The term paper is a standard requirement of undergraduate political science courses, yet for both students and faculty it is frequently unsatisfying. When teachers allow students to choose their own topics from the range of issues covered in a course, students often flounder for direction. Papers based on a professor's preselected questions suggest the need for a thesis but leave undergraduates uncertain about how to construct one. The result: papers that deal with a broad topic rather than presenting a sharp thesis. While the writing process alone may be a valuable learning experience for some undergraduates, many other simply throw together a mass of information without spending time integrating their work into a coherent whole. Students complain of being overwhelmed, and the grader is left to sort through a paper in search of its point.

In 1869, the state of Iowa admitted Arabella Mansfield to the Bar, making her the first woman to receive a license to practice law in the United States (Epstein 1993, 49). That same year, Myra Bradwell applied for an attorney's license in the state of Illinois. When the state refused her, she appealed her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied her claim by an eight-to-one vote (Bradwell v. Illinois 83 U.S. 130 [1873]). In his concurring opinion, Justic Joseph Bradley argues that, “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator” (83 U.S. 130 [1873]). Ironically, shortly before the Supreme Court announced its decision, another woman in Illinois, Adah Kepley, attained a license to practice law. The judge who granted this license believed that her admission to the Bar was “proper and in accord with the spirit of the age” (Berkson 1982, 288).See Bowman (1998/99) for a list of biographies of these early women lawyers.

Census 2000 is over; the debate over adjusting the census is not. In this essay I respond to a number of points from Anderson and Fienberg (2001) and report some of the results from Census 2000.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the American philosopher George Santayana famously asserted. By the same token, a president who is well furnished with institutional memory should be less likely to commit avoidable errors and more likely to get the most out of his (and, at some point, her) time in office. The reflections that follow on what George W. Bush might learn from his predecessors were completed three weeks before his inauguration as the forty-third president of the United States. They appear in print after the Bush presidency has passed its hundred-day mark. Although they cannot take account of Bush's initial presidential performance, they do draw on the extensive record of his life and prepresidential political career.

Introduction

Japan's social policy has been categorized as a “residual” system, not only because of its low public expenditure (Hill 1996, 21) but also because of the weakness of its institutional form, which relies on private measures (Bryson 1992, 106–10). According to Esping-Anderson's three welfare-state regimes—social democratic, liberal, and conservative, classified by the criteria of decommodification and cross-class solidarity (1990, 21–29)—the Japanese welfare system “combines—in fairly equal measure—key elements of both the liberal-residual and the conservative-corporatist” models (1997, 187).However, Esping-Andersen avoids specifically classifying Japan as one of these three regimes because its welfare system “is still in the process of evolution” (1990, 187). Japan, at the same time, had followed the pattern of “a paternalist welfare state, in which male bureaucrats would administer regulations and social insurance ‘for the good’ of breadwinning industrial workers and their dependants” (Skocpol 1995, 12). Indeed, the Japanese social insurance system is bound by Bismarck's legacy (which basically qualified male employees as eligible for insurance coverage), and its policymaking has been dominated by males: ruling-party politicians, top bureaucrats, and representatives of pressure groups (See Nakano 1997, 13–63, 81–85, 89–94).

Quite often, people make jokes at the expense of political science majors. These jokes suggest that political science majors—and especially those graduating from liberal arts colleges and universities—have not acquired the necessary practical skills to make a living, let alone to acquire a lucrative career.

A president who received fewer popular votes than his chief opponent, a House with a razor thin majority for the president's party, and a Senate evenly split—this is not most political scientists' prescription for policy success and certainly not what Republicans had in mind when they dreamed of unified Republican government. During the campaign, George Bush proposed a policy agenda that was ambitious if often vague about details and promised to change the often nasty and bitterly partisan tone in Washington. Are these now impossible dreams?

