Beginning with the 1996 election cycle, political parties and interest groups, through soft money and issue advocacy, have mounted substantial campaigns in competitive elections. Noncandidate campaigns, funded with this outside money, are in some ways extensions of independent expenditure campaigns. However, by avoiding the words of express advocacy, as defined by the Supreme Court, groups may avoid the disclosure requirements imposed on independent expenditures. Party soft money contributions are disclosed but spending is unlimited.

In Gilbert & Sullivan's undeservedly obscure operetta, Utopia Ltd., English invaders seek to colonize the impressionable citizens of this tropical island paradise by employing “a marvelous philologist who'll undertake to show, that ‘yes’ is but another and a neater form of ‘no.’” In our two-party form of government, citizens are colonized the same way, proving that truth can be just as goofy as fiction. We can say No to one candidate only by saying Yes to the other. That is American democracy, reinforced by laws and courts. In many of our states there are more laws concerned with the institution of political parties than there are laws concerned with the institution of marriage. This legal safety net for the two-party system was reinforced in 2000 by a decisive 7–2 Supreme Court opinion invalidating as unconstitutional a California “blanket primary” law giving voters the power to pick anyone they want—from any political party or any independent—to nominate as their candidate to run in the general election for a particular elective office. The Court called the blanket primary “a stark repudiation of freedom of association” that stripped the political parties of the ability to control their own nominating process.

For 30 years political scientists largely ignored high school education in civics and government. There are two explanations for this neglect. First, the prevailing view was that students learned nothing from civics courses (Langton and Jennings 1968). Second, social scientists increasingly saw themselves as members of scientific disciplines, so whatever interest they had in precollege education was devoted to augmenting disciplinary knowledge (Haas 1977; Janowitz 1983, ch. 6).

Introduction

The Internet has recently become an important part of the democratic process (Firestone and Corrado 1996; Kamarck and Nye 1999; Rash 1997; Wilhelm 2000). It was only a matter of time until democracy and politics entered the digital world, and now we are moving toward holding elections over the Internet. A major step in this direction took place early in the 2000 presidential election when the Arizona Democratic primary offered the first binding Internet election for public office (Alvarez and Nagler 2000; Solop 2000).

The report by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California, Los Angeles on college or university first-year students in 2000 contains information that is important to political scientists (Kellogg 2001; Sax et al. 2000). As did Sheilah Mann's (1999) analysis of the 1998 survey, we summarize those facets of the data about freshmen in 2000 that ought to interest members of the discipline.

Like many organizations, the American Political Science Association has taken the dawn of the new millennium as an opportunity to reevaluate its institutional mission. At APSA's 2000 annual meeting, the Strategic Planning Committee (SPC) presented to the APSA Council its final report on “the overall condition of the Association relative to its mission and to the key challenges and opportunities in the external environment” (among other things). Interestingly, the SPC acknowledges that when first asked to “view the future of the APSA through the prism of its organizational mission and objectives,” it was “surprised to learn that the Association had no explicit mission statement beyond its purpose, in the original words of its Constitution, ‘to encourage the study of Political Science’ ” (<www.apsanet.org/new/planning/finalreport.cfm>). Accordingly, the Committee decided to craft an APSA mission statement suitable for the twenty-first century.

Last fall, the 150 first-year students in George Mason University's Honors Program took part in what may have been a national first. In the weeks before the election, they conducted a national survey on attitudes and participation, the unweighted results of which are available for anyone's analysis at <http://gunston.gmu.edu/sdaweb>.

Background

The Nature of the Problem. Some years ago, when I had the privilege of serving as a program director at the National Science Foundation, the proposals I read left me with a distinct impression: many researchers presented exciting research ideas, but in a high proportion of cases the exciting ideas were embedded in horrendously constructed proposals. In relatively few cases were the proposals well constructed, with important elements missing or underdeveloped. One would often find, for example, after a clear initial statement of the research problem and an effectively executed literature review, a thin or nonexistent research design or, without transition, a statement of the statistics to be used. Hypotheses, where present, were often not derived from the discussed literature, or from any literature.

Citizen participation in the development of public policy concerning science and technology may sound like a good, and even a necessary, idea for a democratic society (Foltz 1999). But if the issue proves to be controversial, and if even the experts cannot agree, how can the average person play a meaningful role? Students who study all sides of a technical or scientific controversy are likely to feel that a consensus on public policy is impossible. It is not immediately obvious that ordinary citizens can help to forge a consensus.

It is important to take stock of the status of women in the profession because the integration of women into the professional ranks of political science achieves two important goals: first, it opens the profession to the very best political scientists without regard to gender; second, it enables the profession to take account of the contributions of women to politics and so keeps the profession on the cutting edge of new gender-related research.

Introduction

For over a decade, the Southern Political Science Association has been committed to assessing the status of women faculty members by regularly administering surveys to political science programs within the South. These surveys, sponsored by the SPSA and administered by the Committee on the Status of Women, have resulted in numerous recommendations for creating diversity within departments and gender equity within programs. In this article we examine the results of the Millennium Survey, the latest effort to evaluate the progress of female political scientists within the South. Our findings suggest that in the last 10 years women faculty have made great progress, especially in Ph.D. granting institutions where the number of women in tenured positions at the rank of associate and full professor has doubled since the last survey. This is an important shift from a trend noted in an earlier CSW survey and in a national report in the September–October 1998 issue of Academe where the author remarked that “Women, unlike men, traded off rank for institutional prestige. For women, the more prestigious their institution, the lower their rank; for men there was no such relationship” (Valian 1998). Contrary to the national trend dynamic, women in the South are making the most progress at the most prestigious institutions. Perhaps there are a greater number of faculty positions within doctoral departments and that in the last 10 years these programs have had more opportunities to hire and promote women. Our survey suggests that there have been fewer tenure-track positions available for women within departments at smaller, bachelor's degree-granting institutions. While the number of female associate professors has increased within baccalaureate-granting programs, the number of female full professors has actually declined. However, the overall number of women faculty members at all ranks has increased in the majority of political science programs within the South.

Activities

Walter Broadnax, dean, School of Public Affairs, American University, has been elected vice president of the American Society of Public Administration. He will become president of ASPA in 2003.

John J. Kennedy

When Jack Kennedy died on January 28 in Mexico City, the academic community lost one of its most respected authorities in the field of Latin American studies. He spent the major part of his teaching career at the University of Notre Dame (1951–59 and 1964–80), where he founded and directed the Program of Latin American Studies, and he served as the Chairman of the Department of Government and International Studies. From 1959 to 1964 he taught at the University of Virginia, serving as Executive Officer of the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs.

This summer, APSA's Annual Meeting returns to San Francisco for the first time in five years. The Program Committee, led by Richard Sisson and Edward Mansfield of Ohio State University, has put together a challenging program of over 700 panels, roundtables, and poster sessions.

The following rules proposed by the Association's Rules Committee were approved by the Council at its April 21 meeting.