Assessment is increasingly present on many campuses, and as state legislatures, parents, employers, and accreditation agencies continue to ask for documentation of what students learn at college, it is not likely to go away in the near future. How, then, do we know what our students learn? How can we demonstrate that they do learn, and what they learn?

This list celebrates the generous contributions of our members in giving to one or more of the following programs from 1996 through 2006: APSA awards, programs, the Congressional Fellowship Program, and the Centennial Campaign. APSA thanks these donors for ensuring that the benefits of membership and the influence of the profession will extend far into the future. APSA will update and print this list annually in the January issue of PS.

To deny someone the right to water is tantamount to denying them the right to life, and to set a price on water is to set a price on life. It comes as no surprise then to find a good amount of anxiety and contention over who gets to set the price of water and how much they charge. And over the past two decades, throughout both the developed and developing world, setting the price of water has fallen increasingly to private companies at the same time as various demographic changes have increased water scarcity. Thus we hear water described simultaneously in terms of both a humanitarian crisis of global proportions—one standard though very rough figure is that more than one billion people lack access to safe drinking water (Davis 2005, 146; Black 2004, 28)—and as the “oil of the 21st century” (Wessel 2005).

Herbert McClosky, professor of political science emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, died on March 13, 2006, of pneumonia and complications of Parkinson's disease in Oakland, California. He was 89 years old.

The number of students pursuing degrees and graduating in political science is growing again after the discipline experienced falling or stagnant enrollment numbers at all academic levels in the 1990s, according to data in the latest Digest of Education Statistics (2005). After experiencing a growth in enrollments and degrees awarded in the 1980s, political science departments reported falling enrollments in the early 1990s and stagnant numbers of degrees awarded in the later half of the 1990s (Mann 1996; 2002). Political science departments began to report increasing enrollments starting in 1998–1999 (Mann 2002), reflected in the increase in graduation numbers beginning in 2002.

It is a great honor for the American Political Science Association to have Robert Axelrod as our current president. Axelrod combines a devotion to rigorous science as well as a deep concern with policy issues, particularly those of international peace and the threat of nuclear war. His fascination and distress about threats to peace is a major source of the fantastic energy he has brought to his work. Simultaneously, his insistence on rigorous exploration on the processes that enhance cooperation in complex settings has ensured that his theoretical breakthroughs have been widely recognized across the social sciences as well as in biology and computer sciences.I wish to thank Michael Cohen, Robert Keohane, Rick Riolo, Robert Putnam, Carl Simon, and Leigh Tesfatsion for their input and comments on this biographical essay and Nicole Todd and Patty Lezotte for their help in preparing this essay.

This essay is the first of a planned three-part series dealing with quantitative indicators of continuity and change in the political science discipline, focusing on the period since 1960. The series is inspired by the work of Somit and Tanenhaus (1967) which presented reputational rankings of both departments and individuals. For this series of essays, we created a unique database in which we recorded cumulative citation counts between 1960–2005 for all regular faculty members of U.S. Ph.D.-granting institutions ca. 2002. In addition to identifying the department at which the individuals in this data set are presently employed, we have also collected information on their date of Ph.D. and the institution from which their Ph.D. was awarded.The authors would like to thank Robert Axelrod, Nathaniel Beck, Russell Dalton, James Fowler, Ronald Inglehart, Margaret Levi, Michael Lewis-Beck, Jean Oi, Dorothy Solinger, Don Wittman, and the anonymous reviewers of PS for their helpful feedback and corrections. We are also indebted to the bibliographic assistance of Clover Behrend-Gethard, and to the inspiration of Hans-Dieter Klingemann's pioneering work. Any errors presented in this paper are the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors welcome corrections to the data that is presented in this series. Comments and corrections can be sent to Bgrofman@uci.edu.

Washington insider.

Even before the 2006 presidential election dissolved into a nasty street battle, it was widely perceived as strongly polarized. The two leading candidates, Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), staked out starkly different positions on key economic issues. Calderón promised continuity with Mexico's free-market reforms, focusing on investment as the engine of growth. López Obrador, in contrast, argued that the neoliberal strategy would benefit only a few and he instead promised to alleviate poverty through state spending on infrastructure and social welfare. Unlike in prior presidential elections where the PAN and PRD candidates downplayed their differences to challenge the authoritarian dominant PRI with broad pro-democracy appeals, in this first post-transition election, the candidates made their differences clear.

Stephen Colbert's provocative claims offer a starting point to consider whether and how to broaden the international perspective within undergraduate public policy courses and curriculum. This article discusses whether an absence of international perspectives within public policy courses should be a concern, considers an alternative framework for incorporating a broader international perspective into an introduction to public policy course, and identifies potential assignments and pedagogical tools.I wish to thank Karen Mossberger and Frank Lebo for their help in pulling together information used in this paper.

