Micromanagement and Peer Review

The purpose of peer review is to keep standards high, thus giving reviewers two specific tasks. One is to recommend rejection of work that reflects an author's poor command of the literature, lack of methodological competence, and inattention to literary precision and clarity, while bearing in mind that a lively and dynamic scientific discipline must encourage diversity and avoid an excessive orthodoxy. The other is to offer instructive advice to authors who submit their papers while avoiding the temptation of telling others how to do their research.

Was it Al Gore's election to lose? Most political scientists, includeing us, believed that peace and a booming economy would give Gore a significant advantage in the 2000 presidential race. The election outcome—a virtual dead heat in the popular vote—has prompted two reactions that seem to us to be quite wrong-headed.

Our 2000 presidential election fore cast was considerably off the mark. We predicted Gore would receive 56.9% of the two-party popular vote. Gore did get the majority of this popular vote (about 50.2%), as we predicted, but his total fell many points short of our forecast. Does such a loarge error (of 6.7 points) invalidate our model? We are hesitant to say so, since we forecast Clinton's victory in 1996 almost exactly using the same model, and more closely than other political scientists. While the Gore result has some outlier characteristics, incorporating it into the model does not really budge the structural coefficients. Put another way, introducting the 2000 data does not alter the magnitude of the regression estimates for the three independent variables: GNP change, popularity, peace and prosperity. As shown in the second column of Table 1, the coefficients from the 1952–2000 estimates are, respectively, 1.81, .14, and .14, while the coefficients from the 1952–1996 estimates are, respectively, 1.83, .16, .14.

“He's breaking every political scientist's heart.” Mark Shields, commenting on the Gore campaign for The Newshour with Jim Lehrer on election eve, November 6, 2000

It did not look good for Gore leading up to Election Day. Five days before the election, not a single national poll had Gore ahead. Indeed, the polls at that time showed Bush leading by four percentage points on average (see Table 1). Bush was campaigning in California, and the rumors were that he already had shut down his own internal polling. Even on election eve, only two polls (CBS and Zogby/MSNBC) showed Gore ahead. In these final preelection polls, Bush was leading by 1.7 percentage points on average, and with a pooled N of over 10,000 respondents! At midnight, as Election Day began, the Iowa Political Stock Market vote share market indicated a commanding Bush lead of 4.5 points and the winner-take-all market put the effective probability of a Bush victory at 71%. Some political commentators were writing Gore's epitaph (Kurtz 2000). His one hope, it appeared, was to win the Electoral College vote despite losing the popular vote.

On August 29, 70 days before the election and more than 100 days before anyone would know who would be the next president, my trial-heat and economy model for forecasting presidential elections predicted that Al Gore would receive 52.8% of the national two-party popular vote. By the actual returns, after all the recounts and court rulings were completed, Gore received 50.3% of the national two-Party popular vote, 2.5 percentage points less than the model predicted. While this error is larger than normal (the mean out-of-sample error from 1948 to 1996 for the model is 1.5 percentage points), three of the last thirteen elections had larger out-of-sample errors. In short, though the performance of the forecasting model this year was well within normal bounds, the model was not quite as accurate as usual.

In every respect, the 2000 election defied what had become the conventional wisdom about American presidential elections—that the electorate rewards the incumbent administration for good economic times and punishes it for bad economic times. Occurring at a time when the incumbent president enjoyed fairly high levels of approval and the nation enjoyed relative economic prosperity, it seemed the 2000 election had all the markings of an election in which voters would support the status quo and vote to return a Democrat to the White House. Indeed, a group of election forecasters gathered at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and offered predictions that Gore would win a plurality of the two-party popular vote that ranged from 52.8% to 60.3%.The forecasts were as follows: Alan Abramowitz, 53.2%; James Campbell, 52.8%; Thomas Holbrook, 60.3%; Michael Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien, 55.4%; Brad Lockerbie, 60.3% (revised after the APSA roundtable); Helmut Norpoth, 55.0%; Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson, 55.2%. All forecasts are for the incumbent party candidate's percent of the two-party vote. Of course, we now know that although Gore did manage to win the popular vote by the slimmest of margins, he lost the electoral vote by an equally slim margin, and George W. Bush was elected president.

