The simple act of voting—and its barriers, costs, benefits, and mobilization—continues to be central to politics and political science (Kelley and Mirer 1974). The Supreme Court case Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board (2008) and a well-attended panel on the topic at the 2008 APSA annual meeting in Boston highlight the pertinence of voter-ID issues to the polity and discipline for the 2008 and future elections. As simple as voting is, it is also “of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure” (Burdick v. Takushi 1992).

“Turning out to vote is the most common and important act citizens take in a democracy,” John Aldrich writes (1993, 246), “and, therefore, is one of the most important behaviors for scholars of democratic politics to understand.” Turnout matters at the community as well as the individual level; the larger a county's voter turnout, for instance, the more discretionary federal resources it is likely to receive per capita (Martin 2003). “The blunt truth,” according to V. O. Key (1949, 527), “is that politicians and officials are under no compulsion to pay much heed to classes and groups of citizens that do not vote.”

The issue before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Crawford case (Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd. 2008) was whether a law (Indiana Senate Enrolled Act No. 483) passed by the Indiana legislature requiring most voters to show a photo ID in order to cast a ballot violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs argued that it works an unfair hardship on many people who do not have the government-issued documents that count as a legitimate ID (Indiana Democratic Party et al., 12–16). They argued that the law, in effect, constitutes a poll tax, inasmuch as there are costs to obtain the right kind of photo ID, costs that unduly burden many eligible citizens wanting to exercise their right to vote.

Following the 2004 elections Republicans assumed ascendancy in Indiana, capturing the governorship for the first time in 16 years, retaining control of the Senate and regaining control of the Indiana House of Representatives after eight years in political exile. This political development set the stage for the passage in April 2005 of the Indiana photo-ID law, also known as Senate Enrolled Act 483 (SEA), on a straight party-line vote. Two days after SEA 483 was signed into law by governor Mitch Daniels the Indiana Democratic Party (IDP) filed suit in federal district court in Indianapolis (IDP v. Rokita 2006). The case was assigned in a blind draw to U.S. district judge Sarah Evans Barker, an appointee of President Reagan and a former U.S. attorney. The same day the Indiana chapter of the ACLU filed an action in Marion Superior Court, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. The Indiana attorney general intervened in both cases to defend the law's constitutionality and removed Crawford to federal court, where it was immediately consolidated with Rokita.

“It is beyond cavil that ‘voting is of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure’” (Burdick v. Takushi 1992, 433). Voting is particularly foundational “since the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights” (Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Educ. 1966, 667). As Justice Kennedy dissented in Burdick (1992, 434), even depriving one voter of the exercise of the fundamental right to vote is too substantial an impact to withstand constitutional scrutiny.

Because voter-identification laws discourage voter turnout, particularly among identifiable minority groups, their implementation abridges a fundamental constitutional right. The U.S. Constitution includes a little-known remedy for denying or abridging the right to vote that reduces a state's congressional representation in proportion to the extent of the abridgements.

On January 8, 2008, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a case related to the discriminatory effects of voter-identification laws in the state of Indiana. Indiana has one of the most stringent voting requirements in the nation, as voters are required to present an up-to-date photo identification issued by the federal or state government in order to cast a ballot. Plaintiffs argued that the Indiana requirements prevent significant and unequal obstacles to the right to vote. The state argued that Indiana had the right to enforce strict requirements to prevent fraud and uphold confidence in the electoral process. Similar laws have also been proposed in many other states, typically related to charges of vote fraud, and often times tied into the divisive debate regarding undocumented immigrants or African American felons. Therefore the recent decision of the Court has tremendous implications to the future of photo-identification laws across the United States.

Debates over whether to require voters to provide proof of identity at the polls, and just how that can be accomplished, are taking place in legislative chambers and courtrooms across the nation. At the heart of these debates is the balancing act of ballot security versus access to voting. Opponents of voter-identification requirements argue that they place a disproportionate burden on ethnic and racial minorities, the poor, the less educated, the very young, and the very old. Supporters of identification requirements argue the standards are no higher than those required for boarding a plane or cashing a check, and the requirements are needed to prevent voter fraud.

