Political science as a discipline lacks any convention on the order in which authors should be listed in co-authored publications. As a result, the order of authors' surnames currently provides no information to other scholars, hiring and promotion committees, and other reviewers about the relative contributions of each collaborator. This lack of…

The problem of plagiarism by political scientists has not received much attention. The incidence of plagiarism, however, may be greater than one would think. In this article, I offer a humorous look at what happened when a manuscript of mine was plagiarized. Based on my experience, I offer some suggestions on how scholars might detect and prevent…

We know little about the amount of career preparation offered to students in political science departments. This lack of information is particularly troubling given the state of the current job market and the growth of applied degree programs on university campuses. To address this issue, this article presents the results of a December 2010 survey…

The authors discuss recent developments in services for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the Nordic countries. They note that all of the countries saw important reforms during the 1990s, regarding both deinstitutionalization and decentralization. However, they posit that the litmus test of the reforms is not what happens during reform…

Many assessment studies are devoted to discovering whether student knowledge increases after successful completion of a specific course; fewer studies attempt to examine whether students undergo a change in their values and attitudes as a result of that coursework. Given the continuing emphasis on assessment and the fulfillment of core curriculum…

Librarians have long recognized the importance of privacy to intellectual freedom. As digital technology and its applications advance, however, efforts to protect privacy may become increasingly difficult. With some users behaving in ways that suggest they do not care about privacy and with powerful voices claiming that privacy is dead, librarians…

In his seminal work "Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy", Alexander George (1993) lamented the great divide between academia and the foreign policymaking community, arguing that greater interaction between scholars and policymakers would produce better policy. We share George's belief that scholars and practitioners each have…

William Lowe Boyd was there, making a difference in the study of politics of education, both intellectually and organizationally, at key moments in the development of the field. In fact, the field and study of the subject itself were linked politically, as scholars interested in research on the political science of how schools operate were…

In our professional work, many of us are involved in university service and politics and some of us enter administrative positions. As political scientists who became associate deans of colleges of liberal arts and sciences, our observations from our administrative perches and our disciplinary knowledge have provided insights on how faculty can…

This article examines the comment culture that accompanies documentary films on YouTube as a site of (geo) political education. It considers how viewers try to teach each other about the proper "place" of critique in response to the global, national, and local rhetoric featured in one environmental documentary film. YouTube viewers use…

This article sets to explore the attitudes of higher education students enrolled in a political science programme at Master level towards e-learning facilitated by the introduction of a Moodle platform. The students have been surveyed at the end of public management course in the first semester of the programme asking them to evaluate both the…

In teaching the causes of the Iraq War, the use of "virtual history" can be employed in a conference setting in which different individuals are assigned to different plausible counterfactuals they use to construct virtual histories. The Iraq War lends itself to the virtual history approach because of the availability of many plausible…

Teaching the Declaration of Independence can be a challenge. This article presents a lesson plan based on an explication of the title and the first three lines of the Declaration intended to make the American founding era relevant to today's college students. Assuming civic education is a major goal of teaching American Government, assuming…

Scholars have researched how voters make decisions for well over a half a century, but these studies are limited in what they are able to say about how voters make decisions because they have focused on the choice rather than the process. Most of these studies have focused on the choice that voters reach or the way their memories are structured,…

Although social stratification usually calls to mind the hierarchical ranking of individuals, sociology often broadly considers it the ranking of any social objects. The Treiman Socio-Economic Index (SEI), for example, provides a quantitative assessment of the hierarchical ranking of occupations. This dissertation considers the hierarchical…