Stephen Earl Bennett, a self-described empiricist and “quantoid,” has stepped out from behind the numbers to speak, not as a measuring stick, but as a human being engaged in defending the worth of his studies to the human mind. His article has an element of the personal as is fitting for someone making a case for his own self-respect and educating others about what does and does not deserve admiration and esteem. Loyal to the empirical study of politics, Bennett argues that the attempt to make political philosophy the core of the discipline “should fail.”

Observers of American life have seen a silver lining in the dark clouds that billowed from the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Along with the horror wrought by the terrorist attacks came an outpouring of solidarity and patriotism—a sudden change of heart for many Americans who, prior to that fateful day, had seemed to be drifting inexorably toward individualism, self-absorption, and cynical disinterest in public affairs. As Stanley Greenberg (2001) aptly puts it, suddenly the “we” mattered more than the “me.” People reached out to family members, neighbors, and friends, while proudly declaring their membership in the American national community.

Attracting the most talented citizens to public service has been a challenge for America's leaders since the inception of our nation. Thomas Jefferson expressed concerns about finding honest and capable public servants for his administration, pledging “to seek out the best through the whole Union.” No executive duty “excites more anxious concern…” Jefferson wrote. “No duty, at the same time, is more difficult to fulfill.”

The question, “What kind of political science would you like to see in the next 10 years?” raises several problems: Should I consult my self-serving or my communitarian self in framing an answer? Should I say what practices I would prefer? Or should I recommend what directions the profession should take? More generally, should we be talking about the organization of political science? Or should we refer to the profession's current epistemological conundrums? In his Science as a Vocation, Max Weber first addresses the structure and economic incentives of German university careers, then turns to more philosophical questions: What is “science”? What meanings and usages does “science” convey? What questions can it answer? (Answer: it cannot tell us how to live.) Is it cumulative? Or is Thomas Kuhn right about the noncumulative nature of scientific revolutions? Focusing on the epistemological issues, I'll try to avoid the monopolistic question, “What direction should the profession take?” in favor of the pluralist question, “What variety of knowledge regimes would I like the profession to enable?”

Our Transition to Governing Project is dedicated to understanding and improving the transition from campaigning to governing. Started in 1998, the project is an American Enterprise Institute project in conjunction with the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Norman Ornstein, AEI, and Thomas Mann, Brookings, are codirectors, and John Fortier, AEI, manages the effort. The project has addressed the transition in three broad areas: (1) facilitation of the transition of a new administration into office; (2) scholarly analysis of the blurring of the lines between campaigning and governing, sometimes referred to as the “permanent campaign”; (3) improvement of the quality of the presidential campaign by focusing media attention on the governing qualities of the candidates.

The following essays are based on presentations given by the authors during a short course on elite interviewing, held at the 2001 APSA meeting in San Francisco. The short course, sponsored by the Political Organizations and Parties organized section of the APSA, drew nearly 100 participants.

Changing the Subject (Ever So Slightly)

Let me begin with five basic points about scientific inquiry and methodological rigor that ground my own sense of what is to be done in the wake of current methodological battles in the fields of political science and political theory.

In this article, we report on the incidence of punch-card and other voting equipment by ethnicity, incomes, and other variables, combining county-level demographic data from the Census Bureau with county-level data on voting equipment collected by Election Data Services, Inc. Our findings, reported in the national print and electronic media in early 2001, provide remarkably little support for the view that resource constraints cause poorer counties with large minority populations to retain antiquated or inferior voting equipment.

At one level, George W. Bush's transition to the presidency was unique and without much precedent as a guide. Unlike the situation facing his predecessors, Bush's “official” postelection transition did not begin until December 14, the day after Al Gore's concession speech. Roughly half the time of a “normal” transition had been lost as the controversy over the Florida vote dragged on.

To paraphrase slightly, I have been asked to focus on the apparent tensions between making genuinely scientific contributions by advancing knowledge in rigorous ways within specialized subfields, on the one hand, and addressing substantive political issues of general interest in accessible fashion, on the other. My view is that, though we should try to do both things, we should give priority to the latter—to helping both disciplinary and general public understandings of important substantive political issues become better informed and reasoned. To adopt this priority is still, I believe, to pursue the main tasks of political science as scientifically as possible; but it is true that this course involves significant tradeoffs.

In an interview, what you already know is as important as what you want to know. What you want to know determines which questions you will ask. What you already know will determine how you ask them.

Since the mid-1980s, academic communities have hosted an ongoing debate about the relationship between speech rights and hate speech. Many colleges established codes prohibiting speech ranging from displays of old fashioned racial bigotry to “inappropriately directed laughter” (Heyman 1996; Schiell 1998). These codes soon grew to prohibit other forms of offensive expression, including vilification based on gender, sexual preference, and some other categories comprising those described as historical victims. Stigmatizing or “assaultive” words were described as civil rights violations. Abstract rights of free expression had to be tempered with “the principle of anti-subordination;” that is, rights had to be weighed against harms to the most disadvantaged (Delgado and Stefancic 1997; Lawrence 1995).

