Should we trust the results of our statistical computations? Closely following the development of the mainframe computer, Longley (1967) criticized the accuracy of the first regression programs. Approximately every 10 years thereafter, similar comments echoed for each new generation of statistical software. In a recent criticism, McCullough and Vinod (1999) argue that commonly used statistical packages may give “horrendously inaccurate” results, which have gone largely unnoticed (635–37). Moreover, they argue that in consequence of these inaccuracies, past inferences are in question, and future work must document and archive statistical software alongside statistical models (660–62). When political scientists discuss accuracy in computer-intensive quantitative analysis, however, we are relatively sanguine. Numerical accuracy is almost never discussed in articles or even in textbooks geared toward the most sophisticated and computationally intensive techniques (e.g., King 1989; Mooney 1997). Notable exceptions are a forthcoming APSR controversy that depends on the meaning and evaluation of numerical accuracy in ecological inference (King 2001; Tam Cho and Gaines 2001) and a study of numerical accuracy issues in replication (Altman and McDonald 2001).

David Mayhew's two wonderful essays that constitute Congress: The Electoral Connection have withstood the test of time admirably well. My thoughts will be organized around two quotations taken from his book, because they reflect the two most remarkable aspects of the book's success: its impact on scholarship over its first quarter-century, and its durable portrait that suggest it will continue to resonate—perhaps with amendment—over the coming years and decades.

Vicente Fox's unexpected victory in Mexico's July 2, 2000 presidential elections put a definitive end to Mexico's one-party regime. Until now the longest ruling party in the world, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) failed to turn out those who have traditionally voted for PRI in numbers adequate to match the millions of Mexicans who voted for change by supporting Fox. The Fox win means that Mexico has accomplished the rare feat of ending an authoritarian regime by voting it out of office, an event that comes at the end of a process of building an electoral opposition to the former ruling party that stretches back nearly a quarter century. However, while Fox defeated his PRI rival, Francisco Labastida, by a healthy six-point margin—42.5 to 36.1% of votes cast—he failed to sweep in a majority of legislators from his Alliance for Change (a coalition of Fox's National Action Party [PAN] and the Mexican Green Party [PVEM]). Thus, Fox faces a congress in which he will need constantly to build majorities to support his legislative program and in which the threat of a deadlock will loom continually.

In the interest of providing graduate students with information and advice concerning their graduate careers, APSA has begun a series of efforts to identify “good practices” or “best practices” with respect to a number of aspects of graduate education. The thought is that faculty, junior and senior, may serve as sources of useful information that supplements what departments provide to their own students, At a minimum, from these efforts, students would be able to learn of a variety of perspectives, some of which might be different from those to which they had already been exposed by their own advisors and other faculty with whom they have studied.

Students typically enter the senior seminar in political science having taken different sets of courses in the major and having developed interests in different subjects. They also may believe they are incapable of conducting social scientific research because they have limited skills and because the term is so short. In particular, students taking a capstone course in political science at a liberal arts college that, like Rhodes College, lacks a major research library may question their ability to accumulate in a timely manner adequate information about a subject of interest. These doubts and concerns are not unfounded. Fortunately, combining the case study method and online research resources offers a solution to these difficulties and can greatly enrich the senior seminar experience. This combination would also prove beneficial to faculty overseeing honors research or senior theses.

In regard to these member needs the best service a party can supply to its congressmen is a negative one; it can loeave them alone. And this in general is what the congressional parties do. Party leaders are chosen not to be program salesman or vote mobilizers, but to be brokers, favor-doers, agenda-setters, and protectors of established institutional routines. Party “pressure” to vote one way or another is minimal. Party “whipping” hardly deserves the name. (Mayhew 1974, 99–100)

The House Republican Party acted remarkably like the cohesive, responsible party of party government theory. It proposed and ran on a policy agenda; it organized the chamber and empowered its leaders so as to facilitate the expeditious translation of the agenda into law; with the members maintaining high cohesion, the party delivered on its promises. The fragmentation and lack of discipline most observers of American Politics claim to be cardinal characteristics of American political parties were not in evidence. (Sinclair 1998, 263)

I am struck by how similar the process of constructing a prospectus is to developing plans for a new house. One starts with a desired plot of land and an uncertain vision of an eventual home. The plot of land is terrain to exploit. The vision is of something to be comfortable with and, ideally, something of which to be proud. Getting there, however, is a very bewildering process. An architectural plan and specifications serve as the blueprint—the prospectus—that provides the basis for approval for moving ahead. The chief concerns on the part of the permit reviewers is whether “it will stand up” and whether it meets appropriate planning and construction criteria. The chief concerns of the prospective owner are: “How much will it cost?” “Can it be built within a reasonable amount of time?” and, “Will it look good enough when done?”

Activities

James Brent, associate professor, department of political science, San Jose State University, elected chair of the Academic Senate for 2001–02.

Congress: The Electoral Connection was an important book when it appeared in 1974, and it remains one 25 years later. One measure of the importance of a work is the research that it stimulates. Mayhew's focus on advertising and credit claiming has led to a good deal of research on these activities, and those who study Congress have learned much from both Mayhew himself and the scholars he inspired. Moreover, analyses of advertising and credit claiming continue to proliferate and have recently been conducted on legislatures outside the United States. His identification of the third electorally-motivated activity, position taking, has had a more subtle and insidious impact on the study of Congress.