In late August 2000, at APSA's Annual Meeting, a panel of political scientists offered forecasts for the 2000 presidential election. Although they differed in particulars, most of the forecasters' models incorporated a measure of economic growth plus the president's approval rating. Because the economy was prospering and President Clinton enjoyed phenomenal approval numbers for the eighth year of office, the consensus prediction was a Democratic (Gore) victory by upwards of 6 percentage points. Although political scientists had offered forecasts before previous presidential elections, these political scientists' predictions for 2000 attracted more interest than usual. Their predictions drew exceptional interest both during the campaign, when nobody knew for sure how the election would turn out, and after, when the forecasters had to account for their mistakes.

Introduction

John Pike, former director of space policy at the Federation of American Scientists, once said to me: “Everything there is to know about nuclear strategy can be learned from Dr. Strangelove.” “Everything” is only a mild overstatement. I show Dr. Strangelove annually to Notre Dame audiences to teach about nuclear war, and I will continue to do so until nuclear weapons and war itself are no longer problems. The film offers lessons about war, politics, and history and can serve as a teaching aid for classes in introductory international relations, foreign policy, defense policy, causes of war, organizational politics, and Cold War history.Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worying and Love the Bomb, screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern. Produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Based on the book by Peter Bryant (a pseudonym for Peter George), Red Alert (New York: Ace Books, 1958). The British title for Red Alert was Two Hours to Doom. The book based on the screenplay is: Peter George, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (New York: Bantam Books, 1963. Published January, 1964). The film was scheduled for release on December 12, 1963, but was not shown until January 1964 due to President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. Ed. note: when talking about Dr. Strangelove, the film, the title is italicized. The character Dr. Strangelove is not italicized. A longer version of this guide is available via: <www.nd.edu/~dlindley/>.

Today's policymaking process encompasses a broad range of participants: legislative, executive, and judicial office holders; members of the bureaucracy; and leaders of nongovernmental organizations, including nonprofit and volunteer organizations, private businesses, and interest groups. During the past three decades, women have become significant players in American policymaking, though their success rates have been uneven. Since local jurisdictions have provided better opportunities for women to influence the policy process, I ask the question: What roles do women play as policy influentials and leaders in local government decision making?

APSA is pleased to recognize the following political science faculty who received campuswide awards for teaching excellence in the 2000–2001 academic year. APSA and Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society, annually recognize award winning faculty by inviting them to the APSA Honors Reception, issuing them a certificate noting their accomplishment, and announcing their awards in PS and on the APSA web site. Know someone who should be on this list? Go to <www.apsanet.org/teach/2001awards.cfm> to submit information.

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993 (P.L. 103-31) was designed to reduce the cost of voting by incorporating registration into a transaction with a public agency that citizens initiate for another purpose. The act took effect on January 1, 1995; between then and the 1996 election, 18,333,479 people registered in offices they had visited on other business (Federal Election Commission 1998, Table 2).Most of these were new registrations; the remainder were largely changes of address. (We are grateful to Brian Hancock of the Federal Election Commission for his help in interpreting this table.) They are 44% of the total of 41.1 million “registration applications or transactions” of any sort recorded in the 43 states subject to the NVRA in 1995–96. Six states are exempt from the NVRA; five—Idaho, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming—because they permit electionday registration at the polling place and North Dakota, which does not require voter registration. Vermont's constitutional provisions kept it from implementing the NVRA by 1996. Four years later, answers to even the most elementary questions about this first NVRA election have not been published. We narrow the data gap by describing people who used NVRA to register, and then comparing their participation to that of their fellow citizens who registered to vote using more traditional methods.

Instructors constantly encourage students to learn and process information. Brock and Cameron assert, “Individuals process information, learn concepts, and solve problems in different ways” (1999, 251). Some students learn by listening, others learn by taking notes, more learn by seeing, and still others learn by doing and saying. Yet in many college class-rooms, the dominant teaching method is the traditional lecture. While lecturing may be a necessary teaching technique, it is often insufficient for teaching a large number of students with varying learning preferences.

