The emergence of the Perestroika movement in U.S. political science was an important moment in the contemporary history of our discipline, and as we approach the 10-year anniversary of this movement, it is fitting that PS should publish a retrospective symposium on its origins and significance.

This article discusses the use of pop culture in the classroom as a means to teach foundational political science authors and concepts. I focus on my experience using American Idol as a point of reference to discuss Marx and Engel's The Communist Manifesto and Tocqueville's Democracy in America in undergraduate comparative politics courses. Students are asked to construct a written argument projecting Marx or Tocqueville's perceptions of American Idol, based on their readings. My experiences demonstrate that asking students to reflect on their own contemporary experience through the prism of these two works helps them in three ways: (1) to better understand the ideas of Marx and Tocqueville, as well as their differences; (2) to develop an appreciation for the continued relevance of works in the discipline's canon; and (3) to sharpen and develop critical thinking and analytical skills.

During the six weeks before the 2008 elections, I conducted a contest for the 72 students enrolled in my upper-division course Campaigns and Elections. Using contract prices posted by Intrade.com, an electronic gaming market based in Dublin, I asked students to choose among 10 political outcomes. The “contracts” earned by each choice were determined by the Intrade “bid” prices as of September 24, 2008, the day the contest began. The contest helped teach students about campaign strategies, the way electoral rules affect electoral outcomes, provided a reference point to discuss the campaign, and was designed to stimulate interest in the election.

Prior research has identified a substantial positive relationship between college attendance and civic engagement. This article examines student experiences with university academics and ancillary programs to determine which of these, if any, motivate increased student engagement. Various student characteristics were evaluated to determine their impact on student engagement. Data was obtained from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Current Population Survey (CPS). Results indicated that engagement is related positively to some student college experiences, unrelated to some experiences, and even negatively related to other experiences. Few individual characteristics relate to engagement, ACT scores and gender both impact engagement, and, surprisingly, engagement was higher among men than women.

The purpose of the present symposium was to evaluate Perestroika's impact. Since the American Political Science Review (APSR), the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS), and the Journal of Politics (JOP) were all targets of criticism in the movement, whereas other national and regional association journals such as Perspectives on Politics and Political Research Quarterly were not, I looked for change in the former. Comparable data on the past contents of the APSR and AJPS had already been published, so I focused my recent surveys on those two. This focus implies no judgment as to the relative prestige of these journals. They pretend to represent the discipline as a whole and are paid for by all association members, and these are sufficient reasons to address their editorial biases.

The rise of state-mandated standards in public education have allowed legislators to answer the question of what constitutes a proper civic education, a debate that has existed in the United States since the turn of the twentieth century. Through the content they employ in their standards, states may indirectly influence the type of citizenship education students receive in the classroom. The present study focuses on the Virginia Standards of Learning for two courses, civics and economics and U.S. and Virginia government, which are commonly taught to eighth graders and high school seniors, respectively. A content analysis of the essential knowledge found in the standards for these courses categorizes instructional content into seven forms of citizenship: civic republicanism, character education, deliberative, social justice, participatory, transnational, and cosmopolitan. Although the results are specific to the Virginia Standards of Learning, the nature of how citizenship is portrayed within the standards may transfer to other states with similar forms of standards-based education within their social studies curricula.

The seventh annual Teaching and Learning Conference (TLC) was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from February 5 to 7, 2010, with 224 attendees onsite. The theme for the meeting was “Advancing Excellence in Teaching Political Science.” Using the working-group model, the TLC track format encourages in-depth discussion and debate on research dealing with the scholarship of teaching and learning.

There often exists a problematic gap between more theoretical works on war-to-peace transitions, and the practical challenges that peacebuilding operations face in the field. This article describes the use of classroom simulation to highlight the complexity of contemporary multilateral peace operations. It describes the content and mechanics of the simulation, the issues that can arise in its operation, and strategies for most effectively integrating such a simulation into overall course objectives.

Weblogs (or blogs), as a form of communication on the Internet, have recently risen in prominence but may be poorly understood by both faculty and students. This article explains how blogs differ from other online communication tools and how political science faculty can make use of blogs in their classes. The focus is on using blogs as part of class assignments to reinforce important skills, including critical thinking, political engagement, and essay writing. We also discuss existing academic and professional blogs that may be models for student blogging in political science.

