The research on voter turnout in America is impressive in quantityand quality, but it lacks breadth. National and state elections havereceived most of the attention, while the myriad of other elections,from municipal contests to policy referenda, have often beenignored. As a result, we know a great deal about turnout in stateand national elections, and much less about turnout in other races.The temptation is to generalize the state and national conclusionsto other elections, but this is risky. For example, in a recentaggregate-level study of small town elections in Iowa, Rice andSchlueter (2004) report a relationshipthat runs contrary to virtually all of the state and nationalliterature: education and turnout are negatively correlated; thatis, the citizens in better-educated communities vote in localelections at lower rates than the citizens in less-educatedcommunities. This finding exposes the limitations in ourunderstanding of voter turnout. If all we want is to speak withassurance about turnout in state and national elections, then thecurrent literature is very helpful. If, however, we want to be ableto speak more generally about turnout (and speak more specificallyabout turnout in elections other than state and national contests),then we need to study more types of elections.For a copy of the data, contact Professor Tom W. Rice,department of political science, University of Iowa, Iowa City,IA 52241 (tom-rice@uiowa.edu).

Scores of studies have measured the quality of political science departments. Generally speaking, these studies have taken two forms. Many have relied on scholars' survey responses to construct rankings of the major departments. For example, almost 50 years ago Keniston (1957) interviewed 25 department chairpersons and asked them to assess the quality of various programs, and, much more recently, the National Research Council (NRC 1995) asked 100 political scientists to rate the “scholarly quality of program faculty” in the nation's political science doctoral departments. In response to these opinion-based rankings, a number of researchers have developed what they claim to be more objective measures of department quality based on the research productivity of the faculty (Ballard and Mitchell 1998; Miller, Tien, and Peebler 1996; Robey 1979). While department rankings using these two methods are often similar, there are always noteworthy differences and these have generated an additional literature that explores the relationship between the rating systems (Garand and Graddy 1999; Jackman and Siverson 1996; Katz and Eagles 1996; Miller, Tien, and Peebler 1996).

The relationship between reputational rankings of political science departments and their scholarly productivity remains a source of discussion and controversy. After the National Research Council (1995) published its ranking of 98 political science departments, Katz and Eagles (1996), Jackman and Siverson (1996), and Lowry and Silver (1996) analyzed the factors that seemingly influenced those rankings. Miller, Tien, and Peebler (1996) offered an alternate approach to ranking departments, based both upon the number of faculty (and their graduates) who published in the American Political Science Review and upon the number of citations that faculty members received. More recently, two studies have examined departmental rankings in other ways. Ballard and Mitchell (1998) assessed political science departments by evaluating the level of productivity in nine important disciplinary and subfield journals, and Garand and Graddy (1999) evaluated the impact of journal publications (and other variables) on the rankings of political science departments. In general, Miller, Tien, and Peebler found a high level of correspondence between reputation rankings and productivity, Ballard and Mitchell did not, and Garand and Graddy found that publications in “high impact” journals were important for departmental rankings.

In this study we explore the extent to which the civic cultures of European immigrants to the United States persist in their contemporary descendants. Analyses using data from the World Values Survey and the cumulative General Social Surveys indicate that the civic attitudes of contemporary Americans bear a strong resemblance to the civic attitudes of the contemporary citizens of the European nations with whom they share common ancestors. The Americans who descend from nations with highly civic populations tend to hold relatively civic attitudes, while those who descend from nations with less civic populations tend to hold relatively less civic attitudes. The significance of these findings for democracy is discussed.

Recent research has altered our understanding of how voters select a candidate in U.S. presidential elections. Scholars have demonstrated empirically that issues, candidate personalities, candidate evaluations, and party identification interact in a dynamic simultaneous fashion to determine vote choice. Other researchers have shown that prenomination candidate preferences play an integral role in structuring the general election vote. We join together these two important trends to introduce and test a revised model of vote choice, using 1980 NES panel data. The results reconfirm that candidate selection is part of a dynamic simultaneous process and reveal for the first time that prenomination preferences are woven tightly into this causal web.