In 1996, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made a proposal to restore and preserve 30,000 acres of wetlands in Indiana's Kankakee River basin. Local farmers opposed this, expressing concerns about how a wildlife refuge would affect farming communities along the Kankakee River. Undergirding what seems to be a simple conflict between incompatible environmental and economic interests is a more fundamental conflict between competing ethical frameworks for evaluating public policy. One helpful approach is to examine the normative issues in the Kankakee dispute in terms of the contrast between consequentialist and non-consequentialist ethical frameworks. This article attempts to establish that a failure to recognize alternatives to the consequentialist framework has resulted in a failure of opposing parties to recognize and address each other's ethical concerns. An analysis of the Kankakee wetlands dispute will reveal why it is important for environmentalists to be cognizant of alternatives to consequentialist ethical frameworks.

We introduce the Politics and the Life Sciences special issue on Psychophysiology, Cognition, and Political Differences. This issue represents the second special issue funded by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences that adheres to the Open Science Framework for registered reports (RR). Here pre-analysis plans (PAPs) are peer-reviewed and given in-principle acceptance (IPA) prior to data being collected and/or analyzed, and are published contingent upon the preregistration of the study being followed as proposed. Bound by a common theme of the importance of incorporating psychophysiological perspectives into the study of politics, broadly defined, the articles in this special issue feature a unique set of research questions and methodologies. In the following, we summarize the findings, discuss the innovations produced by this research, and highlight the importance of open science for the future of political science research.

This essay explores efforts to establish interdisciplinary research associations by comparing two organizations that were founded in the early 1980s. One has focused on the field of politics and the life sciences and the other on health services research. Both are involved in securing recognition for a research area—or “field of research”—that had not previously been conceptualized as a coherent academic or professional enterprise. The motivation for this paper is my interest in politics and the life sciences (the field), the organization—the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences that was established in 1980 to foster scholarly study of the field—and its journal Politics and the Life Sciences. (For the sake of clarity I adopt the convention of signifying a field entirely in lower-case orthography, beginning an organizational name with capital letters and naming the related journals in italics.)

There are several noteworthy aspects to 1985. First, the triennial congress of the International Political Science Association was held (in Paris). Second, full panels on biology and politics were featured at four regularly scheduled political science meetings—the American Political Science Association, the International Political Science Association, the Western Political Science Association, and the New York State Political Science Association—an increase from just two the year before. Third, three dissertations are either completed or in progress: a decided improvement after such little activity in that area in 1984. Fourth, over 10 percent of the works appearing were by non-United States political scientists, reflecting a continuation of their greater visibility over the past few years. Fifth, several works were produced by two different teams of researchers that have received substantial support from federal research grants (Masters and colleagues; J. Schubert, Wiegele, and Hines). Finally, there is a continuing influx of new entrants into the ranks of biopolitical scholars (we tally 25 for the year).