Having nailed down his party's presidential nomination with an early and decisive victory in the primaries, Al Gore will go on to defeat George W. Bush in the general election by a comfortable margin. The Democratic ticket, so the prediction, will take 55% of the major-party popular vote in November, compared to 45% for the Republican one—almost exactly the reverse of what national polls have been showing as late as June of the election year.

– A forecast issued July 26, 2000

“Prophecy is good business, but full of risks,” warned Mark Twain. How true in this election. Even though Al Gore edged George W. Bush by half-a-million votes in the popular count, he certainly did not win by the “comfortable margin” I predicted more than two months before the event. What was the basis of my prediction? And what may have cut it short?

By any standard, the 2000 presidential election was close. It was close in the Electoral College, where Bush prevailed by the slimmest majority (271–266), and it was close in the national popular vote, where Gore edged Bush by about 540,000 votes in an electorate of more than 100 million. Needless to say, the 2000 election was also astonishingly close in individual states like Florida, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Oregon.

On television's Law and Order, the police catch criminals and hand them over to the lawyers to get convictions. Part of the program's dramatic tension comes from the police operating under the scrutiny of a rigid and unforgiving legal system. The suspense increases as the lawyers try to do their job even though there is often a gap between justice and what the law requires.

An official recount was required to determine the winner of a knifeedged election. A Senate candidate's untimely death resulted, surprisingly and circuitously, in the Democrats picking up an extra Senate seat. Amidst widespread allegations of fraud and irregularities, the winner of the popular vote in the presidential election failed for the first time since 1888 to win the decisive electoral-college vote. And thus was foiled the vice president's bid to emerge from the shadow of the president he had served for eight years. The year 2000? No. The year was 1960. The Democrat, John Kennedy, was the president-elect who failed to secure the plurality of the popular vote, while the Republican, Richard Nixon, was the vice president whose popular-vote majority offered him scant consolation in defeat.The Senate candidate was not, of course, Missouri Democrat Mel Carnahan, whose death in September 2000 seems to have spurred a large sympathy vote, resulting in a posthumous victory (which, in turn, permitted the appointment of his widow to fill the seat). Keith Thompson was the Republican senator-elect from Wyoming at the time of his death in December 1960. Immediately thereafter, Democratic governor J.J. Hickey resigned to make himself eligible for appointment to the vacant seat by his own successor, Democratic Secretary of State Jack Cage.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the American philosopher George Santayana famously asserted. By the same token, a president who is well furnished with institutional memory should be less likely to commit avoidable errors and more likely to get the most out of his (and, at some point, her) time in office. The reflections that follow on what George W. Bush might learn from his predecessors were completed three weeks before his inauguration as the forty-third president of the United States. They appear in print after the Bush presidency has passed its hundred-day mark. Although they cannot take account of Bush's initial presidential performance, they do draw on the extensive record of his life and prepresidential political career.

A president who received fewer popular votes than his chief opponent, a House with a razor thin majority for the president's party, and a Senate evenly split—this is not most political scientists' prescription for policy success and certainly not what Republicans had in mind when they dreamed of unified Republican government. During the campaign, George Bush proposed a policy agenda that was ambitious if often vague about details and promised to change the often nasty and bitterly partisan tone in Washington. Are these now impossible dreams?

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 (P.L. 103-31) was designed to reduce the cost of voting by incorporating registration into a transaction with a public agency that citizens initiate for another purpose. The act took effect on January 1, 1995; between then and the 1996 election, 18,333,479 people registered in offices they had visited on other business (Federal Election Commission 1998, Table 2).Most of these were new registrations; the remainder were largely changes of address. (We are grateful to Brian Hancock of the Federal Election Commission for his help in interpreting this table.) They are 44% of the total of 41.1 million “registration applications or transactions” of any sort recorded in the 43 states subject to the NVRA in 1995–96. Six states are exempt from the NVRA; five—Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—because they permit electionday registration at the polling place and North Dakota, which does not require voter registration. Vermont's constitutional provisions kept it from implementing the NVRA by 1996. Four years later, answers to even the most elementary questions about this first NVRA election have not been published. We narrow the data gap by describing people who used NVRA to register, and then comparing their participation to that of their fellow citizens who registered to vote using more traditional methods.

