On Monday, August 29, 2005, the Gulf Coast of the United States was hit by the sixth most destructive Atlantic hurricane on record, Hurricane Katrina. Katrina formed in the Bahamas on August 23 and entered the Gulf of Mexico two days later, on the twenty-fifth (Knabb 2005). Twelve hours after entering the gulf, Katrina grew from a Category 3 to a Category 5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with winds up to 160 miles per hour. Katrina made landfall on the twenty-ninth as a powerful Category 3 storm with winds up to 145 miles per hour. However, once Katrina made landfall she maintained a storm surge equivalent to a Category 5 storm. For the city of New Orleans, the greatest threat without question was to be from the storm surge. Lake Pontchartrain—which normally sits at one foot above sea level—was elevated to eight and a half feet above sea level. On Tuesday, August 30, the city's levees broke in three places—along the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal, and the London Street Canal (Mihelich 2005). As a result, 80% of the city was flooded, in some places with water as high as 20 feet above sea level (Knabb 2005).

It all started with a scheduling conflict. Because of a Model United Nations conference, one student let me know that she would need to miss our research methods class the coming week. As hands popped up around the room I realized I would be missing almost a third of my class. Unfortunately they were going to miss crucial lectures on measures of significance and measures of association, without which they could be considerably lost when it came to the semester research paper.

Hour after hour, box by box, and bag by bag, the team of students transferred the thousands of food items warehoused in a second-floor conference room at the Fletcher Library on Arizona State University's West campus. Employing techniques they had developed over the six weeks of a campus-wide food drive, they formed a chain, tossing food back from the conference room to a waiting cart, then down an elevator, to a 16-foot rental truck waiting at the library loading dock. There, another student team, most sweating profusely in the 95 degrees of a spring day in Phoenix, rolled the items into the truck and stacked them. Ultimately, the truck would sag under the weight of tens of thousands of food items beginning the first leg of a journey to a community center that serves hot lunches to children in some of the poorest shantytown neighborhoods of Nogales, Mexico.The authors would like to thank for their support and guidance in the project Barbara Tinsley, Ila Abernathy, Esther Torres, Francisco Trujillo, Jessi Pederson, Lisa Steenson, Emily Taylor, and Esmeralda Gonzalez; and for their helpful comments the anonymous referees for this journal.

Every state wants to be “the” state that selects the next president. Every state wants the attention of the presidential candidates and wants its voters to have a say in the presidential nomination process. But since the early 1980s, presidential nomination events in more and more states have essentially been meaningless as the parties' nominations have effectively been wrapped up before citizens have cast their primary ballots or attended their local caucuses.

Learning how to write a research paper is an important skill for political science majors, and faculty can also benefit when their students develop their research-paper-writing talents. Few departments, however, teach these skills explicitly, and many curricula seem to be based on the assumption that students will arrive at college with adequate basic writing skills. Several programs also suppose that a major will develop the ability to write a research paper through her experience with political science and other courses. These expectations are faulty, as most students are not “proficient” writers when they move to campus (McGrath 2004; NCWASC 2003, 16–7; Persky, Daane, and Jin 2003, 20–1), and writing a research paper in political science is a specific skill set that must be developed (Scholes 1998, 95; Russell 2002, 9–10). The approach I advocate here is to demystify the paper and the process for students by identifying and explaining the different parts of a typical paper—introduction, literature review, model and hypothesis, research design, analysis and assessment, and conclusion—and showing how the paper-writing process is broken into manageable tasks. While faculty know the components of research papers, most students have no idea what these sections should contain or what their titles mean. In addition, because revision and editing are essential general writing skills linked with the overall substantive learning process (NCWASC 2003, 1, 9; Maimon 2002, x), I suggest that students submit their papers in pieces, benefiting from feedback from faculty, peers, and themselves. In this essay, I unpack the parts of the paper and the writing process, providing suggestions for teaching about these segments and integrating research-paper-writing skills into the curriculum.

There is a common misconception among graduate students regarding the purpose of the job interview. Many seem to treat the interview as if it were designed to identify and hire outstanding graduate students. Indeed, over the course of their brief interaction with a prospective hire, faculty strive to reassure themselves of the candidate's intelligence, training, and scholarly potential. But underlying all these, I would like to argue, is a persistent concern: Will this candidate make for a good colleague? This is the primary purpose of the interview: Identifying and hiring prospective peers.

