The articles in this symposium explore the relationships between terrorism and government respect for human rights. These relationships have wide-ranging implications for the study of politics. Terrorism is seen as a major threat to political stability in many countries. Respect for internationally recognized human rights is a fundamental responsibility of national governments. Can governments prevent terrorism while also respecting human rights, or must authorities trade off some human rights to reduce terrorism? If the latter is the case, which human rights can or should be sacrificed for the goal of stopping terrorism?

In this article, we report results from a new study that surveyed a large, national sample of American adults about their willingness to pay for health reform. As in previous work, we find that self-identified Republicans, older Americans, and high-income Americans are less supportive of reform. However, these basic findings mask three important features of public opinion. First, income has a substantial effect on support for reform, even holding political affiliation constant. Indeed, income is the most important determinant of support for reform. Second, the negative effects of income on support for reform begin early in the income distribution, at annual family income levels of $25,000 to $50,000. Third, although older Americans have a less favorable view of reform than the young, much of their opposition is due to dislike of large policy changes than to reform per se.

At a roundtable at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in September 2009, congressional scholars took on a challenge uncommon to the discipline: scenario planning. As chair of the roundtable “Congress and the 21st Century: Future Challenges and Development,” I asked each participant to identify factors to take into account if one were to project what Congress would look like as an institution in 2030. I am pleased to introduce the following articles that resulted from this effort. The authors are Frances E. Lee, University of Maryland; Matthew N. Green, Catholic University of America, with coauthor Daniel Burns; Kathryn Pearson, University of Minnesota; and Colleen J. Shogan, Congressional Research Service.

The tumultuous journey of health reform from President Barack Obama's opening push in February 2009 to his bill signing in March 2010 may be inexplicable from afar. Swept into power on promises of change, Democrats controlled the White House and enjoyed the largest Congressional majorities in decades, and they agreed that the existing health care system cost too much and delivered too little—stranding over 30 million with no health insurance and leaving millions more with only inadequate coverage or dependent on emergency rooms for urgent care. Unified party control and programmatic agreement would seem like a veritable checklist of what was needed to pass health reform legislation.

I thank the selection committee, and the association, for this honor. I'm humbled by the award and by the distinguished list of recipients who have preceded me.

It is not hard to find critics of how the U.S. Congress operates today. Two of the most prominent, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, have bemoaned in particular Congress's failure to follow “regular order,” which in their 2006 book The Broken Branch they describe as a legislative process that incorporates “discussion, debate, negotiation, and compromise” (Mann and Ornstein 2006, 170).

The fundamentals of electoral change in the 2010 midterm elections are unmistakable. Electoral change depends on two general sets of political conditions: those of the previous election or elections and those of the current election. Both favor the Republicans this year.

Can states afford to protect human rights when facing a terrorist threat? Contemporary academic literature suggests that the answer to this question is no, concluding that states that afford their citizens basic political rights and civil liberties leave themselves more exposed to terrorist attacks (Piazza 2008; Wade and Reiter 2007; Pape 2003; Eubank and Weinberg 1994). American policymakers seem to agree. Both the Bush and Obama administrations regard the curtailment of physical integrity rights as a necessary element of effective counterterrorism policy. The Bush administration responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with policies permitting indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, use of physically abusive interrogation practices, and increased and largely unchecked surveillance and wiretapping of suspected terrorists. Although it banned abusive interrogation and announced plans to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, the Obama administration has maintained the practice of wiretapping, reserved the option of rendition, and dramatically increased unmanned drone attacks against suspected terrorists in Pakistan, which often results in civilian casualties. Both presidents have claimed that these policies are necessary to keep Americans safe from terrorism (Hosenball 2009; “Bush Defends Policy on Terror Detainees” 2005).

All indications are that 2010 will be a very good year for Republicans. After two election setbacks, they are poised for a comeback. Partisanship, ideology, the midterm decline from the prior presidential surge, the partisanship of districts being defended, and even President Obama's approval ratings have set the stage for significant seat gains by Republicans in the House.

Current circumstances might seem to present real opportunities for Congress to reassert itself relative to its weakened role during George W. Bush's presidency. Large, unusually cohesive Democratic majorities in both chambers; unified government; and an administration staffed with people who know Congress well—all this might lead one to expect a productive working relationship permitting Congress wide scope of action. Nevertheless, the Senate's internal deliberative processes threaten to create difficulties so significant that they may outweigh these developments. Looking to the future of Congress, changes in Senate procedures and practices are important not only because of their effects on the institution's internal power structure. Left unchecked, they are also likely to have implications for the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government.

During a recent meeting of the APSA Committee on Publications, headed by Lisa Martin, we discussed a proposal that had been put forward to encourage authors to deposit their data in a central repository to provide more centralized access for others seeking to replicate or extend prior work. Such a strategy should ostensibly make it easier for methodological, theoretical, and empirical work to flourish and cumulate.

