This article describes social structural inequities in the academy that contribute to gender imbalances in faculty service demands, which can slow women's career advancement. The author criticizes as ill-considered and ineffective the popular notion that the solution rests with individual female faculty, who should “just say no” to service. Instead, she proposes structural and cultural solutions to this systemic problem, including a revaluation of faculty labor required to maintain the day-to-day operation of institutions of higher learning and research.

We argue for the importance of adequately distinguishing between the concepts of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. We review the literature across disciplines to suggest ways that political scientists might benefit by taking into account important biological distinctions in addition to cultural factors regarding sex, gender, and sexuality in their research. We clarify the distinction between these concepts in an effort to help reduce discrimination and defuse misconceptions, stereotypes, and imposed social roles. We believe that it would be fruitful for us as a discipline to better communicate this research to the wider public in the hope that public opinion and elite discourse will shift in a more tolerant and positive direction as a result.

In 2010, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) celebrated its fortieth anniversary as the leading association for political science in Europe. Forty-one years earlier, in 1969, three European political scientists sent a letter to about a dozen of their European colleagues outlining some suggestions for creating an informal network of institutions and centers interested in comparative politics research. The authors of the letter were Serge Hurtig, Jean Blondel, and Stein Rokkan. Over the next year, led by Blondel and Rokkan with the support of a number of leading professors at the forefront of comparative research in their respective countries (the “founders” being Serge Hurtig, Norman Chester, Hans Daalder, Richard Rose, Jorgen Westerstahl, and Rudolf Wildenmann) and the backing of the Ford Foundation, the ECPR began to take shape. The original plan called for a European journal, a summer school, inventories of European political scientists and graduate courses, workshops, a data information center, and the construction of a transnational infrastructure of institutions to foster a self-sustaining community of professional political scientists. On July 29, 1970, a Ford Foundation grant was awarded to support the achievement of these aims, and the ECPR was established.

Given the large number of cases and considerable institutional and contextual variation across and within local governments, one might assume that the study of local elections is an area already well harvested by political scientists. The truth, however, is that this area of inquiry is relatively unexplored. In fact, to say that a field of study on local elections exists would be a bit of an overstatement. Not only is the literature rather small and not particularly cohesive, but the data collection and methods of analysis are also somewhat primitive, particularly compared to research on state and federal elections. While, on the one hand, this lack of subfield development means that there are many unanswered and even unexplored questions, on the other hand, it means that the possibilities for future research are practically limitless.

Within contemporary political science, local elections are the perennial bridesmaids of behavioral research. While municipal contests are more numerous than any other type of election, academic interest in the factors that motivate local participation and voting behavior pales in comparison to the attention given to national politics. Case studies of individual elections in a small subset of larger American cities do exist, but within the local politics literature, few studies argue for a general theory of local voting behavior (but see Kaufmann 2004; Oliver and Ha 2007). Even in those cases that do, insufficient data exist to rigorously test or replicate these results on a large scale.

Local elections in the past four decades have provided valuable data for political scientists to test various hypotheses concerning racial relations in the United States. Past research has shown, for example, that the elections of African American candidates to powerful offices in urban America are closely related to the changing racial demographics of cities (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 2003). More specifically, racial polarization in a city's mayoral election tends to be at a maximum when whites and blacks each compose about 50% of the city's population. On the other hand, a biracial coalition between whites and blacks led by a charismatic black candidate is more likely to win elections when blacks become a clear majority of the city population (Liu and Vanderleeuw 2007). One remaining question that has increasingly drawn attention from scholars is the condition under which a multiracial coalition may be successfully formed.

As James Madison would not hesitate to tell us, the scale of a polity or jurisdiction is one of the most basic factors organizing political life. By scale, I refer to the number of inhabitants (or, alternately, constituents or voters) in a political unit, although geographic size may also shape political behavior. Large jurisdictional scale implies that candidates for office must campaign in larger constituencies, necessitating more use of paid media, more fundraising effort, and professional campaign advice. To residents of large-scale polities, government often seems distant, remote, and bureaucratic, and the intercession of interest groups, lobbyists, or organized protest activity may be more necessary to access or influence public officials. In these and other ways, the incentives, constraints, and opportunities facing politicians and citizens alike tend to differ systematically depending on a jurisdiction's scale.

The financing of political campaigns has been extensively studied on both the national and state levels. With the advent of campaign contribution and expenditure databases, scholars have a wealth of data to use in examining the importance of money for electoral success, the influence of campaign contributions on legislative roll call voting, and the effects of campaign finance reforms. Much less research has been conducted on the local level, largely because of a lack of available data. Research on local campaign finance is necessary, however, because local governments are not just smaller versions of their state and federal counterparts, but rather have unique political and cultural institutions that create idiosyncratic electoral dynamics. Furthermore, variation across local jurisdictions generates opportunities to study campaign finance in different contexts, allowing for a deeper understanding of how contextual variables influence the role of money. In this article, I outline an agenda for local campaign finance research that addresses central questions in the campaign finance and urban politics literatures.

