It is very difficult to date the birth of political science in Argentina. Unlike other discipline of the social sciences, in Argentina the first distinction can be made between political thought on the one hand, and political science in another. The debate over political thought—as the reflection of different political questions—emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, especially during the process of constructing the Argentine nation-state. Conversely, political science is defined in a general way as the application of the scientific method to the studies on the power of the state (Fernández 2001).

Letters to the editor are an important but poorly understood form of voluntary political participation. To learn more about the content of letters to the editor and the characteristics of the people who write them we conducted a content analysis of 1,415 randomly selected printed letters from eight newspapers from 2002 to 2005. We also matched the letter writers from our sample to demographic and political information contained in a state voterfile.

The April 2009 issue of PS included an obituary for Vivien Hart that was not properly attributed. Robert Benewick, emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, composed most of the remarks. Alexandra Dobrolowsky and Joyce Gelb authored the concluding paragraph.

William W. Kaufmann died on December 14, 2008, in his sleep, at the age of 90. During the cold war, he was a key figure among the “defense intellectuals”—less famous but more influential than most—who moved freely from think tanks to the Pentagon to academia and back again, crafting the theories of nuclear deterrence and translating them to policy. Yet by the '80s, in the final, rococo phase of the standoff, he'd come to reject much of his old thinking and emerged, quite publicly, as one of the defense establishment's most accredited critics.

Duncan MacRae, Jr., was appointed Kenan Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the University of North Carolina in 1972 and served in that capacity until his death as emeritus professor in July 2008.

Since 1996 the World Bank Institute and the Research Department of the World Bank have been developing six governance indicators called the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The six dimensions of governance include control of corruption, measuring perceptions on corruption. Based on the literature review as well as the data itself, this paper concludes that the conceptual and empirical issues on building governance indicators constitute an ongoing project.

Henry Brady's career is a testament to the virtues of big social science—big questions, big datasets, big toolkits, big institutions. While much of political science still functions as a cottage industry, he has played a leading role in the second generation of our discipline's post-war industrial revolution. Building on the varied contributions of such earlier stalwarts as Warren Miller, David Truman, Gabriel Almond, and Paul Lazarsfeld, Brady has contributed significantly to the theoretical, empirical, methodological, and institutional development of the field. With intelligence, energy, and good will, he has instigated and nurtured a remarkable variety of projects, partnerships, and programs to advance our understanding of important political phenomena.

Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator presents a view of the transition from dictatorship to the republic that one also finds in the discourses of certain political leaders today. I argue that we can learn about violence and the founding of a republic from an analysis and, especially, a critique of Gladiator.

Clara Penniman, emeritus professor of political science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, died on January 30, 2009. Penniman was born on April 5, 1914, in Steger, Illinois, to Alethea B. and Rae E. Penniman.

John Stanga, our highly esteemed Wichita State University colleague, died on December 30, 2008, at the age of 69. He is survived by his three sons—Tomas, Joseph, and John Peter. As colleagues, we respected him as a unique scholar, teacher, and friend. In an era often characterized by narrow specialization, he was a true Renaissance man—not only publishing and teaching in several fields of our discipline, but also demonstrating a deep mastery of literature and music, particularly jazz.

In our professional work, many of us are involved in university service and politics and some of us enter administrative positions. As political scientists who became associate deans of colleges of liberal arts and sciences, our observations from our administrative perches and our disciplinary knowledge have provided insights on how faculty can protect and promote academic values.

Dr. Bruce M. Unger, professor of political science at Randolph-Macon College, died of cancer at his home January 31, 2008. A native of Brooklyn, and life-long Brooklyn Dodgers fan, Bruce received his BA at Queens College in 1964, MA at Tulane University in 1967, and Ph.D. at Tulane in 1973. He joined the faculty at Randolph-Macon in 1968, and served 39 years on the faculty. He was Charles J. Potts Professor of Social Sciences when he retired in 2007.

I spent the spring and summer of 2007 reading 185 books in the field of international relations, as I chaired two major book awards in the field.

Human rights issues are closely connected to a range of political processes, from democracy and conflict resolution to judicial accountability and terrorism. Despite the dramatic growth of the human rights field in recent years, however, it remains unclear how much the subject has influenced political science scholarship. I assess this question by examining broad publishing trends, namely human rights articles in the discipline's leading journals.

C. Sylvester Whitaker, Jr., passed away on November 29, 2008, in Waterville, Maine, after a long battle with cancer. He was 73 years old.