The End of Liberalism is an ambitious, engaging, and intellectually provocative work even if it is also occasionally ambiguous, ahistorical, assuming, and utopian. This work attempts to build a theory of the modern American political regime which captures its complexity, inherent contradictions, institutional dilemmas, and self-destructive public philosophy. Since America has yet to abandon the politics and public philosophy of interest group liberalism, Theodore Lowi's (1969 and 1979) polemic remains a useful and now comfortable perch from which to observe the continuing crisis of public authority and shout appropriate epitaphs. There is little doubt that The End of Liberalism continues to stimulate, define, and inform intellectual and political debate in America 20 years after its initial publication.

There are two ironies about The End of Liberalism which are now apparent two decades after its publication. First, if Lowi's work had been completely successful in laying to rest the demon of interest group liberalism and its spiritual compatriots, we might not be assessing the longevity and influence of this work two decades later.

University courses that include statistics and computers intimidate many students. Fear diminished somewhat with the advent of the microcomputer, a physically unimposing box over which users feel they have a fighting chance compared to large and distant mainframes. Now that increasing numbers of students own microcomputers, their sense of control and familiarity is even greater.

The proliferation of computers has been accompanied by the development of low cost student oriented versions of word processing packages, spreadsheets, data base management programs, and statistics packages. There are probably a greater number of student statistics packages than any other category of software. For approximately the cost of a text book (or less) students can purchase functional tools complete with manuals. The sense of student mastery of computing encouraged by the micro is further enhanced by student ownership of the software being used.

Often student computer programs are partially disabled versions of commercially available software. In the case of statistics packages this may mean that the numbers of variables and/or observations that can be handled have been lessened, the variety of statistical techniques reduced, or the manual made less complete. For many uses, especially education, such restrictions are not severe. Some of the packages discussed below would have been considered powerful and full featured programs only a few years ago, and several are better than packages currently sold as full featured software for $200. Nearly all offer standard descriptive statistics, ANOVA, correlation and multiple regression, scatter plots, crosstabs, and rich varieties of transform tools.

As the world has grown more interconnected, many political science programs have added courses on international law, international organizations, the laws of war and peace, international human rights, and comparative judicial politics. While in many cases these are relatively new offerings within international studies, all of these subjects have long been part of the law school curriculum. There is, therefore, a long pedagogical history to be examined in terms of the techniques and content used in law schools to teach these courses. This paper examines a number of these techniques and discusses how they may be used in political science courses to enhance student learning opportunities.

The recent events in Eastern Europe, and, for a brief moment, those last spring in China are initial steps in what may be the birth of stable democratic regimes. We are witnessing the early stages of great dramas in which whole peoples attempt to give shape to their political lives. These are the high moments of politics, an outpouring of energy from which enduring political institutions of popular control may be born. These are also times of enormous danger in which the seeds of future failures may be sown.

By thinking of these events in broadly constitutional terms, we may not only gain some perspective on what is occurring, but we may also increase our understanding of constitutionalism more generally. This can only do us, i.e., Americans, some good, inclined as we are to think of constitutional matters as the specific concern of courts. The Eastern Europeans and the Chinese may increase our understanding of the connections between constitutionalism and the creation of democratic regimes, and why such regimes may fail to take hold. These recent events also may have the benefit of reminding American political scientists that the creation of democratic constitutional regimes is one of their most important subjects, one that cannot be left to lawyers. After all, much of what we study exists because of a successful act of political constitution.

APSA Annual Meeting attendees widely report that they found the 2004 meeting a positive experience, felt welcome at the meeting, learned things that will inform them professionally, and enjoyed the conference overall. Most attendees also felt they had sufficient opportunities to network and that the meeting met their expectations.

Does the fallout from the now infamous Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad reflect inherent mass radicalism or irrationality on the part of Muslim societies? Judging from the news coverage broadcast to Western audiences, one would think so. Most media images focused on bearded men or veiled women demonstrating and burning flags reinforced by dramatic sound bites, as when the usually sober BBC (2006) cited one protester as saying: “They want to test our feelings. They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and their newspapers.” These reactions seemed disproportionate, if not irrational, because of the medium: they were, after all, just drawings.

My classroom experience over the past seven years has convinced me that teaching does indeed offer a special opportunity for learning. Obviously this conclusion has been reached by a countless number of instructors who have taken a serious approach to their teaching. A special understanding and confidence in one's knowledge of the subject-matter comes through the preparation and presentation of a course or even a singular class lecture.

I have attempted to provide undergraduate students with the opportunity for this type of learning experience. A method employed by many instructors is to have students present research projects/papers in class. Although this exercise does approximate the teaching experience, many times the session degenerates into the mere reading of a prepared research paper.

Ideologies are important in modern politics. This is the standard reason political scientists give for studying them. In this article I provide another rationale for the study of ideologies: to promote democracy. This normative argument has been superceded by empirical ones, in part, because of the pejorative connotations of ideology. Those connotations are, however, based upon a selective history and hence an incomplete definition of the term. By reviewing that history, I recover a positive association between ideology and democracy. In the process, I hope to encourage political theorists to teach political ideologies.

The Oxford English Dictionary provides two standard definitions of ideology. The first is descriptive or neutral: ideology is the “science of ideas.” This definition, indeed the word itself, originated with Destutt de Tracy, a French Enlightenment philosopher. The second is critical or deprecatory: ideology is “ideal or abstract speculation” and “unpractical or visionary theorizing.” Napoleon Bonaparte, Tracy's contemporary, first used ideology in this pejorative sense. Both definitions are operative in contemporary political science.

Political scientists who study ideologies as “belief-systems” follow the first definition. For example, standard texts define ideology as “a set of closely related beliefs, or ideas, or even attitudes, characteristic of a group or community” or “a value or belief system accepted as fact or truth by some group.” These texts focus upon the various functions of ideologies, e.g., communication, legitimation, socialization, and especially mobilization.

Protest can be seen as a highly democratic expression of popular opinion. However, protest is also a non-representative, extra-institutional process for political change. In hybrid regimes, such as Ukraine, the legitimacy of effecting change through mass protest is a subject of debate. Because of the influence of mass protests in Ukrainian politics, individual views on the democratic legitimacy of protest are potentially important in perceptions of government legitimacy. Using original survey data from December 2013, this article finds that, whereas satisfaction with the functioning of democracy, partisanship, and the oft-cited regional divide are important determinants of approval for the Euromaidan protests, they do not influence how Ukrainians perceive the role of protest in a democracy. However, among those less committed to democracy, protest is more likely to be seen as illegitimate.

Douglass C. North, co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993, became a major leader in historical and comparative political science and in the study of institutions more generally. His work proved particularly relevant for those interested in questions of state building, state variation, development, and long-term secular change.

There was and continues to be nothing easy about being poor in the Big Easy, or anywhere else in America for that matter. The callous or incompetent handling of the evacuation of the poor from New Orleans smacked of Marie Antoinette's concern for the hungry of Paris, and underscored both the existence and consequence of income inequality in America.