The effect of voter-identification (voter-ID) laws on turnout is a hot-button issue in contemporary American politics. In April of 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Indiana's voter-ID law, the nation's most rigorous, which requires voters to arrive at the polls with a state-issued photo ID containing an expiration date (Crawford v. Marion County 2008). In a famous incident highlighting how Hoosiers were dealing with their state's voter-ID law, representative Julia Carson (D-IN) was initially blocked from voting during Indiana's 2006 primary election for failing to comply with Indiana's voter-identification standard. Carson identified herself with her congressional ID card; since that card did not include an expiration date and therefore did not meet Indiana's voter-identification law, she was turned away at the polls before later being allowed to vote (Goldstein 2006). The rising wave of public, political, and legal debate crested two years later in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling and during the Indiana primaries, with reports of a dozen nuns being denied ballots at the polls due to their lack of appropriate identification (Urbina 2008).

At the heart of the efforts to improve elections in the United States are two important values: access and integrity. To guarantee the right to vote, the polls must be accessible to all who wish to vote. To guarantee legitimate elections, only eligible people should be allowed to vote, and all votes must be tabulated correctly. These values have different implications for administrative procedures, ranging from the implementation of registration systems to the choice of voting equipment to the set up of polling places and training of poll workers. Often these values work hand in hand, but at times they are at odds. Such is the case with the authentication of voters at the polls (see National Commission on Federal Election Reform 2002).

Letters to the editor are an important but poorly understood form of voluntary political participation. To learn more about the content of letters to the editor and the characteristics of the people who write them we conducted a content analysis of 1,415 randomly selected printed letters from eight newspapers from 2002 to 2005. We also matched the letter writers from our sample to demographic and political information contained in a state voterfile.

Since 1996 the World Bank Institute and the Research Department of the World Bank have been developing six governance indicators called the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The six dimensions of governance include control of corruption, measuring perceptions on corruption. Based on the literature review as well as the data itself, this paper concludes that the conceptual and empirical issues on building governance indicators constitute an ongoing project.

Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator presents a view of the transition from dictatorship to the republic that one also finds in the discourses of certain political leaders today. I argue that we can learn about violence and the founding of a republic from an analysis and, especially, a critique of Gladiator.

In our professional work, many of us are involved in university service and politics and some of us enter administrative positions. As political scientists who became associate deans of colleges of liberal arts and sciences, our observations from our administrative perches and our disciplinary knowledge have provided insights on how faculty can protect and promote academic values.

I spent the spring and summer of 2007 reading 185 books in the field of international relations, as I chaired two major book awards in the field.

Human rights issues are closely connected to a range of political processes, from democracy and conflict resolution to judicial accountability and terrorism. Despite the dramatic growth of the human rights field in recent years, however, it remains unclear how much the subject has influenced political science scholarship. I assess this question by examining broad publishing trends, namely human rights articles in the discipline's leading journals.

Times change, and so do research methods; gone are the days of researching with index cards. While academics may be slow to adopt emerging citation technology, the reference manager field is blazing ahead. This article explains what reference managers are, addresses their emergence in and potential impact on academe, and profiles a newcomer to the field: Zotero. We close by surveying and contrasting Zotero's features with those of its staunchest competitors: EndNote and RefWorks.

In 1970, Victoria Schuck reported in PS on female participation at our annual meetings from 1959 to 1969. Ever since 1972 I have written on the gender participation balance at our annual meetings, at first as a letter, later as a regularly appearing note in this publication. This fall is the thirty-seventh time I reported to the association membership about the tally. (Since I retired at the end of the 2007–08 academic year, I hope someone else will continue the number crunching.)

Surveys indicate that there is more interest today in politics among college students than has been the case in the recent past. This article describes a multidisciplinary freshman seminar aimed at using that interest to promote student engagement and the Reacting to the Past simulations at the course's center.

This article illustrates the profound learning that occurs—for students and instructor alike—when a class on third-world development attempts to undertake foreign aid. With undergraduate, graduate, and departmental money, I purchased bulls and carts for farmers, and goats for widows, in two West African villages. Such experiential learning personalized for students the study of micropolitics under conditions of poverty, the development of organizational structure, and north-south dependency.