Cooperation (1984), I published a series of studies that explored the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in the context of the two-person iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). I was well aware that two-person interactions can tell only part of the story of cooperation in societies, so I thought about various ways of building and sustaining cooperation when one person's actions can affect many others. Unfortunately, the most straightforward way to extend the two-person PD game would not sustain cooperation unless something else was added to solve the collective action problem by preventing free riders.

“Liberalism and World Politics” had an impact because it is short and (by my standards) well written. I am sure its brevity has attracted anthologists. The more substantial reasons for its impact seem to me to be the following five: First, the article addressed an important anomaly. Traditional theories of democratic foreign policy said that democracies would inherently be peaceful. The mainstream of the literature on war and peace refuted that claim. A group of carefully done empirical studies suggested that democracies were peaceful, but only with one another. This article resolved the anomaly by outlining the logic of how states that were both liberal and representative would maintain peace with one another, but not reliably with nonliberal, nonrepresentative states. It argued that although states throughout history have gone to war with one another to advance both their rational national and nonnational governmental interests, liberal democratic peoples have, by and large, respected one another's sovereignty and security.

I frequently tell my graduate students that a good indicator that a piece of work has attained the status of a classic is the extent to which it is cited irrelevantly. Although I have been vaguely conscious in the years since this article was published that it has turned up in a lot of footnotes, I have not followed its career in the literature closely enough to be able to tell whether by this austere criterion it qualifies.

”The Silent Revolution in Europe” was the first presentation of the intergenerational value change hypothesis. It argued that the publics of postindustrial societies are shifting from giving top priority to “Materialist” goals such as economic and physical security to placing increasingly strong emphasis on self-expression and the quality of life. Throughout history, survival has been insecure for most people, forcing them to give top priority to survival needs. But in advanced industrial societies, the economic miracles of the postwar era and the emergence of the welfare state gave rise to conditions under which much of the postwar generation grew up taking survival for granted; they give increasingly high priority to “Postmaterialist” values such as belonging, self-expression, and free choice. Because people's basic values do not change overnight, those who experienced the insecurity of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II would continue to emphasize Materialist values, but we would expect to find an intergenerational shift toward Postmaterialist values.