Martha Derthick has long been my favorite bread-and-butter political scientist. If you want to know how the U.S. federal government really works, you can't do better than read her work. But re-reading Policymaking for Social Security in 2003, I discovered a Derthick I'd never known: Derthick the Paradoxical Postmodernist.

The forecasting model presented here is a revised version of a model developed prior to the 1996 election (Holbrook 1996) and is essentially a referendum model. The original model regressed the incumbent party percent of the two-party vote on presidential popularity, an aggregate measure of satisfaction with personal finances, and a dummy variable coded “1” for years in which the incumbent party had held the White House for at least two consecutive terms and “0” for all other years. The first two variables are intended to capture the political and economic performance of the incumbent administration, while the latter variable (borrowed from Abramowitz 1988) is based on the idea that it may be easier to convince voters that it is “time for a change” if the incumbent party has held the White House for at least two consecutive terms. This model provided a fairly accurate forecast of the 1996 election and also had close out-of-sample post-dictions of elections from 1952–1992. However, the 2000 election represented a significant bump in the road, and the model over-predicted Gore's percent of the vote by approximately 10 percentage points.

The trial-heat poll and economy forecasting model is a simple model based on a simple principle. The model uses just two predictor variables to forecast the in-party presidential candidate's share of the national two-party popular vote. The first is the in-party presidential candidate's share of support between the major party candidates in the Gallup Poll's trial-heat (or preference) poll question around Labor Day. The second predictor is the Bureau of Economic Analysis' (BEA) measure of real growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the second quarter of the election year (April through June). The GDP measurement is the “preliminary” measure released by the BEA at the end of August, the latest available in time to be used in the forecast. An in-party presidential candidate who is the incumbent is accorded full responsibility for the economy in the equation and a successor or non-incumbent in-party candidate is accorded half the credit or blame for the growth or decline in the economy. This partial credit or blame for successor candidates refl ects both past experience in forecasting (Campbell 2000) and independent findings regarding the effects of retrospective evaluations of the economy on voting behavior (Nadeau and Lewis-Beck 2001). The regression estimated forecasts based on these two predictors, estimated over the 14 presidential elections from 1948 to 2000, is a mix of about two-thirds trial-heat poll and one-third economic growth. In essence, with the preference poll at the center of the prediction, the forecast may be interpreted as an adjusted preference poll.

Martha Derthick's Policymaking for Social Security is a great work of political analysis—one of the best studies of the politics of public policy ever produced. Written a quarter-century ago, the argument remains fresh and compelling today—fresher, in fact, than most policy work produced more recently. Indeed, what is striking in revisiting this wonderful book is how Derthick beautifully explores some themes that are only now reasserting themselves in the discipline and commanding the attention of political scientists.

The contributors to this symposium have skillfully imparted theoretical content to a work that did not have much, as critics observed when Policymaking for Social Security was published. By family background and childhood experience, I have always been more journalist than social scientist, and what I did in the book was try to construct the reality of policymaking in response to a central question: how did so formidable an institution arise and develop with so little contention?

The Supreme Court's sweeping decision in December, 2003, in McConnell v. FEC was as unexpected as it was dramatic. For months the conventional wisdom had been that the Court was certain to overturn one and possibly both of the main parts of the McCain-Feingold law, or otherwise substantially narrow the statue. Instead, the justices, by a slim 5-4 majority, did just the opposite; not only upholding the law but doing so in terms that virtually echoed the defendants' arguments. Proponents were stunned and thrilled. Opponents were appalled; Justice Scalia called it the “opening act of a national tragedy.” Both sides agreed, however, that the decision in McConnell stands as one of the most important campaign finance and First Amendment precedents in several decades.

Democracy in rural China has attracted much attention in recent years. During President Bill Clinton's visit to China in 1998, he made a public stop at a village outside Xian to chat with a few Chinese villagers about village elections in China. In fact, village democracy has become one of the rare subject matters that the Chinese government is eager to publicize and the Western academia and media are interested to investigate. The Chinese government, often through the Ministry of Civil Affairs, has organized and allowed foreign journalists, social scientists, dignitaries, diplomats, and political, academic, and social organizations (such as the U.S. International Republican Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Carter Center, and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations) to go to Chinese rural areas to observe village selfgovernment and elections. There is no doubt that the Chinese government intends to showcase its village selfgovernment to the outside world, hoping to improve its tarnished image from the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989. Western media and governments are interested in this new development in China in the hope that this will be the beginning of the long-delayed democratic transition in the most populous country in the world.

How did two political scientists, both lifelong Democrats, end up working for the Republican National Committee (RNC)? We did so with more than a little trepidation and only after consulting extensively with each other and our friends. Many considerations influenced our difficult decision to join the plaintiffs as expert witnesses in McConnell v. FEC, but the most important factor was that we shared a long-standing commitment to the party system and feared that the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Act (BCRA), the most significant campaign finance legislation to be passed in 25 years, marked the dangerous culmination of a regulatory regime, born of the Progressive era, that weakened the parties' ability to engage in those activities that have made them so important to the working of constitutional government in the United States. Moreover, we predicted that BCRA would shift money and the balance of power away from political parties and towards interest groups, with serious consequences for American democracy.

Anyone who has ever graded a term paper knows that students seem to forget most everything they learned in freshman composition class when it comes time to write an analytical essay in another course. “Writing across the curriculum” has become almost a mantra that schools have adopted to counter this problem. Yet it is unclear exactly what “writing across the curriculum” means, and it is more uncertain how to implement the concept. This paper grows out of an effort to put “writing across the curriculum” into practice through collaborative teaching at Hampden-Sydney College.

In some respects, our work in McConnell v. FEC began years before the passage of McCain-Feingold. During 1996–1997 we served on a commission organized by Herbert Alexander to create a political scientists' view of campaign financing. The majority voted 6 to 3 to recommend removing limits on the amounts that parties could contribute to candidates. Our dissent, with Janet Box-Steffensmeier, asserted that such a move would do little to strengthen parties or make elections more competitive, while increasing the potential for donors to corrupt parties (Citizens' Research Foundation 1997). Shortly afterward, we were contacted by lawyers from the FEC looking for expert witnesses in Colorado Republican II to argue on behalf of congressional limits on parties' “coordinated expenditures” (Sorauf and Krasno 1997). A few years later, we were asked by lawyers from the office of Missouri's Attorney General to testify on behalf of that state's regulation of party finances (modeled on FECA) in Missouri Shrink PAC v. Lamb (Krasno and Sorauf 2000). In all of these cases our “testimony” consisted of lengthy reports written for district courts or panels.