As the 2008 presidential nominating process got underway, Iowa's coveted status as first-in-the-nation appeared increasingly in jeopardy, as states engaged in aggressive frontloading throughout 2006 and 2007. In the past, late March primaries in large states like Florida, New York, and California were irrelevant to the electoral outcome. To avoid a repeat in 2008, Florida moved its primary to January 29 and California moved to what is now being called “super duper Tuesday” on February 5 when nearly two dozen states will hold primaries. Under pressure from extra-early voting in Florida and other front-loading states, as we write this the Iowa caucuses are to be held on January 3, two days after New Year's. It seems possible that as a result of the nominating season becoming more condensed, there may be an increase in the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire, the opposite of what the states moving earlier wanted. If the first nominating events are now the starter's gun in a 50-meter dash rather than a mile run, who gets off the starting blocks first may well matter even more. As Hull (2007, 66) argues, Iowa's impact on New Hampshire and the national nomination process is a “wild, wired one.” In this rapid sea of a changing nomination process we take a close look at the Iowa electorate, both statewide registered voters and a subset of likely caucus attendees, to shed light on the underpinnings of support for the presidential candidates in the early stages of the 2008 campaign, using unique rolling cross-sectional data to track opinion change over time.The University of Iowa Hawkeye Poll is co-directed by David Redlawsk and Caroline Tolbert. It was administered with the support of the University of Iowa Social Science Research Center, Director Kevin Leicht, and funded by the University of Iowa Office of the Provost and the College of Liberal Arts and Science. We thank all these people along with the team of graduate and undergraduate students who worked with us on the survey project.

People in Political Science.

As the 2006 midterm elections approached, pollsters, scholars, and journalists attempted to predict whether the Democrats would take back the House, Senate, or both. Much media attention was paid to President George W. Bush's declining popularity and the public's dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled Congress (see e.g., Cook 2006). With most attention paid to the immediate political dynamics of the campaign, less noticed (though not entirely neglected) was the fact that the Democrats faced a significant structural disadvantage in their effort to retake both houses of Congress. The Democrats faced an uphill battle to control the Senate simply due to the small number of seats that were seriously contested. Their hurdle to taking over the House was subtler but perhaps just as high: as we show here, they needed to win well over half the vote share in order to have an even chance of winning 50% of the seats, thereby overcoming a structural advantage enjoyed by Republicans leading up to Election Day.We thank Gary Jacobson and Walt Borges for generously sharing their data, Robert Erikson, Eduardo Leoni, Robert Shapiro, David Epstein, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, and the National Science Foundation for financial support. Replication datasets and statistical code are available at www.columbia.edu/∼jpk2004/house2006.html.

Lecture is, arguably, the oldest known instructional technique used in the university setting. Since it was first employed in Plato's Academy, lecture has become an indispensable part of teaching favored across the college and university curriculum. Recently, this time-honored method of instruction has come under attack for its presumed inability to foster higher order cognitive and attitudinal goals (Cashin 1985; Day 1980; Frederick 1999; Renner 1993). Critics of traditional lecture-based formats call for their replacement with active learning approaches that provide students with an opportunity to meaningfully talk, interact, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, and issues of an academic subject (Meyers and Jones 1993, 6).

For the record..

Being on the academic job market is one of the greatest horrors of scholarly life. An applicant submits dozens of applications and all too frequently receives no response at all from the majority of places to which she applies. The lack of feedback makes it impossible to know why one was not considered good enough for an interview, making it difficult to improve one's applications and job prospects in the future. A recent review of applications for a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college convinced me that many of the applicants lacked a basic understanding of how to market themselves to a search committee at a teaching college. A part of the problem is likely the many years of assimilation into the research culture of their graduate programs; a process that creates a greater intuitive understanding of the culture of major research institutions than of teaching institutions. Nevertheless many applicants do apply for jobs at liberal arts colleges, so a primer is needed for job seekers who want to maximize their chances of getting an interview for those jobs.

From the beginning of my teaching career I had been drawn to class participation (Cohen 1991; 1993). I enjoyed posing questions and problems to the class, and they seemed to enjoy the interaction. At the same time, intuitively I was drawn to discussion and participation as ways to enhance learning. Later I learned that these were part of what was known as “active learning,” and they really did have the ability to enhance student learning (Barr and Tagg 1995; Chickering, Gamson, and Barsi 1989; Pascarella and Terenzini 2005, 101–2). My faith bolstered, I continued to explore ways to actively engage students through developing thought-provoking questions, assigning in-class writing, utilizing small group work, and integrating short presentations. Eventually I began to share my ideas with colleagues at conferences and publish them in respected journals. I discussed what I was doing in class, the basic principles underlying my approach, the challenges it provided, and the hoped-for results when it came to student learning.

