Emails received by the authors since the publication of “The Political Science 400: A 20-Year Update” (Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007) called attention to mistakes in the citation counts of a number of scholars. Corrections to the citation counts are posted in an EXCEL file at www.socsci.uci.edu/∼bgrofman/. Once we have entered all corrections, an erratum will appear in a later issue of PS. Please address any corrections to that article to BGrofman@uci.edu.

In our article entitled “The Political Science 400: A 20-Year Update” (PS, January 2007, 133–45), we presented the names and total citation counts (1960–2005) of political science faculty employed (ca. 2002) in U.S. Ph.D.-granting institutions who were among the 400 most cited in their cohort or subfield. We recognize the very important nature of our data for individual scholars and the institutions at which they teach, and we apologize to those colleagues whose citation counts were misreported, especially to those few whose counts were off by a very large amount. Yet, given that nearly 4,000 political scientists are employed in a Ph.D.-granting institution in the U.S., and given the numerous data limitations associated with using the Web of Science search engine (as we explained in the lengthy methodological appendix to our article), while we worked as hard as we could to prevent errors, having some errors in our data set was virtually unavoidable.

There is a passage in Richardson Dilworth's “Privatization, the World Water Crisis, and the Social Contract” (PS, January 2007, 49) that requires careful attention.

We are sitting in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and they are sitting in Cumbayá, Ecuador, and we are discussing the inequalities of globalization. In Quito, over 150,000 people are protesting in front of the Presidential Palace with signs reading, “Basta con la dictadura!” (Enough with the dictatorship!), furious over then-President Lucio Gutierrez's controversial dismissal of the country's Supreme Court. Meanwhile, back in Myrtle Beach, we're witnessing events live through video footage my students shot while in Quito participating in the protests. Political demonstrations like this are common in the less developed world, but they seldom translate this vividly into a globalization classroom. At Coastal Carolina University and La Universidad San Francisco de Quito, however, images like this and conversations about such dramatic daily events are made possible by a videoconference link between the two universities that facilitates a semester-long class on globalization.

Professor Judith Hicks Stiehm asked students and political scientists to consider some things about our military in her introduction (453–6) to the July 2007 PS symposium. The deliberations on my end as a student are over. Here are the results.

Judging by their answers on public opinion surveys, many Russian citizens favor democracy, at least as long as the stakes are not too high or rights are not being extended to people they do not like (e.g., Tikhonova 2005, 39; Colton and McFaul 2001; Gibson 1998). But Russians' behavior at times belies those findings. Ordinary Russians expressed little outrage when the first president of independent Russia, Boris Yeltsin, bombed the parliament in 1993. Nor did they forcefully protest the actions of their second president, Vladimir Putin, when he restricted personal freedoms, strengthened executive power, and undermined the electoral process. Indeed, Russians continue to give Putin high approval ratings (Fond Obshchestvennoe Mnenie 2006). Russians' electoral choices also have not tended to favor democrats. In many local elections and in elections to the State Duma throughout the 1990s, significant numbers of Russians chose Communists, near-fascist nationalists, or others of questionable democratic credentials to represent them. Liberal democratic parties fared poorly in a number of elections and in the 2003 Duma elections failed to win a single seat. Since 2003, support for liberal parties declined still further (Levashov 2006, 10).

I'm happy to report that I agree wholeheartedly with Roger Masters that we humans have a biological rather than a socially constructed need for water. In fact, Prof. Masters and I are so much in agreement on this point that I don't feel it necessary to consult “the literature on mammalian biological needs” as he suggests. As a mammal myself, I firmly believe that I would die were I denied water for a sufficient length of time, though I plan on keeping this an untested hypothesis.

In a research note written in 2005 and subsequently rejected by three leading political science journals as too speculative and not adequately statistically anchored, we sought to update Brunell and Grofman's 1998 research note in the APSR on divided Senate delegation by showing that we were right in predicting that, in the Senate election years taking place immediately after our original data analyses, the number of states with divided Senate delegations would continue to decline. It did: from 19 states in 1996 to 18 in 1998, way down to 13 in 2000 and remaining at that level until the most recent election in 2006. However, at the end of our 2005 paper we also say: “Unlike Brunell and Grofman (1998), though, we are not prepared to predict further decreases in the number of divided Senate delegations.”

Cartoons come in many shapes and sizes, from gag cartoons and comic strips, to comic books and graphic novels. A more or less respectable cartoon format is the newspaper editorial cartoon. This symposium considers the state of editorial cartooning around the globe, from representations of gender, religion, student life, and popular culture in the United States, to visual politics in Indonesia, Yemen, Turkey, and South Africa.

On March 28, 2006, the following televised exchange took place between two professors at Al-Azhar University in Egypt and the station newscaster for Kuwaiti Al-Rai TV on the subject of female circumcision.

The October, 2006 issue of PS (923–4) published a quiz on the U.S. Military alongside a call for submissions on what we should be teaching students about our military. The essays here represent a fraction of the response. Other proposals have been incorporated in several panels that will be presented at the APSA Annual Meeting in Chicago this fall. Still others have been incorporated in a volume contracted to Palgrave Press and provisionally titled Inside Defense.