One of the primary concerns driving Perestroika was the hegemony of quantitative methods in American political science research, curricula, journals, and positions, to the exclusion of qualitative and interpretive approaches. In this article, we assess the contemporary methodological diversity of U.S. political science, at the APSA in particular, to see what, if anything, has changed over the last 10 years. This is an admittedly rough assessment, as the deadline for this symposium did not allow time to repeat the research projects that started Perestroika's and our own solo and joint efforts, the latter preceding and then intersecting with the former. We therefore give a broad overview of methods-directed activities, although we cannot help but see events through the lens of our own involvement in them, and that view is perforce partial.

As part of a course considering “American Democracy in Theory and Practice,” we took 36 students to Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. During that visit, students observed a community that seeks self-sufficiency and yet proves to be simultaneously responsive to and reflective of American democracy more broadly. Specifically, in a few short hours, they were able to see the virtues of civic association, the difficulty of respecting individualism in large-scale polities, the influence of regional identity, and the two-way interaction between politics and culture—all themes that featured prominently in our course. We offer this reflection to suggest the pedagogical benefits of showing the tensions of American politics in action and to encourage colleagues to consider integrating similar ventures into their own courses.

Popular music is ubiquitous in the lives of our students, music is used by politicians at virtually every one of their campaign events, and musicians are increasingly active in politics, but music has never been considered as a pedagogical tool in teaching political science classes. This article describes the use of music in an introduction to American politics class. I argue that playing music in class can increase student interest, reinforce important concepts, and actively engage the students in the learning process. Finally, using popular culture connects meaningfully with the way that many of our undergraduate students are experiencing politics.

Not long ago, many political scientists suffered from economics envy. Some still do. They view economics as the queen of the social sciences, claiming that it is “scientific,” like physics. Physicists and other natural scientists spend most of their time trying to explain phenomena, but non-behavioral micro-economists spend most of their time on mathematical proofs and econometric tests of a priori theories based on intuitive plausibility or principles of “rational action.” Being “scientific” it was alleged, meant that economics could access objective knowledge, knowledge that was said to be true independent of time, place, and circumstance. Robert Bates called on political scientists to do the same by arguing that they should be in search of “lawful regularities which … must not be context bound” (Bates 1997b).

This section lists upcoming book publications across the broad field of political science. If your first-edition book is scheduled for publication in the three months before the next issue of PS, enter the details of publication in the box found at the PS Web site: http://www.apsanet.org/section_223.cfm. We hope that spreading word of upcoming work will help keep our members even more attuned to new scholarship within the discipline.

The Political Science Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) announces it awards for basic research support and dissertation improvement grants for fiscal year 2009. The program funded 56 new projects and 34 doctoral dissertation improvement proposals. (Additional program funds were spent on continuing grant increments. These result from awards that were made in previous fiscal years, but where funds are being disbursed on a yearly basis instead all up front.) The Political Science Program spent $10,461,799 on these research, training, and workshop projects and $383,238 on dissertation training grants for political science students. In addition, the program contributed $345,000 to support three Graduate Research Fellowships. The program holds two grant competitions annually (Regular Research, August and January 15; Dissertation Improvement, January 15) and constitutes a major source of political science research funding as part of fulfilling NSF's mission to encourage theoretically focused empirical investigations aimed at improving the explanation of fundamental social and political processes and structures.

In this article, we speak to two of the Perestroika movement's contributions to political science: heightened awareness of (1) the need for a more catholic approach to methods and (2) the increased sensitivity to the special demands of international cross-cultural research. We make several suggestions here that address each of these topics.

The Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Conference Group of the American Political Science Association is proud to announce the creation of the “Grain of Sand” Award to honor a political scientist whose contributions to interpretive studies of the political, and, indeed, to the discipline itself, its ideas, and its persons, have been longstanding and merit special recognition.

Dr. Edward W. Arian, a renaissance man. He navigated two very successful careers, one as a world class professional musician and one as a political scientist. In addition to his family, which was most important to him, these were the other important components of his life.