Preview of the articles that will be published in the April issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, Washington Insider, Center Page, and In Profile.

The pacted nature of democratic transition seems to define the divergent path taken by Chilean elites in comparison with their Argentinean counterparts. However, using a Most Similar System Design (MSSD), two new elements enhance opportunities for explaining the different outcomes. First, the content of a mandate that has the ability to co-opt people from outside the privileged class; and second, the capacity of the elite to generate a process of political systematization and economic monetarization that ensures stability with no apparent democratic setbacks.

No year is like any other for the successive classes of APSA Congressional Fellows. Over the last few years Fellows have encountered the impeachment of a president, the repercussions of the terrorist bombings of New York City's Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the invasion of Iraq, and the devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina. One of this year's 2004–2005 Fellows, Amy Steigerwalt, is still waiting for the University of New Orleans to open so she can resume her teaching position.

Special thanks, call for papers, Berlin seminar, Ella T Grasso collection, and National Archives offers Summer Institute for Educators.

The following tables display the 10 most frequently downloaded APSA journal articles from the Cambridge University Press web site from January 2003 to present.

Saluting our fifty-year members.

The 2005 recipients of the Rowman & Littlefield Award for Innovative Teaching in Political Science are Barbara Allen and Greg Marfleet of Carleton College.

The Northeastern Political Science Association (NPSA) held its annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in November 2005.

Pi Sigma Alpha, the National Political Science Honor Society, is proud to announce the winners of its 2005 Chapter Activity Grants Competition. Now in its 24th year, the Chapter Activity Grants program is the biggest and most important of the honor society's roster of awards because of the size of its budget and the large number of students it affects. In this annual program Pi Sigma Alpha chapters submit proposals for activities they would not be able to carry out without funding. The maximum grant to any chapter is $2,000. The proposed activities may be in areas such as chapter and student development, social service, and the like. A grants committee reviews the proposals competitively and makes awards based on the quality and feasibility of the activity proposed, the completeness and appropriateness of the budget, and other factors. Some proposals receive full funding, some receive partial funding with instructions on how to scale back the activity, and some are rejected. This year the committee funded 88 chapter projects for a total of nearly $56,000.

Designed to introduce 20 students to the world of graduate study and encourage applications to Ph.D. programs in political science, the heart of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute (RBSI) is two transferable credit courses, one in quantitative analysis and one in race and American politics. The courses introduce students to the intellectual demands of graduate school and political science research methods. As a final project for both courses, students prepare original, empirical research papers and top students are given the opportunity to present their research at APSA's Annual Meeting, with all expenses paid by the Association. Exact dates for the 2006 Summer Institute will be announced in spring 2006.

Two Ralph Bunche Summer Institute Scholars, Candis Watts, Duke University, and DeReal R. Moore, Texas Christian University, presented research funded in part by the Jewel L. Prestage and Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Endowment for Minority Opportunities. The Prestage-Fenno Fund promotes and supports expanded opportunities for minority students contemplating advanced training in political science through such programs as, though not limited to, the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute.

By the mid 1990s, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers alike had begun to recognize the critical importance of good governance for growth and poverty reduction. Yet corruption, its mirror image, remained “taboo” at the World Bank up until the historic “cancer of corruption” speech in 1996 of then-Bank President James Wolfensohn that formally brought governance and anticorruption into the forefront of the Bank's agenda (see Figure 1). In 1997, the World Development Report: The State in a Changing World broke new ground within the Bank, taking stock of the erstwhile work on governance and addressing what the institution could do to enhance its ability to help client countries improve governance and reduce corruption.The presentation was made at the APSA 2005 meeting, “Panel on Politics and Development Programs: APSA and World Bank Collaboration.” Panel participants included: Margaret Levi (APSA President 2004–2005), Ashutosh Varshney, Anna Grzymala-Busse (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor), Daniel N. Posner (University of California Los Angeles), and Timothy Frye (Ohio State University) from APSA; and Sanjay Pradhan, Edgardo Campos, Richard Messick, and Maks Kobonbaev from the World Bank Public Sector Governance Unit.

This article helps fill the void in U.S. political science's approach to Latin American political science and its institutionalization. One example of that void is that PS: Political Science & Politics has recently published several pieces on the state of the discipline in diverse regions of the world but, despite its relative importance, none on the state of the discipline in Latin America (see, for example, Bogaç and Turan 2004; Rizayev 2004; and Sharapova 2005). This omission is remarkable because this continent has both nourished U.S. political science by providing several outstanding colleagues, many of whom have generated controversial and important arguments against the dominant paradigms in the discipline, and because, for better or worse, Latin America has been considered the “backyard” of the United States. Arguably, because of its economic, social, and political ties with the U.S., any major change in Latin America would have greater and more immediate implications for the U.S. than similar events elsewhere in the world. These topics are particularly pertinent with the upcoming conference of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) being held in Santiago, Chile, in 2009, and the APSA's new efforts to recruit members from overseas, especially from not-so privileged countries.

Upcoming international events 2006.

APSA International Membership.

Organized section update.

APSA Council meeting draft minutes.