This forum is a unique opportunity to bring social science research to bear on public policy and the practical effects of election reforms in the American states. It is also an opportunity to study America's election system, building on the research of some of the leading scholars working in this area. The American states offer a natural laboratory (a “laboratory of democracy”), with significant variation in the rules, institutions, and procedures governing elections. This forum empirically evaluates what we have learned about the effects of various election reforms in the 50 states. The papers included in this forum were originally presented at a conference hosted by Kent State University's department of political science and which had a title similar to that of this symposium. The theme is now shared by the conference and this symposium: that the 2008 presidential election will be crucial for American democracy, especially in light of the apparently related phenomena of decreasing (or flattening) voter participation rates, low trust in government and political efficacy, alleged procedural irregularities in recent elections, uncompetitive congressional elections or uncontested state legislative elections, and lapses in ethical judgment by politicians in the past decade.

Political science has a long tradition of research into topics such as campaign finance and redistricting, but these separate efforts have only recently merged into something resembling a recognizable sub-field of political reform. One impetus for this new-found coherence has been the emergence of recent reform concerns regarding such matters as U.S. election administration, primary election procedures, conflict of interest situations, ballot restrictions on minor party candidates, and the need for transparency. The addition of the new on top of the still-unresolved, ongoing problems has yielded plenty of grist for the political science mill.

Symposium authors' bios.

Clay Bennett is the editorial cartoonist for the Christian Science Monitor, based in Boston. Bennett joined the Christian Science Monitor in 1998 and produces five cartoons a week, which are nationally syndicated by the Christian Science Monitor News Service. Previously, he was the editorial cartoonist for the St. Petersburg Times from 1981–1994. He began his career as a staff artist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Fayetteville Times after graduating from the University of North Alabama in 1980 with degrees in Art and History.

The purpose of the John Gaus Award and Lectureship is to recognize “scholarship in the joint tradition of political science and public administration.” That tradition has a long and honorable history. Many of the presidents of the American Political Science Association were scholars of public administration (Frank J. Goodnow, Woodrow Wilson, W. W. Willoughby, Leonard White, Luther Gulick, Pendleton Herring, Emmette S. Redford, Carl J. Friedrich, James Q. Wilson, and Matthew Holden, Jr.) and several others made contributions to the literature (V. O. Key, Jr., Charles S. Hyneman, Robert A. Dahl, Aaron Wildavsky, and Elinor Ostrom). Yet a visitor from another planet studying political science and public administration might conclude that these tribes have evolved into two distinct species.Prepared for presentation as the John Gaus Distinguished Lecture, American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, September 1, 2006, Philadelphia. I would like to thank Paul Brace, George Krause, Alisa Hicklin, Larry O'Toole, Jim Rogers, and Michael Thies for their assistance.

Ann Telnaes is one of the most important political cartoonists of this era. In 2001, she became only the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. Relying on sharp, elegant lines, noted use of positive and negative spaces, strong metaphor, evocative symbolism, biting satire, and pointed editorial commentary, Telnaes' editorial cartoons are distinctive both artistically and in the message they convey.

Early or convenience voting—understood in this context to be relaxed administrative rules and procedures by which citizens can cast a ballot at a time and place other than the precinct on Election Day—is a popular candidate for election reformers. Typically, reformers argue that maximization of turnout is a primary goal, and reducing barriers between voters and the polls is an important method for achieving higher turnout. Arguments in favor of voting by mail, early in-person voting, and relaxed absentee requirements share this characteristic. While there are good theoretical reasons, drawn primarily from the rational choice tradition, to believe that early voting reforms should increase turnout, the empirical literature has found decidedly mixed results. While one prominent study suggests that voting by mail is associated with a 10% increase in turnout, other studies find smaller—but still statistically significant—increases in turnout associated with other convenience voting methods.This work is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the AEI/Brookings Election Reform Project, and the Charles McKinley Fund of Reed College. Thanks to Caroline Tolbert and Daniel Smith for sharing data with us, and to David Magleby for comments on an earlier version of this paper. All responsibility for interpretations lay with the authors.

In order to keep members informed about APSA financial pratices, the APSA Trust and Development Board, which is charged by the APSA Constitution to oversee Association assets, reports from time to time on Association investment practices.

APSA's investments are managed professionally by Mr. Loren Ross of Cedarpoint Capital Management, Inc., New York, with oversight by the APSA Trust and Development Board. The following is a statement of investment philosophy circulated by Cedarpoint Capital Management on APSA's behalf. The holdings in APSA's Trust and Congressional Fellowship Portfolios, as of June 2006, are also listed.

March 15, 2006

When the U.S. deploys its forces around the world, an increasingly important part of its operations is no longer managed by the U.S. military, per se, but rather by what some call contractors, others call private military and security companies, and still others call mercenaries. In this essay, I will briefly describe the private security industry and the larger global market for force that it is a part of and how the U.S. military's increasing reliance on private forces brings both benefit and risk.