While the study of Black politics in the American context has not been a top priority in political science, it is indisputable that this topic in general is more likely to be discussed in the discipline's journals in recent decades than in the more distant past. What accounts for this noticeable increase in prominence? How did the study of Black politics move from total obscurity to occupying a more significant (although still relatively marginalized) position within mainstream political science? To answer these questions, we draw a parallel between politics and political science. Specifically, we posit that the increased focus on African American politics is due to Black agency in the form of social movement activity, which reached its zenith during the civil rights movement. Before the civil rights movement, we note as numerous others have, that the racially conservative views of American society in the nineteenth century resulted in Black politics being an understudied area. We argue, however, that as social movement activity increased the salience of racial issues in America, so too did it raise the importance of race for political scientists.

If a future terrorist attack results in casualties on American soil, what, if any, government compensation should be provided to victims? Despite the enormous attention given to the September 11, 2001, attacks and the near universal sympathy for their casualties, there is no apparent consensual answer to the above question among politicians, academics, or within society at large. While tens of billions of dollars in public funds have been allocated to preventing another attack, and tens of thousands of personnel hours have been devoted to simulations aimed at helping victims in the immediate aftermath, relatively little attention has been given to what support might (or might not) be justified to provide for longer term needs. Victim compensation remains off the radar screen for even the vast majority of people whose daily lives are significantly consumed by contemplating terrorism.The authors would like to thank Michael Powers, Bruce Wolk, two anonymous referees for PS, participants in the PPA/Economics brownbag seminar, and Lascher's PPA 210 students for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

In the news…

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, enter the details of publication 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 2008 Teaching and Learning Conference (TLC) was held on February 22–24, 2008, in San Jose, California. This year marks the fifth annual TLC. 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 12 Working Groups, there were workshops on various topics. This year there were over 300 registrants, including college and university faculty, graduate students, high school teachers, nonprofit representatives, and others. Michael Brintnall and Kimberly Mealy of APSA offered welcoming remarks. APSA President Dianne Pinderhughes, University of Notre Dame, was the 2008 TLC opening speaker. Dr. Luis Fraga, former APSA council member and associate vice provost of the University of Washington, delivered the keynote address “The Responsibilities of Leadership: Political Science Education for the 21st Century.” The closing program featured short presentations from the chair of the Programming Committee, Sherri Wallace, and from each track moderator. 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.

This study surveys recent editions of circulating introductory texts for teaching American government/politics courses. Most of the major textbooks used for these courses utilize the traditional institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American government, which have historically treated the African American political experience as separate from mainstream American politics; thus, relegating its discussions to a separate chapter on “civil rights” or “equal rights.” Modeling our textbook reviews after the APSA Standing Committee on the Status of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Transgendered in the Profession (Novkov and Gossett 2007) and the non-published 2006 report to the APSA Standing Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession, we analyze 27 circulating introductory American government/politics textbooks to examine to what extent African Americans are integrated into the study of American politics.This report was commissioned and supported by the American Political Science Association's Standing Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession. The Committee reviewed earlier drafts and accepted the final report for publication and distribution. The Committee members include James Jennings, co-chair (Tufts University); Angela K. Lewis, co-chair (University of Alabama, Birmingham); Kerry L. Haynie (Duke University); Alice Jackson (Morgan State University); Mark Q. Sawyer (University of California, Berkley); Rogers M. Smith (University of Pennsylvania); Robert Starks (Northeastern Illinois University); and Toni-Michelle Travis (George Mason University).

In an essay entitled “Variations on Negations and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity,” Black feminist Michele Wallace explores the difficulties of producing and presenting a “black female cultural perspective, which for the most part is not allowed to become written in a society in which writing is the primary currency of knowledge” (Wallace 1990, 54). Although she anticipates that some might find a defense of Black female cultural and political criticism “elitist,” she nevertheless remains, “convinced that the major battle for the ‘other’ of the ‘other’ [i.e., Black women] will be to achieve a voice, or voices, thus inevitably transforming the basic relations of dominant discourse. Only with these voices—written, published, televised, taped, filmed, staged, cross-indexed, and footnoted—will [Black women] approach control over [their] own lives” (66).