Service learning in higher education is an American creature. But outside the U.S., practices that resemble American service learning or that have begun self-consciously to describe themselves as “service learning” may also be found. This article gives an account of a proto-service-learning course on civil society in Singapore and discusses some similarities and differences between the U.S. and Singapore contexts in which the practices of service learning have evolved, identifying how this civil society course in particular was both a product of as well as a challenge to Singapore's somewhat different priorities in higher education, political culture, and attitudes to social justice and cultural diversity.

This article explores how results from Iowa may affect outcomes in subsequent nomination contests. We suggest that how Iowa matters may be determined, at least in part, by how voters and the news media assess whether or not candidates meet or exceed expectations there.

Compared to the popular vote, the Electoral College magnifies the perception of the winner's margin of victory. In this analysis, a method of quantifying the magnitude of the advantage given to the winner due to the Electoral College's two electoral vote add-on and winner-take-all methodologies is presented. Using the electoral vote distribution that was present in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, we analyzed one million random two-candidate simulated elections. The results show that the net effect of the Electoral College is to give the winning candidate an average 29.45 electoral vote advantage per election due to the winner-take-all methodology. This winner's advantage includes an average 0.42 electoral vote advantage given to the winner per election due to the two electoral vote add-on.

This article describes teaching a course called Harry Potter and Politics. Focusing on aspects of political culture, the class tackled themes of identity, institutional behavior, and globalization. Teaching Harry Potter has several benefits. Students are both familiar with the wizarding world and yet have enough distance to examine it dispassionately. The book is driven by ethnic conflict, political power struggles, and dysfunctional bureaucracies. Finally, there is an academic literature on the books. Beyond Harry Potter, teaching politics through popular culture is not only natural for addressing political culture, but taps into the ways undergraduates are increasingly experiencing politics.

Nearly all campuses are determining ways by which they could internationalize the curriculum to connect their campus with the world. While study abroad programs are quite common, a less used mechanism that makes this important connection is a global leadership program. At the University of Utah, one innovative program is the International Leadership Academy, which integrates globalization into a class that provides students with conceptual skills as they enter a global market. This article discusses the design and implementation of a program that connects globalization and leadership. The ILA not only prepares students to make use of the many international opportunities in Utah, but exposes them to competing theories and explanations of international leadership.

This lecture was presented at the University of Sheffield on October 22, 2008, inaugurating the Graduate School of Politics; and at Oxford University on October 16, 2008. I have retained the lecture style for this publication, only making minor changes and additions in the text.

Just as radio and television revolutionized the presidential election process in earlier decades, today the “new media” are making a significant imprint on how campaigns are conducted by candidates, covered by journalists, and evaluated by the voters. While the same basic goals for campaigns apply, the tools to accomplish these goals have expanded.

Neoliberalism is one of the most pervasive and contested concepts of our contemporary era. Thus, it is essential for students to gain an understanding of its history, meaning, assumptions, and policy prescriptions. In addition to recognizing the importance of neoliberalism in the current political discourse, I argue that the polarized responses to the concept provide opportunities for teaching about critical topics in political science. This article provides suggestions for teaching about six such topics through the lens of neoliberal policies such as free trade, structural adjustment, and privatization.

Forty years ago, violent protests at the Democratic National Convention captured the attention of the nation as rioters vented their anger over a nomination process they felt excluded their voices. The disastrous 1968 convention spawned a cascade of reforms in the presidential nomination system, many of which were intended to create greater opportunity for meaningful participation of the party's rank-and-file members. Forty years later, where do we stand? Does the nomination process meet the goals of encouraging broad participation and connecting rank-and-file preferences to nomination outcomes? We offer some tentative answers to these questions by tracing the history of the nomination process, its evolution over the last 40 years, and the implications of several key changes in the system for citizen participation.

What do political scientists study? As part of a larger project, we coded every article in 25 leading journals between 2000 and 2007. We then created a word cloud of the 6,005 titles using http://www.wordle.net. The 150 most-used words appear in the word cloud. The size of each word is proportional to the number of times the word is mentioned. Draw your own conclusions.

One of the greatest challenges we face as political scientists is to teach undergraduates how to think comparatively. This article proposes a number of practical, easily adaptable exercises that many of us can incorporate in our teaching to turn curious undergraduates into smart social scientists who think comparatively about the world.

Publishing a research journal can be a rewarding and useful learning experience for undergraduate students. Drawing upon our experiences with The Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics, we describe the benefits of producing a peer-reviewed journal. Among the benefits we highlight are gains in political science knowledge, increased understanding of research methodologies, refinement of writing and debating skills, and development of interpersonal skills. We close with a call for professors to encourage their students to submit papers to the journal.