The Clinton/Lewinsky/Starr affair unearthed a fault line in contemporary feminist theory, an unresolved tension between two governing ideals: “the personal is political” and the right to privacy. Since the early 1970s, both of these slogans have figured prominently in feminist scholarship and feminist politics. But as the Clinton sex scandal dragged on, many began to question the merits of politicizing personal matters such as intimate relationships. In the scandal's wake, feminists may find it tempting to retire the rallying cry “the personal is political,” and to distance themselves from what now appears to be a quaint leftover of the bold but naïve feminism of the 1970s. In the end, Starr's McCarthyesqueIn one of the more memorable quips to emerge from the reams of commentary on the scandal, Alan Dershowitz coined the term “sexual McCarthyism” to describe Starr's tactics. probe seems to have enhanced the public commitment to privacy. No longer to be taken for granted, the right to privacy is widely affirmed as an essential shield against official coercion.

The number of African American and Hispanic mayors of American cities has grown steadily since 1967, the year that Cleveland elected Carl Stokes the first minority mayor of a major American city.Throughout this paper, we use the term “minority” to refer to African Americans and Hispanics. In doing so, we do not assume that African American and Hispanic voters have the same preferences, nor do we intend to minimize the significant diversity within each of these groups. Rather, we group Hispanics and African Americans together because of the relative disadvantage members of both communities have experienced in comparison to whites in the United States. Over the past three decades, cities in all parts of the country have elected black and Hispanic mayors, including the five largest: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia. As the new century begins, almost one-third (25/76) of major American cities have minority mayors. The election of minority mayors is a clear sign of political progress by minorities since passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s.

Vicente Fox's unexpected victory in Mexico's July 2, 2000 presidential elections put a definitive end to Mexico's one-party regime. Until now the longest ruling party in the world, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) failed to turn out those who have traditionally voted for PRI in numbers adequate to match the millions of Mexicans who voted for change by supporting Fox. The Fox win means that Mexico has accomplished the rare feat of ending an authoritarian regime by voting it out of office, an event that comes at the end of a process of building an electoral opposition to the former ruling party that stretches back nearly a quarter century. However, while Fox defeated his PRI rival, Francisco Labastida, by a healthy six-point margin—42.5 to 36.1% of votes cast—he failed to sweep in a majority of legislators from his Alliance for Change (a coalition of Fox's National Action Party [PAN] and the Mexican Green Party [PVEM]). Thus, Fox faces a congress in which he will need constantly to build majorities to support his legislative program and in which the threat of a deadlock will loom continually.

Students typically enter the senior seminar in political science having taken different sets of courses in the major and having developed interests in different subjects. They also may believe they are incapable of conducting social scientific research because they have limited skills and because the term is so short. In particular, students taking a capstone course in political science at a liberal arts college that, like Rhodes College, lacks a major research library may question their ability to accumulate in a timely manner adequate information about a subject of interest. These doubts and concerns are not unfounded. Fortunately, combining the case study method and online research resources offers a solution to these difficulties and can greatly enrich the senior seminar experience. This combination would also prove beneficial to faculty overseeing honors research or senior theses.

Radical democrat John Dewey ([1916] 1966) believed that education could be a powerful tool for developing citizens' character and drawing them into political engagement. He also argued that science could inform public debate and contribute to problem solving in the community (Dewey [1935] 1980, [1939] 1989). Here, we describe and evaluate our attempt to realize these twin ideals in a semester-long course at Chapman University during spring 1999. In this course, students were active learners holding partial control over their educational experience and democratic citizens attempting to make a contribution to their community.

Effective education quite obviously requires that instructors possess both substantive expertise and the ability to communicate that expertise to students. Although skilled teachers routinely meet these dual requirements, doing so sometimes presents a seemingly inexorable dilemma. In this article we address one such situation: when an instructor in possession of the requisite substantive expertise is incapable of teaching in the students' native language.

In the spring of 2000, the department of political science at the University of Colorado received a Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) grant through the American Political Science Association. Grant funds were used to sponsor discussions about how best to prepare young political scientists to meet their professional and scholarly responsibilities as members of the discipline (see <www.preparing-faculty.org>). A central theme of a recent PFF meeting at Colorado was the importance of mentoring relationships in the process of graduate student education and faculty preparation.