This essay encourages associate professors to wait to initiate their candidacy for promotion until they have established a clearly sufficient, unchallengeable record of research and publication. To guarantee faculty productivity and intellectual vibrancy, and to provide consistent incentives and rewards, university departments should apply reasonably demanding promotion standards that are equivalent to their tenure criteria. Associate professors have a strong interest in comfortably clearing this promotion hurdle to enhance their professional reputation in the eyes of their departmental colleagues, the university leadership, and external referees. Therefore, they are well advised to bid for the rank of professor only after accumulating a strong record that makes a smooth promotion likely.

Charges are frequently leveled that the peer-review system is broken, and reviewers are overburdened with requests. But this specific charge has been made in the absence of data about the actual reviewing loads of political scientists. I report the results of a recent survey asking a random sample of about 600 APSA members with PhDs what their reviewing loads are like and what their beliefs are about the value of peer reviewing to them and others. Article reviewing loads correspond to rank, institution, and scholarly productivity in predictable ways. At PhD-granting institutions, assistant professors averaged 5.5, associate professors averaged 7.0, and full professors averaged 8.3 in the past year; everyone else averaged just under 3 reviews a year. To recognize the value we place on peer reviewing, we need a system that collects data on who reviews and presents them in a format usable by scholars and their relevant evaluation bodies.

A central topic in the comparative-politics subdiscipline is the study of democratic transitions. Despite a growing role-playing literature, there are currently no simulations that illustrate the dynamics of democratic transitions. This article proposes a role-playing simulation that demonstrates to students why it is difficult for countries to transition to democracy and why protests are a necessary but not sufficient condition to topple a dictatorship. As surveys and teaching evaluations subsequently showed, this exercise succeeded in clarifying the more difficult theoretical concepts as well as in making a potentially dry subject more accessible.

In 2013, Virginia Republicans nominated two Tea Party conservatives for statewide office: Ken Cuccinelli and Earl Walker Jackson, Sr. They differed in two significant respects: (1) Cuccinelli has more political experience, and (2) Cuccinelli is white and Jackson is black. For this article, we used this quasi-experimental opportunity to examine the racial resentment explanation for Tea Party support. We found no evidence of voting patterns consistent with this characterization of Tea Party supporters. There was no significant gap between Tea Party support for Cuccinelli and Jackson, and Tea Party supporters were far more likely to cast ballots for both candidates than they were to choose one or the other. In fact, we found that racial resentment is positively associated with support for Jackson. In this election, neither Tea Party support nor racial resentment negatively affected support for the black Republican candidate for lieutenant governor.