Volume 8, Issue 3

This essay offers some experience-based observations about electoral phenomena that academic political science misses because of a focus on conceptual and theoretical debates that often take pride of place over the empirical phenomena that gave rise to the ideas and concepts that we highly value. We suggest that academic political science is increasingly committed to models and methods that serve a theory or an idea more than they account for observable empirical regularities. Practitioner methods and innovations for persuading voters and winning elections under varying electoral conditions are largely unknown to scholars, with consequences for our collective factual knowledge and ability to test current hypotheses and theories about elections in an appropriate wide range of circumstances.

In the wealth of research on politics and politicians over the past fifty or so years, little attention has been accorded the relationships between the personal and the public sides of politicians' lives. Given the difficulties of collecting data, this absence is unsurprising. But that does not mean the personal-political linkage is unimportant, and one way to address this subject may be to draw upon political fiction, both to gain insights and to suggest avenues of inquiry. And within political fiction, the best source, at least for American politics, likely includes the works of veteran novelist Ward Just.

Political scientists and the international development community have strong formal and informal norms that create barriers to engaging with the U.S. military. Nowhere are these tensions greater felt than in the actual battlefield. With the evolution of contemporary counterinsurgency strategy, the military has reached out to both social scientists and the development community. Instead of closing doors to the military, all parties would be better served if they opened their doors to dialogue. Most importantly, engaging the military constructively will actually help save civilian lives, rather than endanger them.

There is no surefire mechanism to balance the incoming flow of political science doctoral candidates with the availability of tenure-track positions upon graduation. With as many as 15% of such doctoral graduates leaving academe, it would appear time for the campus to begin mentoring its students with a seasoned understanding of the non-academic career options. A sampling of former APSA Congressional Fellow political science doctorates indicates a variety of such non-academic applied political science positions for which the graduate work was a benefit.

Political journalism can serve as a useful bridge between practical politics and political science. This article recounts the author’s personal journey from a childhood interest in maps, numbers and elections to a lifetime career as a political journalist. It also illustrates the partnership that can flourish between journalism and academe in making sense of our nation’s political scene.

Working as an expert witness is one of the most direct ways for a political scientist to affect actual policy. However, the worlds of academia and litigation are vastly different environments, with different norms, goals, and rules. I explore some of these differences, as well as the implications for straddling the two worlds as an expert. Ultimately, the parties in election law, redistricting, and voting rights litigation have found political scientists to be valuable partners. It is a very satisfying experience to find that our methods and skills have value outside the friendly confines of the ivory tower.

Relative to other social scientists, political scientists seem disengaged from the political world outside the academy. In this article, I suggest that this is regrettable, arguing that such service is beneficial both for scholarship and for society at large. I examine two such forms of outside service: writing for a blog and working in a political party. I examine the potential pitfalls and benefits from such service.

Policy—what government does, why it does it, and what difference it makes—deserves a more central position in political science, especially in the study of American politics. This paper outlines the advantages of such a "policy-focused" political science not just for the engagement of the discipline (and those within it) with pressing real-world problems, but also for the quality of research. My argument is not simply that a focus on policy will make political science more "relevant," although it will. It is that a political science without systematic attention to policy is a bad political science—a political science that fails to capture extremely important aspects of politics.

The relationship between political science and the "real world" of public policy and politics has long been a complicated one. Current calls for more relevance in political science research echo back to the discipline's early days. This essay traces the intertwined history of practice and ivory tower, with specific attention to the rise of economics as a policy-engaged social science. A mini-case study of political scientists' involvement in contemporary health policymaking provides a concrete focus.

We argue that political science blogs can link conversations among political scientists with broader public debates about contemporary issues. Political science blogs do this by identifying relevant research, explaining its findings, and articulating its applicability. We identify strategies besides blogging that individual scholars and the discipline could undertake to enhance its public profile.

Due to public concern with undergraduate education and lack of government support for research, political science departments face important threats to viability. Scholars have proposed that the discipline respond by re-orienting itself to address publicly-acknowledged problems. I propose an alternative response: we should expand our service role, especially when we can engage undergraduates in providing public information. I have launched a web-based venture called the Michigan Policy Network, a student-led reporting and research program to report and organize information on Michigan state government. I describe the role of the network, propose similar ideas for extending the public reach of political science, and explain how the challenges facing the discipline look from a department at the state university in the state capital.

Many political scientists would like journalists and political practitioners to take political science more seriously, and many are beginning to pay attention. This paper outlines ten things that political science scholarship has learned that are at odds with much of the conventional wisdom of American politics.

Barack Obama’s large policy ambitions have made him a highly polarizing figure for Americans, just as his predecessor George W. Bush, also a person of grand ambitions, had been. Obama has pursued a “directive” presidency, in which the chief executive serves as the director of change, who creates opportunities to move in new directions and lead others where they otherwise would not go. One consequence of this is growing popular disapproval of Obama’s presidential agenda. Maintaining popular support is hard and frustrating work, and in seeking to maintain it, presidents encounter widespread constraints. Recent presidents in times of popular disapproval have resorted to emphatic employment of executive powers. In such a situation, a president, by unresponsively trying to direct events, can effectively destroy his popular support—the presidential power trap. That is the central threat to Obama’s presidency at present.

This article makes forecasts for the 2010 state legislative and gubernatorial elections. These forecasts indicate the Republicans will add control of 15 legislative chambers and nine governor’s offices, leaving them with 51 chambers and 32 governorships. Forecasts about the extent of redistricting authority by the Democratic and Republican parties indicate the Republicans will have authority over 125 U.S. House seats, while the Democrats will have authority over 62. In a chamber level analysis of 2,141 legislative and a state level analysis of 758 gubernatorial elections, four national forces are used in predicting election outcomes from 1950 to present: presidential approval, change in per capita income, midterm loss, and the percentage of respondents who say they will vote for a Democrat for the U.S. House. The differential effect of these forces in states with the straight-ticket option is also taken into account. Monte Carlo simulation that takes into account states’ different rules regarding redistricting authority is then utilized to assess how many U.S. House seats the Democratic and Republican parties will control.