In a book published four years ago, Andrew Busch and I divided proposals to reform the presidential nomination process into two categories, which we called comprehensive and incremental (see Mayer and Busch 2004, chapter 5). Like any attempt to classify a complex reality, this distinction blurs a bit at the edges, but the basic idea should be clear. Comprehensive proposals call for major, far-reaching changes in the basic operations of the presidential nomination process; incremental proposals make more limited, marginal changes in the rules, while retaining the fundamental structure of the existing system.

This article proposes a new role-playing exercise for public law courses: a mock-trial simulation using the European inquisitorial system of trial procedure. By exposing students to an alternative method of conducting a trial, numerous pedagogical benefits can be obtained, including stimulating critical thinking regarding the potential inefficiencies in the American trial system. The article provides an overview of the inquisitorial trial system, and also sets out the procedures for conducting the simulation and conducting assessment.

Self-reflective political scientists have extensively reviewed the history of the discipline and argued over its future, but to date there has been little effort to systematically survey undergraduate scope and methods courses (for an exception see Thies and Hogan 2005). This lack of data leaves the discipline unable to assess how much we are teaching undergraduates about the scope of political science or, indeed, what we mean by the scope of the discipline. Similarly, though there have been many battles waged over the appropriateness of various methodologies, it is not clear how much of this discussion, or how many of these methods, make it into the undergraduate classroom. Survey results from a nation-wide sample of political science departments indicate that most departments require a scope and methods course of their majors and that, while there is a great deal of variety in topics covered, some common themes exist and some common assignments are used.

The political science honor society, Pi Sigma Alpha, has chapters in nearly 700 institutions across the United States. The organization sponsors many programs that can contribute a great deal to students of political science; however, many students are unaware of these opportunities. This article encourages chapter advisors to make use of these programs. My chapter's experience suggests many benefits can occur to those who take advantage of the opportunities presented through Pi Sigma Alpha.

The sixth annual Teaching and Learning Conference (TLC) was held February 6–8, 2009, in Baltimore, Maryland, with nearly 300 registrants. The conference uses the working-group model, permitting in-depth discussion and debate amongst colleagues on research dealing with the scholarship of teaching and learning. In addition to the 11 working groups there were workshops on various topics. Michael Brintnall, APSA executive director, and Kimberly A. Mealy, APSA director of Educational, Professional and Minority Initiatives, offered welcoming remarks. John Jeffries, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, was the opening speaker, and APSA president Peter Katzenstein, Cornell University, spoke at the opening reception. Joseph A. Kahne, the Abbie Valley Professor of Education, dean of the School of Education, and director of the Civic Engagement Research Group at Mills College, delivered the keynote address titled “Teaching, Digital Media, and Civic Engagement: Evidence and Strategies.” The closing program featured a short presentation from the chair of the Programming Committee, Russell Mayer. It is our hope that the ideas generated and shared at the TLC will help to foster debate, research, and pedagogical innovations within the discipline.

As part of their ongoing efforts to address frontloading and other perceived problems, both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) proposed revised schedules and rules for 2008. The major changes for the Democrats were that two new states were allowed to join Iowa and New Hampshire in violating the official February 5 start date. The idea was that these states—Nevada from the West and South Carolina from the South—would enhance participation by more diverse populations (Latinos and African Americans). While the Republican rules called for states to lose half of their delegate vote if they violated the timing rules, the Democrats implemented a “death penalty” requiring any state violating the timing rules to lose all of its delegates. The New York Times called these changes the biggest shift in the way Democrats have nominated their presidential candidates in 30 years. Yet in the end these changes did little to lessen frontloading, as 70% of all delegates were actually chosen by the beginning of March. Two large states (Michigan and Florida) defied both national parties and voted before February 5.

We present two simulations designed to convey the strategic nature of terrorism and counterterrorism. The first is a simulated hostage crisis, designed primarily to illustrate the concepts of credible commitment and costly signaling. The second explores high-level decision making of both a terrorist group and the state, and is designed to highlight scarce-resource allocation and organizational dynamics. The simulations should be useful both in a traditional classroom setting as well as to the larger public. We provide a primer on the subject matter, and all the material necessary to run the simulations.

Many political science departments offer, and increasing numbers of them require, undergraduate research methods courses. At the same time, studies cite high levels of student anxiety about such courses. Utilizing survey data from both students who take and faculty who teach methods, we conduct an analysis that compares the barriers students and faculty independently perceive. Next, we share results from our own exploratory assessment technique, which evaluates our success in increasing student confidence with regard to conducting research. Finally, we present specific exercises and assignments which can serve as solutions to student barriers. We argue that conscious reflection as to where students lack confidence and assessment of our efforts allows instructors to approach teaching methods more effectively.