Qualitative research dominates political science. In the field of international relations (IR), for example, about 70% of scholars primarily employ qualitative methods, compared to 21% favoring formal or quantitative analysis (Jordan et al. 2009). Since nearly all of the latter make secondary use of textual and historical methods, overall over 90% of IR scholars employ qualitative analysis, whereas 48% use any statistical and only 12% any formal methods. This understates the dominance of qualitative analysis, for many statistical data sets rest ultimately on historical work, and IR scholars, when polled, report that qualitative case studies are more relevant for policy than quantitative or formal work. Hardly any major IR debate—whether that over the end of the cold war, American unipolarity, Chinese foreign policy, the nature of European integration, compliance with international law, democratic peace, the causes of war, or the impact of human rights norms—remains untouched by important qualitative contributions.

Academic publishing is tightly connected to college and university faculty members' prospects for promotion, tenure, salary increases, and professional recognition, and is often regarded as an index of one's scholarly contribution to a given field (Blackburn and Lawrence 1995). This is problematic because, as many researchers have clearly documented, women publish less than men. Because female faculty produce fewer publications on average than their male counterparts, they also receive lower pay and are more likely to hold the ranks of assistant and associate professor (Blackburn and Lawrence 1995; Creamer 1998; Dinauer and Ondeck 1999; Roland and Fontanesi-Seime 1996; Schneider 1998). And, although gender differences in publishing have narrowed in most disciplines over the past two decades, in most cases, men still outpublish women by a ratio of two to one (Roland and Fontanesi-Seime 1996). Among the factors cited as being important to publishing regularly are ambition, reputation, merit, institutional support and resources, professional networks and collegial/mentoring relationships, research topic and methodology, and time.

Gender diversity is good for the study of international relations (IR) and political science. Graduate training is an opportunity for scholars to affect the demographics of their field and the gendered practices within it. This article presents a first-cut investigation of the degree to which gender bias exists in graduate IR syllabi. The author found that the gender of the instructor for graduate courses matters significantly for what type of research is taught, in two ways. First, on average, female instructors assign significantly more research by female authors than male instructors. Second, women appear to be considerably more reluctant than men about assigning their own research as required readings. Some but not all of the difference between male- and female-taught courses might be explained by differences in course composition.

I show herein how to write a publishable paper by beginning with the replication of a published article. This strategy seems to work well for class projects in producing papers that ultimately get published, helping to professionalize students into the discipline, and teaching the scientific norms of the free exchange of academic information. I begin by briefly revisiting the prominent debate on replication our discipline had a decade ago and some of the progress made in data sharing since.My deepest appreciation goes, in addition to my students, to the numerous scholars who have cheerfully, and in some cases repeatedly, responded to my students' queries over many years. Thanks also to the National Institutes of Aging (P01 AG17625-01) and the National Science Foundation (SES-0318275, IIS-9874747) for research support.

Professional journals are central in our professional lives. They are a primary means of communicating new ideas and research findings to other political scientists, and hence help record, however haltingly, our collective progress in understanding the political world. In a business where one's academic contribution is frequently taken as a tally of publications, the journals also function as an important instrument of professional advancement. Counts of vitae entries, however, seem to be generally weighted by judgements of quality; but the quality assessed quite often appears to be of the journal in which an article appears rather than the quality of the specific article. It is interesting therefore, and perhaps prudent to consider how the community of political scientists evaluate the journals in which we publish. This short note presents some data on this question.

Our data were gathered from questionnaires mailed in April 1974 to a sample of 515 political scientists affiliated with Ph.D. granting institutions. The number of usable returned questionnaires is 255 for a response rate of 50 percent. Respondents were asked to rate 63 journals presented alphabetically with additional space provided for the rating of journals not included on the list. The respondents were instructed to rate each journal in terms of the general quality of its articles. The rating scale ranged from 0 to 10 with 0 = poor, 2 = fair, 4 = adequate, 6 = good, 8 = very good, and 10 = outstanding. Respondents were asked only to rate those journals with which they were familiar. In addition to the ratings, information was also gathered on the age, academic rank, academic affiliation, graduate school, recent journal publication information, and areas of professional interest of the respondents.