Two big assumptions fuel current mobilization against and policy discussions about the U.S. war on terror and its implications for human rights and international cooperation. First, terrorism creates strong pressures on governments—especially democracies—to restrict human rights. Second, these restrictions are not only immoral and illegal, but also counterproductive to curbing terrorism. If these two assumptions are correct, then democracies face a vicious circle: terrorist attacks provoke a reaction that makes it harder to defeat terrorist organizations.

From the establishment of the United States Postal Service and the invention of the telegram, to the introduction of C-SPAN and the explosion of the Internet, the development of new communication technologies has always affected the functioning of Congress. Not surprisingly, recent innovations such as e-mail and social networking have spurred Congress to alter the way it operates as an institution, and rethink the manner in which it engages the public. In this brief examination, I discuss recent changes in congressional behavior and practices due to technological innovation, specifically the proliferation of social networking Web sites. Then, I cautiously predict future trends in the use of social networking and related technologies as they become more integrated in congressional offices and increase the capacity for more robust internal and constituent communications over time.

States represent a solution to an important set of economic, political, and social problems. Whether one turns to philosophers such as Hobbes or Locke or more recent work by rational institutionalists such as Douglass North, it is something of a received wisdom that powerful states play a central and vital role in fostering economic, political, and social cooperation. The other edge of that sword, of course, is that powerful states that claim a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of coercion are ideally situated to predate, using methods that include incarceration without trial and torture. The very power that makes states effective at engaging in cooperation can weaken other organizations that might deter the state from predation. While democratic theory is not necessarily focused on the question of how we might constrain a powerful state's predation, democracy is—and, more specifically, liberal democratic institutions are—widely held to be one of the most important tools at our disposal to deter predation (e.g., Staton and Reenock 2010). Democracy, of course, refers to rule by the people, and in this article, I focus on universal suffrage as the means by which those who wield state power produce rule by the people. I refer to liberal democratic institutions, by contrast, as those institutions that perform a distinct—and, one can argue, antidemocratic—function: their purpose is to distribute power among multiple state actors in an effort to address the second edge of the sword described above and limit the tyranny of majorities. This article shows how this distinction usefully assists our assessment of the Bush administration's incarceration and interrogation policies in its war on terror.

As Election Day approaches, many political commentators are asking whether the 2010 midterm elections could be a reprise of 1994, when Republicans picked up eight seats in the Senate and 52 seats in the House of Representatives to take control of both chambers for the first time in 40 years. There is almost universal agreement that Republicans are poised to make major gains in both the House and the Senate. And while the GOP's chances of gaining the 10 seats needed to take control of the upper chamber appear remote, results from the generic ballot forecasting model indicate that the 39 seats required to take back the House of Representatives are well within reach.

Science functions best within a liberal democracy. Every hypothesis test is an expression of doubt, as it carries with it the implication that a particular presumption may be incorrect (Kruschke 1998), whereas authoritarianism punishes challenges to prescribed beliefs. Consequently, science can lead to true innovation and improvements in knowledge only when laws and social norms permit dissent.

Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of “Change We Can Believe In.” One of the biggest changes many anticipated with his election was a dramatic break with the previous administration's counterterror policy. There were good reasons for thinking that this would be the case. George W. Bush was a Republican who took his cues from the most conservative elements of his party, including neoconservatives, the religious right, and other proponents of an assertive stance of U.S. global primacy and a forward-leaning posture in the war on terror. Conversely, Barack Obama is a liberal Democrat who opposed the Iraq War and seeks to “reset” America's relations with other countries around the world by recommitting the United States to a more moderate approach to waging the war against al-Qaeda, including measures such as adopting a more multilateral foreign policy, closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, ending the practices of extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation, and showing a greater respect for civil liberties domestically.

In this article, we present a forecast of the 2010 midterm House election based on information available in early July 2010. We combine this forecast with a note of caution, explaining why electoral circumstances might lead our forecast to err. Finally, we present guidance regarding how to update the electoral forecast for 2010 based on new information that will become available leading up to Election Day.

The United States population is changing in significant ways: it is growing larger, older, and more racially and ethnically diverse, and these changes are regionally concentrated. How will these changes affect the future of Congress? In this article, I show that demographic change has significant implications for the quality of representation, the legislative agenda, party coalitions, and the diversity of congressional membership in the future, even as change inside Congress will proceed more slowly than change outside it.

Political science has witnessed a renaissance in qualitative research methods (Bennett and Elman 2006). Over the last 15 years, the canon has been reworked to systematize and expand the repertoire of qualitative methods, ground them more firmly in contemporary philosophy of science, and illuminate their strengths relative to quantitative and formal methods (Bennett and Elman 2007). A rapidly expanding body of political science research now employs qualitative and multi-method analysis, and institutions dedicated to qualitative and multi-method research have flourished.