An unfortunate typo has been called to the editors' attention in Joshua D. Clinton, Simon Jackman, and Doug Rivers' article, “‘The Most Liberal Senator?’ Analyzing and Interpreting Congressional Roll Calls” (PS, October 2004, 805–811). The header for Figure 3 and Figure 4 (pages 809 and 810, respectively) mistakenly names the current president of the United States “President Bust.” The header should read, in full, “Rank Ordering and 95% Confidence Intervals including President Bush using 62 National Journal Key Votes.” The editors of PS apologize for this unintentional and unfortunate oversight.

“If I can't dance, I don't want to come to your revolution”—Emma Goldman

Kim Quaile Hill (PS: Political Science and Politics, July 2004) seeks to debunk five “myths about the physical sciences” that “pose notable hurdles for appreciating the social sciences as legitimate scientific enterprise” (467). One of these myths is that “the physical sciences have always been highly successful in explaining their subject matter.” Hill complains that political science students are “ignorant of the history of science” and therefore they fail to “appreciate the differences between young and mature scientific disciplines…. If students can appreciate that all sciences were once youthful—as political science still is today—they will have a useful perspective by which to understand why and how the knowledge base of our discipline is limited” (469).

Well, let us admit, we all suffer from at least a mild case of “social sciences inferiority complex.” So it seems does Kim Quaile Hill in his spirited defense of the “less exact” part of academe. He finds his students' skepticism about (maybe even disdain for) political science troubling and frustrating. He is unhappy with students questioning the validity and certainty of social sciences. He fights back. However, his solution to the problem is not only ill-conceived, but it has the potential of harming his (our?) own cause. Instead of dealing with students' skepticism of the scientific character of social sciences, he blames that skepticism on students' misperceptions and misconceptions about physical sciences. Still, initially his argument sounds convincing when the misconceptions are framed in terms of scientific illiteracy, pseudo-science, and superstition. The first impression is—of course, how one can appreciate social sciences without a good understanding of science in the more traditional hard-sciences sense. Yet, we quickly discover that is not the author's point. It is the opposite. It is not so much about distrusting physical sciences, but rather about trusting it too much. With so much faith in physical sciences, social sciences are perceived as soft, inaccurate, and uncertain.

Kim Quaile Hill (PS: Political Science and Politics, July 2004) makes a somewhat nuanced contribution to the appraisal of epistemic controversies in the discipline of political science. His primary concern is for the manner in which erroneous presumptions about the nature of the scientific method in fields such as chemistry or physics have encumbered the effort to instill students with the habit of applying similar approaches in the study of politics. At first, the argument seems directed at uninformed students who do not recognize the social sciences as legitimately “scientific.” Upon further reading, it quickly becomes clear in her elaboration of five common “myths” about science that the more implicit intention of this piece is to challenge the assertion of some in the field that the abstract, variant qualities of political phenomena make these applications somehow inappropriate. The point that he proffers—that the physical sciences are hardly as rigid, finite or objective as some may assume—is certainly a valid one.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to respond to Oren, Ozminkowski, and Strake's comments on my recent article on myths about the physical sciences. All of them in my judgment either misperceive parts of my original argument or raise concerns that allow me to extend that argument. To the degree that others share their views, this essay may address widespread differences of opinion or misperceptions about these matters.

The world is undergoing a process of structural transformation in multiple dimensions: technological, economic, cultural, and institutional. This creates as many opportunities as it induces perils. Perhaps the most fundamental problem we now face is the crisis of political institutions in charge of managing the transition. We know the problems, we understand the issues, and in many countries there is enough political will to tackle the questions to be addressed. However, the organizational and institutional tools of governance are either insufficient or inadequate. Furthermore, the crisis of governance is related to a crisis of political legitimacy, characterized by increasing distance between citizens and their representatives. Both crises feed into each other, threatening with political paralysis and opening the way both for authoritarian policies and for demagogic revolts.

My topic today is accountability of the federal public service. Democratic accountability is at the core of both public administration and political science because, inherently, democratic government is accountable government. For that reason, it is worrisome that present definitions and systems of accountability are out of date, perhaps even seriously broken.

In the 2004 presidential election, 121.1 million ballots were cast for the major party candidates. President George W. Bush received 51.24% of these votes to Senator John Kerry's 48.76%. As Bush prepares for his second term, we know how the candidates performed. How did the election forecasters do?

Prior to the 2004 presidential election we provided forecasts of the final vote relying on two different models. The first model follows what we did in 1996 and 2000 and relies on two variables:

1. the cumulated weighted growth in leading economic indicators (LEI) through the 13th quarter of the sitting president's term—March of the election year—which provides advance information about income growth leading up to Election Day while also summarizing prior income growth; and

2. the current value of presidential approval, which absorbs some economic effects but also reflects non-economic aspects of incumbent performance.

The Jobs Model of presidential election forecasting predicted well in 2004. The model, based on data available in August 2004, generated an error of only 1.3 percentage points when forecasting the incumbent share of the two-party popular vote (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2004). In contrast, the median forecast from seven teams of statistical modelers was off 2.6 percentage points (Campbell 2004, 734). We believe that the Jobs Model was more accurate because it broadened measurement of economic performance, a conceptual variable lying at the core of most of these efforts. Take, as a representative example, the Growth Model in Table 1, Column 1. Its forecast for George W. Bush was 54.0% (almost exactly at the median for the above-mentioned group of forecasters). This model was earlier reported by us, but rejected on grounds of specification error (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2004, 754). We argued that the changing nature of the American economy required attention to a hitherto neglected variable—job creation. When this variable, new jobs over the presidential term, is added to the Growth Model, the fit statistics improve dramatically (see Table 1, Column 2,).