As we write, the world is still in the grips of a financial crisis. Germany was one of the first countries to bail out a bank in July 2007. Then, in September 2007, the United Kingdom (UK) witnessed a run on a building society, Northern Rock, and the subsequent widespread nationalization of its banking sector. In the United States, the crisis led to a number of collapses among financial institutions, most famously Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the bail out of the insurance group, AIG, all in 2008.

This article describes social structural inequities in the academy that contribute to gender imbalances in faculty service demands, which can slow women's career advancement. The author criticizes as ill-considered and ineffective the popular notion that the solution rests with individual female faculty, who should “just say no” to service. Instead, she proposes structural and cultural solutions to this systemic problem, including a revaluation of faculty labor required to maintain the day-to-day operation of institutions of higher learning and research.

When Justin Dart, Chairman of Dart Industries, said in 1978, “talking with politicians is a fine thing, but with a little money they hear you better,” his colleagues apparently concurred. As Figure 1 indicates, subsequent to several congressional. Federal Election Commission and Supreme Court decisions which clarified some ambiguity concerning their legality, the surge in corporate PAC growth was extremely impressive. The advent of the growth in corporate PACs represented a fundamental shift in the way business money is funneled into electoral politics. Prior to the 1970s, business executives contributed to politicians in an unsystematic, ad hoc manner. Traditionally, corporate executives got together and bankrolled candidates of their choice with little pressure or need to disclose the recipients of their largess.

Gone are those days when the so-called “corporate bag-men” would pass out envelopes filled with cash on the 17th green of some exclusive country club. Today, computerized records of congressmen's roll-call votes and lists of potential PAC contributors have replaced the nine iron as an effective corporate political tool.

As the 2004 presidential election approached, journalists discovered an apparently new political phenomenon: the “religion gap,” or the tendency of the most religious Americans to espouse conservative political beliefs and prefer Republican candidates. As a typical news story put it, “Want to know how Americans will vote next Election Day? Watch what they do the weekend before. If they attend religious services regularly, they probably will vote Republican by a 2-1 margin. If they never go, they likely will vote Democratic by a 2-1 margin” (Thomma 2003). The religion gap was illustrated frequently and clearly by public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center (2003) study, for example, found the American public sharply divided between the Republicans and Democrats on the eve of the 2004 campaign, with frequency of worship attendance emerging as a powerful predictor of party preference. In fact, most evidence of the religion gap was linked to differences in worship attendance.

One of the essential atarting points of any branch of science is a consistent, broadly understood terminology. Generally accepted definitions of key terms within a discipline are important in order to judge claims by scholars about a given topic. Fortunately, among those who work on the topic of nationalism, there is a growing convergence of definitions of “nation” and “nationalism.” Unfortunately, both terms are often still misused, used loosely, or used inconsistently, especially among those in political science who discuss these terms in passing. Authors of introductory textbooks, who are careful in their usage of other terms, often use these two words in varying—and even contradictory—ways in different parts of the same book. Because of their importance for the discipline, however, political scientists should be very mindful of their use of the terms “nation” and “nationalism.”

In this article, definitions for “nation” and “nationalism” are proposed, with each definition followed by sections on common ways the terms are misemployed in political science. I provide examples of both misuses and “loose uses.” While the line between misuse and loose use is somewhat fuzzy (a point reinforced below in the discussion of nations vs. ethnic groups), I consider a misuse to be one in which the term is used in a way that is completely outside how the term is used by nationalism scholars. A loose use is one in which the author has captured only part of the concept or has stretched the meaning of the term to an extreme degree.