Scholars of political science often lament the difficulties associated with finding the most appropriate data to test theories about how the political world works. The study of local political participation and, more broadly, elections is certainly no stranger to this quandary. However, considering that the nearly 90,000 units of local government generally hold regular elections for a wide array of political offices, this field of study should offer an embarrassment of riches; we should never be at a loss for a way to examine the questions that are central to the functioning of democracy.

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping declared that China's future depended on gaige kaifang (reform and opening up to the West). By any standard, China has reformed its economic system and prospered handsomely by integrating into the world economy. With less fanfare, China has taken steps to restructure its political system and committed substantial resources to harmonizing relations with its neighbors. Given these changes, China's insular tradition, and Communist government, this article considers how the country's reemergence has impacted the teaching of international relations (IR) at Chinese universities. Using primary and secondary sources, including university Web sites written in Chinese and English, and about a dozen semi-structured interviews conducted in Beijing and Xi'an, this study concludes that although China has become actively engaged in IR and the internationalization of universities is evident, the government has yet to endorse fully the importance of IR as a discipline, and universities have not systematically adopted the theoretical toolbox developed outside of China to describe, explain, and predict behavior in IR.

Research suggests that student learning is enhanced when students are engaged through active learning strategies. In studying public opinion and polling, challenges include the provision of meaningful active learning environments when resources are limited. In this article, I discuss the design and implementation of telephone surveys as a teaching tool for use in introductory American politics as well as upper-level public opinion courses. I emphasize polling situations in which there are limited resources or no established survey research center is available. Topics include student involvement in survey design and implementation, logistics, and budgeting. Student satisfaction with participation in the survey process is also discussed.

A considerable amount of research exists about political science careers at community colleges and liberal arts institutions, as well as about training and hiring practices across different types of institutions. However, there is virtually no commentary available on political science careers at comprehensive institutions, where a significant proportion of those in the field will spend their professional careers. The primary goal of this article is to initiate a conversation about working at a comprehensive university, which has both similarities to and important differences with Ph.D.-granting universities and liberal arts institutions. In doing so, we seek to highlight and discuss unique subtleties and complexities in the areas of teaching, research, and service that may provide insight into careers at comprehensive institutions and assist those who may be seeking or have just gained academic positions at such institutions.

U.K. government policy is placing a heavy emphasis on “essential” and “employability” skills in an effort to help individuals cope with changing social and economic circumstances. Delivery of these skills falls to a range of education providers. This is a particular difficulty for university lecturers who teach non-vocational students who are increasingly concerned about their ability to compete in the job market after graduation. Transferable skills are therefore a key issue in student learning and support in U.K. political science, as well as other disciplines. Through assessment of one U.K.-based political science research methods module, this article suggests effective group-based ways of embedding such skills for political science students in a way that puts the student, and not the teacher, at the center of the learning process. These ideas are confirmed by survey evidence. In particular, student group research projects underline the idea that instructors should go beyond the classroom to help students apply theory. Importantly for both U.K.- and non-U.K.-based lecturers, the assertion can now also be extended to include transferable skills in addition to learning and applying theory.

Traditional writing assignments only teach students to write for academic settings. Assigning students policy briefs and policy memos gives them the opportunity to practice the type of writing they will perform both inside and outside of academia while still developing critical thinking skills and an understanding of the political world. Including policy-style writing assignments in the curriculum teaches undergraduates the skills demanded by their future employers, helps future academics learn how to write grant and conference proposals, offers students practice at the highest levels of Bloom's taxonomy of learning, hones synthesis and analysis, teaches students to be client-oriented, and makes students more effective citizens.

The political science program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) announces it awards for basic research support and dissertation improvement grants for fiscal year 2010. The program funded 75 new projects and 31 doctoral dissertation improvement proposals. Additional program funds were spent on continuing grant increments, which result from awards that were made in previous fiscal years, but for which funds are being disbursed on a yearly basis instead of upfront. The political science program spent $12,753,794 on these research, training, and workshop projects and $345,389 on dissertation training grants for political science students. The program holds two grant competitions annually—Regular Research, August and January 15; and Dissertation Improvement, January 15—and constitutes a major source of political science research funding as part of fulfilling NSF's mission to encourage theoretically focused empirical investigations aimed at improving the explanation of fundamental social and political processes and structures.

Asher Arian, one of Israel's most prominent political scientists, died on July 6 after a long illness, a four-year battle with cancer. He was 71. Asher Arian was a leading political scientist both in Israel and the United States.

Robert V. (“Bill”) Daniels died in Burlington, Vermont, on March 28, 2010, at the age of 84. He was a distinguished scholar and teacher at the University of Vermont for more than three decades, a respected administrator in various university positions, a president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and an elected state senator in the Vermont legislature for nearly a decade. He authored two dozen books on themes of fundamental importance, mostly on revolution and modernization, power and authority, leadership and opposition, participation and bureaucracy, representation and communication, and ideology and culture in the Soviet Union.

Mel Hinich, professor of political science and economics at the University of Texas at Austin and Mike Hogg Professor of Local Government, died in a tragic fall the evening of September 6, 2010.