Each year since 1993, the American Political Science Association has recognized its campuswide teaching award winners in the December issue of PS. From 1993 to 1999, more than 400 faculty were recognized for their achievements in the classroom. Though we know who receives teaching awards, we know little about these exceptional teachers. What are the demographic backgrounds, behaviors, and attitudes of “star” teachers? Do they value teaching in qualitatively different ways than other university faculty? Do they use similar particular teaching strategies? Do different institutional settings value different styles of teaching? Are there meaningful variations in the approaches and activities of star teachers with different demographic backgrounds?

Twenty-five years after writing Congress: The Electoral Connection, what are my thoughts about it? Here are five observations of various kinds that I hope might be interesting. The first two belong under the heading, “What kind of work is it?” The last three address the question, “How have I come to think of the book in light of events and scholarship of the last quarter-century?”

The Clinton/Lewinsky/Starr affair unearthed a fault line in contemporary feminist theory, an unresolved tension between two governing ideals: “the personal is political” and the right to privacy. Since the early 1970s, both of these slogans have figured prominently in feminist scholarship and feminist politics. But as the Clinton sex scandal dragged on, many began to question the merits of politicizing personal matters such as intimate relationships. In the scandal's wake, feminists may find it tempting to retire the rallying cry “the personal is political,” and to distance themselves from what now appears to be a quaint leftover of the bold but naïve feminism of the 1970s. In the end, Starr's McCarthyesqueIn one of the more memorable quips to emerge from the reams of commentary on the scandal, Alan Dershowitz coined the term “sexual McCarthyism” to describe Starr's tactics. probe seems to have enhanced the public commitment to privacy. No longer to be taken for granted, the right to privacy is widely affirmed as an essential shield against official coercion.

The number of African American and Hispanic mayors of American cities has grown steadily since 1967, the year that Cleveland elected Carl Stokes the first minority mayor of a major American city.Throughout this paper, we use the term “minority” to refer to African Americans and Hispanics. In doing so, we do not assume that African American and Hispanic voters have the same preferences, nor do we intend to minimize the significant diversity within each of these groups. Rather, we group Hispanics and African Americans together because of the relative disadvantage members of both communities have experienced in comparison to whites in the United States. Over the past three decades, cities in all parts of the country have elected black and Hispanic mayors, including the five largest: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia. As the new century begins, almost one-third (25/76) of major American cities have minority mayors. The election of minority mayors is a clear sign of political progress by minorities since passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s.

The mark of a classic work of scholarship is an enduring lesson: Does the work teach a lesson that remains important and informative decades after it is written? David Mayhew's Congress: The Electoral Connection (1974) certainly statisfies this requirement. It is one of a handful of books published in the last half-century that contains insights and lessons that students of American politics still cite in their research and teach in their classes.

Introduction

In recent years, the availability of online source material and online papers has increased instructors' concerns regarding plagiarism in the classroom. Many instructors do not realize, however, that the digital revolution has also created a niche for fast and (at least somewhat) reliable plagiarism-detection software.

The relationship between reputational rankings of political science departments and their scholarly productivity remains a source of discussion and controversy. After the National Research Council (1995) published its ranking of 98 political science departments, Katz and Eagles (1996), Jackman and Siverson (1996), and Lowry and Silver (1996) analyzed the factors that seemingly influenced those rankings. Miller, Tien, and Peebler (1996) offered an alternate approach to ranking departments, based both upon the number of faculty (and their graduates) who published in the American Political Science Review and upon the number of citations that faculty members received. More recently, two studies have examined departmental rankings in other ways. Ballard and Mitchell (1998) assessed political science departments by evaluating the level of productivity in nine important disciplinary and subfield journals, and Garand and Graddy (1999) evaluated the impact of journal publications (and other variables) on the rankings of political science departments. In general, Miller, Tien, and Peebler found a high level of correspondence between reputation rankings and productivity, Ballard and Mitchell did not, and Garand and Graddy found that publications in “high impact” journals were important for departmental rankings.