What kind of Internet data is generated in authoritarian political environments? And how can political scientists use that data to better understand the dynamics of nondemocratic regimes?

The most incisive twentieth century students of language converge from different premises on the conclusion that language is the key creator of the social worlds people experience, and they agree as well that language cannot usefully be understood as a tool for describing an objective reality. For the later Wittgenstein there are no essences, only language games. Chomsky analyzes the sense in which grammar is generative. For Derrida all language is performative, a form of action that undermines its own presuppositions. Foucault sees language as antedating and constructing subjectivity. The “linguistic turn” in twentieth century philosophy, social psychology, and literary theory entails an intellectual ferment that raises fundamental questions about a great deal of mainstream political science, and especially about its logical positivist premises.

While the writers just mentioned analyze various senses in which language use is an aspect of creativity, those who focus upon specifically political language are chiefly concerned with its capacity to reflect ideology, mystify, and distort. The more perspicacious of them deny that an undistorting language is possible in a social world marked by inequalities in resources and status, though the notion of an undistorted language can be useful as an evocation of an ideal benchmark. The emphasis upon political language as distorting or mystifying is a key theme in Lasswell and Orwell, as it is in Habermas, Osgood, Ellul, Vygotsky, Enzensberger, Bennett, and Shapiro.

Political scientists who are policy scholars often trace their lineage back to the pioneering work of Lerner and Lasswell (1951). But public policy did not emerge as a significant subfield within the discipline of political science until the late 1960s or early 70s. This resulted from at least three important stimuli: (1) social and political pressures to apply the profession's accumulated knowledge to the pressing social problems of racial discrimination, poverty, the arms race, and environmental pollution; (2) the challenge posed by Dawson and Robinson (1963), who argued that governmental policy decisions were less the result of traditional disciplinary concerns such as public opinion and party composition than of socioeconomic factors such as income, education, and unemployment levels; and (3) the efforts of David Easton, whose Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965) provided an intellectual framework for understanding the entire policy process, from demand articulation through policy formulation and implementation, to feedback effects on society.

Over the past twenty years, policy research by political scientists can be divided into four types, depending upon the principal focus:

1. Substantive area research. This seeks to understand the politics of a specific policy area, such as health, education, transportation, natural resources, or foreign policy. Most of the work in this tradition has consisted of detailed, largely atheoretical, case studies. Examples would include the work of Derthick (1979) on social security, Moynihan (1970) on antipoverty programs, and Bailey and Mosher (1968) on federal aid to education. Such studies are useful to practitioners and policy activists in these areas, as well as providing potentially useful information for inductive theory building. In terms of the profession as a whole, however, they are probably less useful than theoretical case studies—such as Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) on implementation or Nelson (1984) on agenda-setting—which use a specific case to illustrate or test theories of important aspects of the policy process.

2. Evaluation and impact studies. Most evaluation research is based on contributions from other disciplines, particularly welfare economics (Stokey and Zeckhauser 1978; Jenkins-Smith 1990). Policy scholars trained as political scientists have made several contributions. They have broadened the criteria of evaluation from traditional social welfare functions to include process criteria, such as opportunities for effective citizen participation (Pierce and Doerksen, 1976). They have focused attention on distributional effects (MacRae, 1989). They have criticized traditional techniques of benefit-cost analysis on many grounds (Meier, 1984; MacRae and Whittington, 1988). Most importantly, they have integrated evaluation studies into research on the policy process by examining the use and non-use of policy analysis in the real world (Wildavsky, 1966; Dunn, 1980; Weiss, 1977).

3. Policy process. Two decades ago, both Ranney (1968) and Sharkansky (1970) urged political scientists interested in public policy to focus on the policy process, i.e. the factors affecting policy formulation and implementation, as well as the subsequent effects of policy. In their view, focusing on substantive policy areas risked falling into the relatively fruitless realm of atheoretical case studies, while evaluation research offered little promise for a discipline without clear normative standards of good policy. A focus on the policy process would provide opportunities for applying and integrating the discipline's accumulated knowledge concerning political behavior in various institutional settings. That advice was remarkably prescient; the first paper in this symposium attempts to summarize what has been learned.