This section lists upcoming book publications across the broad field of political science. This list is fully reader-generated. If your first-edition book is scheduled for publication in the three months before publication of the next issue of PS (i.e., if it will be published in the December, January, February, or March months that lay between publication of PS's January and April issues), enter the details of publi-cation in the box found at PS's web site: www.apsanet.org/section_223.cfm. We hope that spreading word of upcoming work will help keep our members even more attune to new scholarship within the discipline. The Booklist is appearing in the Association News section due to spacing problems unique to this issue. It will return to the journal's People in Political Science section in subsequent issues.

Early analyses of the 2006 presidential election in Mexico have called our attention to the post-election process, to accusations of fraud, to the extent of partisan polarization, and to the prospects of democratic consolidation, but few have offered an explanation of why President Vicente Fox's National Action Party (PAN) was able to maintain control of the executive office, even by the slim margin of 0.56%. In this article, I argue that the first post-PRI-regime election split the anti-PRI vote into different ideological and policy-oriented camps. This made the 2006 race a choice between policy programs and priorities that reflected economic concerns, and voters' assessments of the economy were a central feature of candidate support. Economic growth in the second half of the Fox administration as well as unusually high oil prices played a crucial role in the election. They enabled the PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón, to appeal for stability and to attack his main contender, PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as a danger to it. Had economic growth remained slow and oil prices at the expected rate, the PAN's chances to keep the presidency would have been slim, especially against a popular leftist candidate who had a lead in the polls, promised to help the poor at the expense of the rich, and voiced harsh criticism against the “neoliberal” policies of the PRI and PAN governments.

On September 11, 2005, Koizumi Junichiro and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) achieved a stunning victory in the 44th House of Representatives election. In stark contrast with the previous election, just two years earlier, in which the LDP had only managed 237 seats, the LDP captured an impressive 296 seats. This meant that together with their coalition partner, the Komeito, the LDP now controlled two thirds of the seats in the House of Representatives (the more powerful of the two houses that comprise Japan's Diet, or parliament).

With Walter Beach's passing in November 2006, a host of communities lost a valued and dedicated friend. When Walter was presented APSA's Frank J. Goodnow Award in 1998 for his sustained contributions to the discipline, if his political science colleagues who knew him less well were enormously impressed by the vast extent of his civic engagements, they had to be mind-boggled by the depth of his contributions. These contributions went far beyond his 15-year service to APSA as staff associate, director of the Congressional Fellowship Program, and, finally, assistant director; they also included his 10-year engagement at the Brookings Institution, and his 16-year engagement with Heldref Publications and the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. It was as if Walter never met a worthy endeavor for which he would not become a benefactor—from his life-long commitment to his 1956 alma mater Dickinson College (along with brother Alan, 1955) from which he was given the Distinguished Alumni Award in 1992, to his service as trustee of the Hillwood Museum and Gardens Foundation, to his directorship of the International Eye Foundation, to his endowment of the National Capital Area Political Science Association, to his vigorous support of the Southern Political Science Association, to his service on the board of the Washington Center for Internships, to his fundraising prowess for George Washington University's Gelman Library and Mount Vernon College, among others. These will be the focus of a fuller tribute to be published in the April 2006 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics.

A Look at the Centennial Center for Political Science & Public Affairs

Duane Lockard, professor of politics, emeritus, of Princeton University, died on June 19, 2006, from complications from Parkinson's disease. He was born in the poor coal-mining town of Owings, West Virginia; and, by the time he was eight, the Great Depression had increased his community's poverty. One of his childhood chores was to collect lumps of coal that fell from passing ore trains so his family could have heat in their house. As a teenager, he pumped gas at a filling station and, for a time, followed his father into the dark depths of the mines. Although the older men were kind to him, he found it oppressive to work in pitch blackness, hunched over in the small rooms carved out by pickaxes. In an effort to escape, he tried to enroll in Fairmont State Teachers College, planning to live at home and hitchhike the 18 miles to the school. Alas, when he tried to register, he could muster only half of the $30 tuition fee. Fortunately for future generations of scholars and students, a compassionate and perceptive dean recognized talent and allowed him to matriculate.

The excellent papers in this symposium warrant our close attention for the cardinal reason that they teach citizenship in the global world. They arm us with ideas, concrete techniques, and specialized skill sets to reach this goal. The simple importance of learning to function well in a global society belies the complexity of achieving it. These papers give us tools as well as provide motivation to confront this challenge.

APSA international membership.

The 2006 Workshop for Department Chairs, held at the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, focused on the theme of “Planning for Assessment and Accountability Issues.” Moderated by Stephen Majeski, chair, department of political science, University of Washington, and of the APSA Departmental Services Committee, the session included presentations by four speakers with notable experience on this topic: Kerstin Hamann, University of Central Florida; Michelle Deardorf, Jackson State University; Ken Campbell, University of Delaware; Linda Suskie, Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

Eugene A. Mawhinney, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Maine, died at Bangor, Maine on June 24, 2006. He was 84 years old. Gene Mawhinney served the department of political science and the people of Maine for some 35 years as a faculty colleague, as a teacher of American government and especially of constitutional law, as a mentor to two generations of Maine's pre-law students, and as a valued and long-serving advisor to Maine's state government.