Radical democrat John Dewey ([1916] 1966) believed that education could be a powerful tool for developing citizens' character and drawing them into political engagement. He also argued that science could inform public debate and contribute to problem solving in the community (Dewey [1935] 1980, [1939] 1989). Here, we describe and evaluate our attempt to realize these twin ideals in a semester-long course at Chapman University during spring 1999. In this course, students were active learners holding partial control over their educational experience and democratic citizens attempting to make a contribution to their community.

You are feeling relief that your coursework is drawing to a close. You have become somewhat competent at going to class, discussing materials, and passing tests. However, you have a sense of dread that keeps creeping up on you every time you try to think of “the topic” for your dissertation. You look to the senior graduate students and even ask them questions about how they found their topic. Divine revelation seems to have hit them and you wonder when your turn will come. But they seem to be all-knowing, more like budding faculty now than one of you. So you try to fight the notions of self-doubt about whether you can actually find a topic and start the quest of finding someone to help you. You naturally turn to the professor whom you “know the best.” Is this the right choice? No one seems to know; you just have this sense that you want to complete the process as painlessly as possible. As questions swirl inside your head—from how to choose an advisor to what might be the right way to pick a dissertation topic—you may ask yourself what the process of writing your dissertation proposal will really be like.

Donald E. Boles

Donald Edward Boles died on Monday, February 12, at his home in Marieta, California, due to complications from a massive stroke he had suffered in November 1999. He was 74 years old. For more than 36 years (1955–91) Don was a faculty member in the Department of Political Science, Iowa State University.

I cannot imagine my work on the U.S. Congress without David Mayhew's little book. When I discovered it in Trevor's bookstore in the fall of 1974, I was a 27-year-old newly minted Ph. D. who had just spent two years “teaching Congress” at the University of Texas and was on Capitol Hill working as an APSA Congressional Fellow. It was a heady time, both in Congress and in congressional studies. Vietnam was focusing attention on how the action and inaction of Congress affected the lives of ordinary citizens, particularly the young. Nixon's resignation a few moths earlier had helped sweep into office a new generation of Democratic legislators who then activated a period of dramatic legislative reform. An extraordinary generation of congressional scholars—Cooper, Davidson, Dexter, Fenno, Froman, Huitt, Jones, Kingdon, Lowi, Manley, Oleszek, Patterson, Polsby, Price, Rieselbach, Ripley, Truman, Wildavsky, Wolfinger, Young, and others—was etching out the details of congressional politics in a richly compelling manner. In the broader discipline, the works of Dahl, Downs, Easton, and Riker were holding out the promise that rigorous theoretical analysis could enable political scientists to make parsimonious and even predictive sense out of politics. And a new generation of young scholars had been drawn to the study of Congress by the conditions of the time and the intellectual ferment of the field. Into this swirl came The Electoral Connection.

In an era in which some political scientists are concerned that an emphasis on formalism has weakened the realworld commitment and impact of the discipline, APSA President Robert D. Putnam has led the way in melding research and action. Putnam's research has been driven by attention to the big, basic questions of governance: How do national traditions of ideological style affect political decision making? What determines the success or failure of political institutions? What domestic political factors help or hinder efforts by political leaders to reach cooperative international agreements?

Student preparing dissertation proposals may benefit from many sorts of interactions with faculty members. Here I consider the different sorts of advice and support that faculty may provide ina variety of different roles and relationships to students.

Effective education quite obviously requires that instructors possess both substantive expertise and the ability to communicate that expertise to students. Although skilled teachers routinely meet these dual requirements, doing so sometimes presents a seemingly inexorable dilemma. In this article we address one such situation: when an instructor in possession of the requisite substantive expertise is incapable of teaching in the students' native language.

In the spring of 2000, the department of political science at the University of Colorado received a Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) grant through the American Political Science Association. Grant funds were used to sponsor discussions about how best to prepare young political scientists to meet their professional and scholarly responsibilities as members of the discipline (see <www.preparing-faculty.org>). A central theme of a recent PFF meeting at Colorado was the importance of mentoring relationships in the process of graduate student education and faculty preparation.

Editor's Note: The following is reprinted from AAUP's May–June 2001 issue of Academe with the permission of the AAUP. Updated information from the 2001 AAUP annual meeting is also included. Investigations by the American Association of University Professors of the administrations of the institutions listed below show that, as evidenced by a past violation, they are not observing the generally recognized principles of academic freedom and tenure endorsed by this Association, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and more than 150 other professional and educational organizations. The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure may be found in the May–June 1990 issue of Academe.

Thanks for all those comments, or at least most of them! I will touch on a few of the points briefly, then close with two observations.

The central research questions that I wanted to pursue in my dissertation were clear to me early in my graduate school career. I wanted to explore why some groups in the United States were so woefully unrepresented in many of the nation's high-level political offices. In 1991, when I began to think more concretely about my topic, there were only two women serving in the U.S. Senate, and the literature exploring the experiences of women candidates was very limited. Because of the seeming injustice of this situation, I quickly knew I wanted to jump into this area of research to see if I could shed some light on what was causing the enormous discrepancy in the number of men and women being elected to top offices.