Giving a job talk has multiple aims. Most important of these: to get a job. But, it also makes sense to think about a job talk as (a) practice that will improve your skills for future job interviews, making it more likely that you will eventually get a job, even if not this one, (b) a kind of initiation ritual into the profession, and (c) a way to broaden your academic network and make new friends. It is your chance to persuade your peers (and perhaps your future colleagues) that you are a promising/accomplished scholar, a potentially good colleague, and a good teacher—not necessarily in that order. Priorities attached to these desiderata will vary from department to department (with major differences to be expected between research-oriented departments and those with a more liberal arts focus), but even within any given department, different members of the department will undoubtedly attach different weights to each of these three concerns. Such relevant information will be conveyed in a job talk.

A great divide between “Ivory Tower” academics and those engaged in applied politics characterizes popular perceptions for those on both sides of this chasm. Yet, after spending a year in Washington, D.C., as part of the APSA's Congressional Fellowship Program, it is evident that there are commonalities as well as differences between these two groups. However, applied career opportunities are rarely investigated by graduate students in political science, who aim instead for a tenured position in academe. According to the most recent data collected by the APSA, only 7 to 13% of Ph.D.s selected a non-academic position or career track during the period from 1990 through 2000, and this trend remained stable during the early part of this decade (Lopez 2003, 836).The author would like to thank Jeff Biggs, director of the Congressional Fellowship Program, and Michael Brintnall of the American Political Science Association. She also thanks Gene Alpert, Stan Bach, Arthur Burris, Beth Fuchs, John Haskell, Scott Keeter, Bill Koetzle, George Kundanis, Celinda Lake, Congressman Dan Lipinski, Thomas Mann, Norm Ornstein, Neil Pinney, John Ratliff, and Ben Scott for their contributions and insights. Those included in this study are not intended to be an exhaustive or representative list of political science Ph.D.s working in applied settings.

This article describes the creation and implementation of a new online assessment program (“PACKS”) for the department of politics at the University of Virginia. It discusses the benefits of online assessments, including the ease of administration, minimal faculty involvement, ability to link assessment data to existing student data (e.g., GPA and courses completed), and ability to track student progress over time. The assessment can be easily adapted for use by other departments in the social sciences and by other colleges and universities. The authors discuss the drawbacks to this type of assessment, including the challenge of obtaining the highest number of respondents. They recommend using a strong incentive to ensure full participation, such as an advising hold that prevents students from registering until they complete the assessment. The authors contend that implementing survey-based assessment tools is an ideal way for departments to meet their accrediting institutions’ assessment requirements.

The Time for Change Model once again correctly predicted the winner of the US presidential election. In late August, before the Republican and Democratic national conventions, the model predicted that President Obama would win 50.6% of the major party vote to 49.4% for his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney. When all the votes are counted, it now appears that Obama will end up with approximately 51.8% of the vote, making the Time for Change Model one of the nation's most accurate statistical forecasting models. Despite the fact that this prediction was made more than two months before Election Day, the Time for Change forecast was more accurate than the results of many national polls conducted immediately before the election including the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls both of which predicted a popular vote win for Mitt Romney.

Total international membership in APSA continues to reach new highs in absolute and relative terms, surpassing December's record number of 2,031 to reach 2,081 for the first time in August 2007. This represents 14.1% of APSA total membership, also a record high.

In 2011, more than 3% of all black men in the United States were imprisoned, compared to only 0.5% of all white men. Among prisoners ages 18 to 24, black men were imprisoned at a rate more than seven times that of white men (Carson and Sabol 2012). It is becoming increasingly urgent for researchers to understand what accounts for these race-based disparities. While a broad constellation of social problems exist that likely contribute to these disparities in concert, different fields of social science tend to focus on different types of explanations. Political scientists and sociologists have tended to emphasize the role of institutional factors, including criminal justice policies and practices, in maintaining race-based disparities. Social psychologists, in contrast, have tended to emphasize individual factors, including punitive responses to crime by jurors, judges, and criminal justice professionals.

A dozen years before this PS symposium, several political scientists came together in a similar manner to honor Louis Fisher's scholarship and highlight his contributions to the discipline (Spitzer 2000). Many wonderful insights and observations were made to shed light on Fisher's versatility and impact. However, that effort missed an opportunity to highlight a key contribution of Fisher's work: a revival of pre-behavioral era functions and concerns within political science. In many ways Fisher is a throwback to a traditional political science approach where scholars did not select subfields or specialties but sought to engage in broad public debates about governing and, most importantly, believed that normative and empirical studies could and should go hand in hand. With the latter approach Fisher has made his most important contribution to political science.

When I was looking for a quotation to garnish the introduction to my doctoral dissertation on Senate committees, I turned, like hundreds of graduate students before and since, to Woodrow Wilson's Congressional Government. “Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition,” he wrote (1885) and I quoted (1972), “whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.” But the book deserves better than simply to be mined for quotations. As Wilson's doctoral dissertation, it offers insights into his developing political thought. It illumines the operations of the national government during what was indeed a period of congressional and standing-committee ascendancy, although Wilson's account was neither objective nor totally reliable. And it prompts reflection on certain recurring dilemmas in the practice of American democracy.This essay is adapted from a presentation at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, November 14, 2005.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments worldwide—many that previously prioritized austerity—to approve large relief packages. Political economy tells us that politicians will try to profit from this electorally, but much remains unknown about precisely how pandemic relief might influence voting intentions. Then-President Donald Trump foregrounded this question early in the pandemic by becoming the first US president to physically place his name on Internal Revenue Service relief checks mailed to citizens. By leveraging a nationally representative survey whose timing achieved quasi-experimental variation in the receipt of payments both with and without Trump’s name physically on them, this study asks: Can a president successfully win support through physical personalization of the payments? Yes, the study finds. Receiving a physically personalized check in the mail is associated with a much greater self-reported likelihood of voting for the president, with gains mainly from partisan outgroups. No clear effect is found for unpersonalized electronic transfers. These findings withstand multiple robustness checks.

After a more than seven-decade battle, American women secured the right to vote in August 1920. The struggle for women to have a voice in elections was not over, however. The Nineteenth Amendment states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The amendment gives Congress the power to enforce the law by appropriate legislation. It does not, however, empower or charge any government office or actor with ensuring that women can and do cast ballots. This article argues that this reality, often taken for granted, has serious implications for both the incorporation of women into the electorate and the representation of their political interests.

At least partially in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election (Jordan and Balz 2018), 2018 witnessed a record number of women running for and winning legislative elections across the country. This candidacy surge affords a unique opportunity to evaluate why individuals choose to run for office. Extant literature identifies both individual- and institutional-level determinants of candidate entry, yet little attention has been given to a critical institutional feature that can encourage or discourage women to put their names forward: primary type. This article develops a model of candidate emergence positing that different primary systems—by virtue of including and excluding the participation of various subpopulations of a state’s electorate—will be more or less attractive to potential female candidates relative to potential male candidates. We uncover evidence consistent with our theory: women appear less interested in running in certain types of primaries (e.g., semi-closed) but find other systems more appealing (e.g., nonpartisan). The results also indicate that after considering primary type, women tend to outperform men in the subsequent general election across the board. This study provides encouraging evidence that closing the representation gap is an increasingly achievable goal but that the rules of the electoral game continue to determine who is playing.