I wish to address four related themes that run throughout our discussions. In doing so, I find much about which I agree with the other panelists although I might modify certain propositions in ways that may alter these propositions so significantly as to be critical.

It was to be the single most visible decision of George W. Bush's first year in office, inspiring even a rare prime-time televised address to announce and explain to the American people his decision on government support for stem cell research. For weeks, the White House press office told of the President's wide-ranging search for advice: the meetings with ethicists and scientists, with interest group representatives, and with dozens of ordinary citizens.

Many factors are important when it comes to conducting high quality elite interviews. As my colleagues have noted in their presentations in San Francisco and in their essays in this issue, gaining valid and reliable data from elite interviews demands that researchers be well prepared, construct sound questions, establish a rapport with respondents, know how to write up their notes, and code responses accurately and consistently. Improving these skills will certainly reduce the amount of measurement error contained in interview data. Unfortunately, none of these skills matter if you do not get the interview. In other words, everything that my colleagues have talked about depends on getting in the door, getting access to your subject. A well-prepared personable researcher who would be able to control an open-ended and wide-ranging interview, while establishing a strong informal rapport with an elite respondent will never get to demonstrate his or her interviewing skills—or ability to decrease measurement error—if the meeting never takes place. Furthermore and fundamentally, systematic error will also be introduced if researchers only get access to certain types of respondents.

The Isle of Ted Simulation is a successful teaching tool that is disarmingly simple yet repeatedly captivates participants. Although I originally designed the simulation to explain collective-action problems in American politics, almost all recent uses of the simulation have been in international relations and international organization classes. The simulation is an effective teaching tool for a wide variety of issues including:

1. collective goods and free riders (e.g., Olson 1971)

2. international organizations versus international organization and global governance versus global government (e.g., Rosenau and Czempiel 1992)

3. regimes and the effects of transparency (e.g., Keohane 1982, 1984; Krasner 1982; Mitchell 1994; Young 1989, 1994)

4. relative and absolute gains (e.g., Grieco 1988)

5. constructivist approaches to international relations (e.g., Wendt 1992)

6. rational choice models of decision making (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita 2000; Lave and March 1993; Monroe 1991)

7. and how the shadow of the future can engender cooperation in the present (e.g, Axelrod 1984; Hardin 1982; Shubik 1970).

For the past three years, the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University has hosted short courses at the American Political Science Association's Annual Meeting on the topic of teaching about campaigns and elections. These efforts are part of the “Improving Campaign Conduct” project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Our experience shows that professors teaching American politics have an interest in keeping their classroom materials relevant and timely, while also preserving a strong analytical framework. Here, we hope to offer some advice and guidance to professors teaching courses that cover campaigns and elections in whole or in part.

In real estate the maxim for picking a piece of property is “location, location, location.” In elite interviewing, as in social science generally, the maxim for the best way to design and conduct a study is “purpose, purpose, purpose.” It's elementary that the primary question one must ask before designing a study is, “What do I want to learn?” Appropriate methods flow from the answer. Interviewing is often important if one needs to know what a set of people think, or how they interpret an event or series of events, or what they have done or are planning to do. (Interviews are not always necessary. Written records, for example, may be more than adequate.) In a case study, respondents are selected on the basis of what they might know to help the investigator fill in pieces of a puzzle or confirm the proper alignment of pieces already in place. If one aims to make inferences about a larger population, then one must draw a systematic sample. For some kinds of information, highly structured interviews using mainly or exclusively close-ended questions may be an excellent way to proceed. If one needs to probe for information and to give respondents maximum flexibility in structuring their responses, then open-ended questions are the way to go.

This paper uses a unique source of data about television commercials to examine some of the most important issues connected to this proposal. It is appropriate that we focus on television advertising since it is the largest—and most discussed—single category of expenditures by candidates, parties and interest groups in federal elections. McCain-Feingold's chief impact would surely be seen on the nation's airwaves, on the thousands of issue ads paid for with soft money. Indeed, many of the arguments for and against McCain-Feingold are rooted in different interpretations of those very ads.

Nothing challenges a new President's team more than its need to fill out the executive. The White House 2001 Project played a significant role in this aspect of the presidential transition. Its White House Interview Program provided useful information gleaned from the rarified ranks of White House personnel, and its Nomination Forms Online Program detailed for the first time the exact particulars of the inquiry process. Already well under way by the time the Bush team began planning in 1999, the White House 2001 Project provided the Bush staff with details about two of the five great transition challenges affecting personnel: scale and complexity.