Months after Mexico's independent electoral institute had validated the July 2, 2006, presidential elections, and weeks after the autonomous electoral court had certified National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderón as president, runner-up Andrés Manuel López Obrador continued to cry foul. Days before the court's final September 5 ruling, López Obrador (known widely as “AMLO”), representing the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the Coalition for the Good of All, decided to disband the mobilizations blocking some of Mexico City's main transportation arteries, but to continue protesting indefinitely, and to name a “shadow cabinet,” to press Calderón. López Obrador lost the election by a hair (a mere 233,831 votes, out of over 41,700,000 cast—the final certified number after electoral court rulings), but he did lose, and in a “free and fair” contest organized by one of the world's more respected electoral institutions.

To what extent do political cartoonists use popular culture references to make sense of political culture? Seeing images in 2004, depicting Vice President Dick Cheney as Darth Vader from Star Wars, John Edwards as the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, and John Kerry as Frankenstein's monster, it is clear that some editorial cartoonists make connections between our popular culture and our political culture. Why, and with what possible consequences?

Election reforms have attracted substantial attention since the troubled elections of 2000. Some address problems in the administration of elections. Others aim to regulate the conduct of elected officials and lobbyists. A third category affects the structure by which elections are conducted. It is not clear whether the same over-arching problem motivates interest in these reforms. One common theme may be that public confidence in representation suffers as a result of actual or perceived deficiencies in the conduct of elections and elected officials. The failure to count votes accurately, the fact that eligible voters find they are unable to vote, the inability of minor parties to access ballots, revelations of scandalous relations between representatives and lobbyists, the power of wealthy donors, the lack of “civility” in political discourse, the uncompetitive nature of many elections, may all somehow act together to erode public trust, and reduce participation and engagement with representative democracy.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) is one of the most important—if not the most important—public policies developed over the last half century to increase access to the U.S. political system for people of color. The VRA also provides an important context for understanding the ascension of nonwhite groups into the elected leadership of the nation (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984; Davidson and Grofman 1994; Menifield 2001; McClain and Stewart 2002; Segura and Bowler 2005; Bositis 2006). This essay assesses the present-day significance of the VRA for the political representation of communities of color by examining the implications of majority-minority districts and other key provisions in the VRA for the election of nonwhite officials in the beginning years of the twenty-first century.

In Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988), the U.S. Supreme Court refused to extend free press protections to student newspapers at the high school level, supporting an administrator's decision to remove two articles prior to publication. The majority held that “First Amendment rights of students are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings, and must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment.” They claimed that school newspapers were not a “forum for public expression,” and authorized the prior restraint exercised by the administrator “so long as [his] actions [were] reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”

The question of global justice is among the most salient and controversial issues of our day. In the popular press it inspires a constant stream of books, articles, and film documentaries. It serves as the calling card for a major new social movement in rich and poor countries throughout the world (sometimes referred to as the “anti-globalization” movement). And it is an increasingly prominent issue in mainstream politics in Europe and the developing world (though not yet in the United States). If present trends continue, debates over global justice may become as ubiquitous in the 21st century as debates over socialism were in the previous century.For comments and suggestions on various versions of this manuscript I thank Wendy Hunter, Jim McGuire, Michael Ross, Strom Thacker, and the anonymous reviewers for this journal. For research assistance I am indebted to Hernan Roman. For financial support, I am grateful to Fred Pardee and the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.

Evidence suggesting that the growth of civic roots in adolescence may be crucial to the long-term development of citizenship has stimulated research into factors that might influence civic development during this time. One interesting finding to emerge from that exploration is the apparent importance of discussion to the development of civic competence. Adolescents who discuss politics and current events with their parents, peers, or teachers tend to score higher than other youth on measures of civic behaviors, attitudes, and skills. They develop higher levels of political knowledge, show greater intention to vote in the future, and do better on a range of civic outcomes from petitioning and boycotting to raising money for charities and participating in community meetings (Torney-Purta et al. 2001; Andolina et al. 2003).

Several of us gathered in 2003 at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association to discuss why, in an association with groups dedicated to Canadian, French, German, Italian, and Churchillian studies (to name but a few), there was no organized group dedicated to the study of politics in Spain and Portugal.

Throughout American history editorial cartoons have exposed corruption, offered criticism of people in power, questioned and supported policies, and in general given the public another format assisting in the understanding of current events. The freedom to caricature politicians and visually comment on social and political issues has been a hallmark of the editorial cartoonist's profession. In the aftermath of the worldwide furor over Danish cartoonists' use of the Prophet Muhammad's image in early 2006, it is useful to ask whether certain images from the War on Terror have become taboo as a subject for American editorial cartoonists.

Portugal and Spain have been at the heart of European history and have played a critical role in European (and world) affairs throughout the centuries. Yet decades of relative isolation under authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century left both countries at the margins of Europe, and they did not take part in the early stages of the process of European integration in the 1950s–70s. Fortunately, the success of processes of democratic transition in both countries in the second half of the 1970s paved the way for full membership in the European Community (EC).I would like to thank the participants in the conference “Towards the Completion of Europe” held at the University of Miami on April 2005, and in particular to Dr. Joaquín Roy for all his advice and support. This is an updated version of a paper that I presented at the conference published in Royo 2006. I would like to thank Jeffrey Kopstein, Ramón de Miguel, Kalypso Nicolaidis, George Ross, and Francisco Seixas da Costa for their valuable comments during the last roundtable of the conference From Isolation to Europe: 15 Years of Spanish and Portuguese Membership in the European Union at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, November 2–3, 2001. See also Royo 2003.