Based on George Bush's net approval rating of −1% in the final Gallup Poll in June, a 3.7% growth rate for real GDP during the first two quarters of 2004, and the fact that the Republican Party had controlled the White House for only one term, the time-for-change model predicted that Mr. Bush would win reelection with 53.7% of the major party vote. This forecast was made in late July, before the Republican National Convention and more than three months before Election Day.

On Labor Day, 57 days before the election, using the Gallup poll's division of likely voters and GDP growth during the second quarter of the year, the trial-heat and economy forecasting model predicted that George W. Bush would receive 53.8% of the two-party popular vote (Campbell 2004a). Out of concerns about relying too heavily on a single poll and the possible complications associated with the Republican Convention running right up to the Labor Day weekend, a companion model based on the pre-convention Gallup poll, the net convention poll bump, and the economy was constructed. It forecast a slightly closer election, with a Bush vote of 52.8%.

The forecasting model I wrote about in the October 2004 issue of PS (Holbrook 2004) is best described as a referendum model. It incorporates presidential approval (Gallup polls averaged from June through August), a measure of aggregate satisfaction with personal finances weighted by the tone of economic news (averaged from June through August), and a dummy variable coded “1” for years in which the incumbent party had held the White House for at least two consecutive terms and “0” for all other years. The first two variables are intended to capture the political and economic performance of the incumbent administration, while the latter (borrowed from Abramowitz 1988) is based on the idea that it may be easier to convince voters that it is “time for a change” if the incumbent party has held the White House for at least two consecutive terms.

For all the signs of a dead heat in the horserace polls and strong hints of a victory for Senator John Kerry in exit polls on Election Day itself, the reelection of George W. Bush proved predictable from a model with a leading indicator available as far back as January. The forecast published in the October 2004 issue of PS was initially posted on January 29, 2004, the day after the New Hampshire Primary. It claimed, with 95% certainty, that President George W. Bush would defeat Democrat John Kerry in November. The forecast, which was not subject to any revision throughout the remainder of the election year, gave Bush 54.7% and Kerry 45.3% of the major-party vote. It missed the actual division of the major-party vote by a little more than one unit of the forecast error (2.7). All in all, a satisfactory performance of the model.

There are two components to my model of presidential election forecasting: Given the enormous amount of work on voting behavior that finds prospective assessments of the economy to be strongly related to vote choice (e.g., Abramowitz 1985; Kuklinski and West 1981; Lewis-Beck 1988; Lockerbie 1992), I make use of a prospective economic item from the Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior that asks if the next year will be better, worse, or the same for the respondent. I take the average of the negative responses to this question from the first quarter of the election year as my economic measure. These data are available in late April.

In presidential elections over the last several decades, observers have noticed two patterns involving Latinos. The first, according to DeSipio and de la Garza (2002, 398), is that “With each presidential election, the media and the punditocracy discover Latinos anew.” As Jorge Ramos (2004) pointed out, “Without fail every four years, many politicians in the United States rediscover Latinos, only to forget them all over again for the next three years…It is a phenomenon so predictable that I have dubbed it the ‘Christopher Columbus Syndrome.”’

The dramatic expansion of democratic regimes throughout the world has produced a boom in the field of survey research. There are at least six reasons for this boom. First, democracy brings with it elections, and with elections, parties and candidates who want to know where and how to campaign and contributors who want to know on which “horse” to place their bets. Second, democratic governments care very much about public opinion since not only does their reelection depend upon the public will, but their ability to govern depends to a great degree on how well they are able to gauge public reaction to their policies. Third, democratic governments want objective information to help them plan their programs and to be able to gauge their impacts once implemented. Fourth, international donors increasingly carry out surveys of “users” or potential users of public services to help them plan their investment strategies. Fifth, international donors regularly examine program impacts as a means of evaluating project success and as a means of targeting future grants and loans. Finally, within the field of political science at least, there is a growing consensus that political culture matters for sustaining democracy and that the entire “democracy game” goes beyond finding the right institutions to having citizens believe in democratic principles. There is, of course, no unanimity on this point, raised so forcefully years ago in Dahl's “Preface to Democratic Theory,” and there will be those among the “new institutionalists” who entirely dismiss the role of what Dahl called the “consensus on the polyarchal norms” (1956, 135). Yet, broadly speaking, it is fair to say that most democracy experts would agree that in democracies, the public matters; publics vote, protest, and even rebel, and to exclude them in the calculus of the study of democratic consolidation is to risk missing an important part of the story.

Elections are the chief mechanisms of popular consent and political accountability in democracy. As recent history attests: “elections in the democratic context can have significant implications for the makeup of a nation's ruling circle and the character of its policies” (Ginsberg 1982, viii). While American elections are undeniably consequential, they fail on the democratic standard of equality. The American electorate is class biased—and more so than in other advanced democracies. Research for more than 50 years has shown that large numbers of Americans don't vote and that voters and nonvoters are drawn from different income and educational strata (Leighley and Nagler 1992). The burning issue of American elections is how to make the electorate more representative of the population as a whole. Courses on American elections, however, devote little time to turn-out and still less on how to mobilize non-voters. Instead, the lion's share of the typical syllabus is devoted to the presidential campaign process. The emphasis on “hoopla” (Patterson 1980) cannot help but feed student conceptualization of politics as a game, rather than an essential social enterprise. If our goal as teachers of political science is to bring students into the world of constructive democratic citizenship, then we must discuss with our students what is at stake in American elections.

“One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science” (Arendt 1994, 171).