Policy design. With roots in the policy sciences tradition described by deLeon (1988), this approach has recently focused on such topics as the efficacy of different types of policy instruments (Salamon 1989; Linder and Peters 1989). Although some scholars within this orientation propose a quite radical departure from the behavioral traditions of the discipline (Bobrow and Dryzek 1987), others build upon work by policy-oriented political scientists over the past twenty years (Schneider and Ingram 1990) while Miller (1989) seeks to integrate political philosophy and the behavioral sciences.

Across the social sciences, growing concerns about research transparency have led to calls for pre-analysis plans (PAPs) that specify in advance how researchers intend to analyze the data they are about to gather. PAPs promote transparency and credibility by helping readers distinguish between exploratory and confirmatory analyses. However, PAPs are time-consuming to write and may fail to anticipate contingencies that arise in the course of data collection. This article proposes the use of “standard operating procedures” (SOPs)—default practices to guide decisions when issues arise that were not anticipated in the PAP. We offer an example of an SOP that can be adapted by other researchers seeking a safety net to support their PAPs.

“Miss Cooper: Loneliness is a terrible thing don't you agree?

Anne: Yes, I do agree. A terrible thing ….

Miss Meacham: She's not an ‘alone’ type.

Miss Cooper: Is any type an ‘alone’ type, Miss Meacham … ?”

(From Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables, (1955, 78, 92)

In Separate Tables, the hit of the 1955 New York theatrical season, the Irish playwright, Terence Rattigan, used the metaphor of solitary diners in a second-rate residential hotel in Cornwall to convey the loneliness of the human condition. It may be a bit far fetched to use this metaphor to describe the condition of political science in the 1980s. But in some sense the various schools and sects of political science now sit at separate tables, each with its own conception of proper political science, but each protecting some secret island of vulnerability.

It was not always so. If we recall the state of the profession a quarter of a century ago, let us say in the early 1960s, David Easton's (1953) and David Truman's (1955) scoldings of the profession for its backwardness among the social science disciplines, had been taken to heart by a substantial and productive cadre of young political scientists. In 1961 Robert Dahl wrote his Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest reflecting the sure confidence of a successful movement, whose leaders were rapidly becoming the most visible figures in the profession. Neither Dahl nor Heinz Eulau, whose Behavioral Persuasion appeared in 1963 made exaggerated or exclusive claims for the new political science.

This paper suggests one reason for the weak empirical results relative to civic engagement is that many service and volunteer programs have failed to sufficiently address development of fundamental civic skills such as expressing opinions and working collectively to achieve common interests as part of their design. As a result, while some studies of service learning participants show enhanced compassion and interest in social problems generally, those attitudinal changes do not consistently translate into behavioral changes (Eyler, Giles, and Braxton 1997; Perry and Katula 2001). This paper reviews recent empirical studies of community service, service learning, and volunteering, and then frames the consistently strong evidence that participation in clubs and organizations during adolescence leads to higher levels of civic engagement during adulthood within the political participation model developed by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995).

Recent polls reveal that between 20% and 25% of Americans erroneously indicate that President Obama is a Muslim. In this article, we compare individuals' explicit responses on a survey about religion and politics with reaction time data from an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to investigate whether individuals truly associate Obama with Islam or are motivated reasoners who simply express negativity about the president when given the opportunity. Our results suggest that predispositions such as ideology, partisanship, and race affect how citizens feel about Obama, which in turn motivates them to accept misinformation about the president. We also find that these implicit associations increase the probability of stating that Obama is likely a Muslim. Interestingly, political sophistication does not appear to inoculate citizens from exposure to misinformation, as they exhibit the same IAT effect as less knowledgeable individuals.