On January 5, 1975, Ronald Reagan completed two terms as governor of California, and soon thereafter he began taping his nationally syndicated radio program. Between January 1975 and October 1979, with the exception of a brief interlude to compete for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, the former governor delivered three-minute commentaries that were broadcast every week by approximately 300 U.S. radio stations, reaching an audience of between 20–30 million listeners.

There's no better place to celebrate the diversity of the political science profession than in the Windy City, home of the ground-breaking social science innovation of the various Chicago Schools of the mid-twentieth century. In keeping with those innovations, the 103rd APSA Annual Meeting takes as its theme “Political Science and Beyond,” a look at what political science can teach to, and learn from, cognate disciplines. In addition, take this opportunity to visit Chicago's stunning architecture, world-famous museums and parks, and world-class dining.

On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed 12 editorial cartoons, several of which contained caricatures of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. This publication sparked a controversy that began in Denmark and spanned the globe. The cartoon publications stemmed from an article discussing the difficulty in finding illustrators for a book on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. According to the book's author, cartoonists refused contract out of fear of retaliation from the Muslim community, citing the example of the 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutchman, for making the documentary Submission, a film focused upon the position of women in Islam. In addition to the article, nationwide debate discussed the right to freedom of speech and the problems surrounding self-censorship. It was within this context that Flemming Rose, the cultural editor at Jyllands-Posten, asked Danish cartoonists to depict the Prophet Muhammad as they saw him with the underlying purpose to raise the issue of self-censorship and fuel further debate. The cartoons ran alongside an article on free speech and self-censorship.

Interest in the links between corruption and politics has increased significantly since the early 1990s. Although the public widely sees corruption as a phenomenon that particularly afflicts the developing world—as reflected in the growing emphasis placed on anti-corruption initiatives by such international agencies as the World Bank, IMF, OECD, and Transparency International—the issue is also attracting significant attention in established democracies. Politicians, civil society activists, and media commentators have expressed concerns about a host of high-profile scandals contributing to a decline of trust in the political class, whilst a perceived “culture of corruption” in several of the post-communist countries of east-central Europe is seen as an obstacle to their full integration into the European Union. Indeed, corruption has started to become a powerful policy narrative in many countries, blamed for a host of shortcomings in democracies and non-democracies alike (Heywood and Krastev 2006).

The editors of PS and the staff of APSA would like to apologize for an error printed in the October 2006 issue. The names of two of the APSA award winners were inadvertently switched. The corrected citations are printed below:

The Leo Strauss Award, for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of political philosophy, was presented to Xavier Marquez. Guided by Catherine Zuckert at the University of Notre Dame, Marquez completed his dissertation, “The Stranger's Knowledge: Political Knowledge in Plato's Statesman.”

The Leonard D. White Award for best doctoral dissertation in the field of public administration was awarded to David Pitts of Georgia State University. He completed his dissertation, “Diversity, Representation, and Performance: Evidence about Ethnicity in Public Organizations,” under the direction of Laurence J. O'Toole, Jr. at the University of Georgia.

As political scientists, many of us encourage our students to get involved in community activities and local politics; and in fact many of our political science colleagues have run for state and local (and, less frequently, national) office. While the literature on parties, elections, and voting behavior may help provide us with some context when we (or our students) enter the political arena, there is a striking dearth of literature on voting behavior (and candidate behavior) in local elections. What Herson (1957) referred to as “the lost world of municipal government” can still be so characterized today, though a few recent studies have attempted to predict winners of municipal races (for example, McGleneghan and Ragland 2002; Lieske 1989). This article analyzes my own education in local politics, which resulted from my candidacy for the Town Council of Cazenovia, New York in November, 2005. I came to the experience of participating in a local campaign with expectations shaped by my teaching and research in American politics at the national level, and found that these expectations often gave way to the specifics of context. Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist running for Congress in 2006, expressed this sentiment as: “Political science is all generalities. Politics is all individual circumstances” (Fischer 2006).

This list celebrates the generous contributions of our members in giving to one or more of the following programs from 1996 through 2006: APSA awards, programs, the Congressional Fellowship Program, and the Centennial Campaign. APSA thanks these donors for ensuring that the benefits of membership and the influence of the profession will extend far into the future. APSA will update and print this list annually in the January issue of PS.

Pi Sigma Alpha, the National Political Science Honor Society, is proud to announce the winners of its 2006 Chapter Activity Grants Competition. In this annual program, Pi Sigma Alpha chapters submit proposals for activities they would not be able to carry out without funding. The maximum grant to any chapter is $2,000. The proposed activities may be in areas such as chapter and student development, social service, and the like. A grants committee reviews the proposals competitively and makes awards based on the quality and feasibility of the activity proposed, the completeness and appropriateness of the budget, and other factors. This was the first year in which chapters were permitted to submit proposals for two activities. Some proposals received full funding, some received partial funding with instructions on how to scale back the activity, and some were rejected. This year the committee funded proposals from 87 chapters for a total of over $75,000. Now in its 25th year, the Chapter Activity Grants program is the biggest and most important of the honor society's award programs both because of the size of its budget and the very large number of students who benefit.

Billed as the first great crisis of the twenty-first century, terrorist attacks on the United States led to unprecedented media attention. What was initially seen as unqualified worldwide support for the U.S. quickly gave way to claims in the U.S. of growing anti-Americanism around the world (Mack 2005, v). This paper uses editorial cartoons in leading newspapers in Spain and the U.S. to investigate purported anti-Americanism.

On June 15, 2007, Spain celebrated 30 years since the 1977 elections inaugurated the current democratic political system. These were the first democratic elections in 40 years—the last were held during Spain's first experience with mass democracy during the Second Republic (1931–1936). This essay explores why and how to incorporate the Spanish case into syllabi on comparative democratization. I suggest a few interesting topics to explore and more fully develop how the Spanish case can be used to illustrate explanations of democratization, namely modernization theory and elite pact making.