Structural questions about the undergraduate political science major have spurred debates in the field for more than thirty years. Today, resurgent growth of unusually sharp threats to American democracy fuel familiar curricular questions with new urgency. However, the combined effects of inertia, bureaucratic hurdles, and resource constraints…

This article outlines a semester-long advocacy project that walks students through the steps to develop a successful advocacy campaign, culminating in a trip to the state capitol to "lobby" legislators. The manuscript provides faculty with the basic structure for the project and suggests gradable assignments. The project builds on the…

This article reports on a movement to create a radical new model of higher education in Europe and beyond based on the practices of self-education and militant/co-research during 2011. The article provides an account of a group that lies at the heart of this movement, the Edu-Factory Collective. The approach advocated by the Edu-Factory Collective…

What if Stephen Douglas instead of Abraham Lincoln had won the U.S. presidential election of 1860? What if John F. Kennedy had not carried some of the eight states he won by 2 percentage points or fewer in 1960? What if six hundred more people in Florida had voted for Al Gore in 2000? And what if, in that same year, the U.S. House of…

In this article, the author attempts three things: (a) to describe the main beliefs of the "continental empiricist" epistemology that dominated the study of the social sciences in North America since the mid 1930s; (b) to speak of the influence of this epistemology on the dominant or mainstream school in the study of politics; and (c) to…

As the current issues about the nature and quality of education are disseminated through the media, gifted students are privy to these issues and educators should be concerned about the intellectual and affective consequences they might have on this population of students. Teaching gifted students to become politically savvy enables them to…

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…

My subject is the way Peter Bachrach addressed the question of poverty. But given that I was his student and research assistant and that I am a political scientist largely because of him, it is impossible to resist a few words about the experience of being in his classrooms. Peter was an inspiring teacher of politics. The substantive content of…

In this article, the author discusses Black intellectual superstar Melissa Harris-Perry, who is ditching drama at Princeton University in order to build a new, unique center at Tulane, in the heart of the South. The new center will focus on the study of race, gender, and politics in the American South, a job created specifically with her in mind.…

Social studies teachers are tasked with aiding their students' abilities to engage in public debate and make politically sound decisions. One way the authors have found to help facilitate this is to draw connections between content knowledge and current political conversations through the use of clips from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." While…

People often make choices that go against their own best interests. In the controversial bestseller "Nudge," Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that people can benefit from simple "nudges" to improve their decision-making. In an upper-level undergraduate course on political decision-making, I created a series of assignments around "Nudge." In…

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…

Dissemination of journal submission data is critical for identifying editorial bias, creating an informed scholarly marketplace, and critically mapping the contours of a discipline's scholarship. However, our survey and case study investigations indicate that nearly a decade after the Perestroika movement began, political science journals remain…

During my 45 years as an academic, I have followed the admonition sometimes attributed to the legendary Jedi warrior Obi-Wan Kenobe that political scientists should "use [their] power for good and not for evil." In this spirit, I have devoted substantial portions of my career to public service by providing strategic advice and campaign management…

In November 2007, I helped found a blog, "The Monkey Cage", with two of my colleagues, David Park and Lee Sigelman. This site joined a nascent political science blogosphere that is now composed of at least 80 blogs (Farrell and Sides 2010). The goals of "The Monkey Cage" are to publicize political science research and use this research to comment…