The number of African American and Hispanic mayors of American cities has grown steadily since 1967, the year that Cleveland elected Carl Stokes the first minority mayor of a major American city.Throughout this paper, we use the term “minority” to refer to African Americans and Hispanics. In doing so, we do not assume that African American and Hispanic voters have the same preferences, nor do we intend to minimize the significant diversity within each of these groups. Rather, we group Hispanics and African Americans together because of the relative disadvantage members of both communities have experienced in comparison to whites in the United States. Over the past three decades, cities in all parts of the country have elected black and Hispanic mayors, including the five largest: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia. As the new century begins, almost one-third (25/76) of major American cities have minority mayors. The election of minority mayors is a clear sign of political progress by minorities since passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s.

A simulation of the foreign policy decision-making process, as described in this article, can assist an instructor in linking students' abstract understanding of complex political events, circumstances, and decision making to the real-world interplay of the multiple factors involved in decision making. It is this type of active learning that helps bring a student's abstract understanding into the concrete world. Instead of being passive learners relying on an instructor's knowledge, students are active participants in the learning process.

Role-playing games and simulations emerged as a classroom technique to provide students an experiential or hands-on approach to learning. Early use of simulations in the political science classroom primarily focused on teaching American politics (Kaarbo and Lantis 1997). However, the contemporary use of simulations now extends into comparative politics (Shellman 2001) and international relations (Jefferson 1999; Thomas 2002).

Women's parliamentary representation in the 27 long-established but “unfinished democracies” (Haavio-Mannila et al. 1985) of the world varies between 2.3% in Japan's lower house to 39.0% in unicameral Finland. Women state legislators in the United States range from 4% in Kentucky to 39% in Washington in the lower house. Women are 11% of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The causes of this variation are primarily the electoral arrangements by which legislators are chosen and, secondarily, the political, economic, and social context.

Favorable societal conditions will not substitute for unfavorable electoral systems for women to reach their optimal representation in parliament and local legislatures. But unfavorable contextual conditions—including cultural biases and discriminatory practices—can be overcome to a great extent by alternate electoral systems. Electoral arrangements are not neutral; they are the means used to exclude or include groups. The arrangements are amenable to change faster than social biases and other barriers to women's election opportunity and fair representation.

Democracy falls short when women of whatever color or ethnic group cannot cast an effective vote to elect representatives of their choice or to enact laws they believe are critically needed. When there are higher proportions of women in parliament, for example, more laws are enacted that benefit children (Lijphart 1991).

Despite mediocre approval ratings and below average economic growth, George W. Bush has a good chance of winning a second term in the White House according to the time-forchange forecasting model.

Given the large number of cases and considerable institutional and contextual variation across and within local governments, one might assume that the study of local elections is an area already well harvested by political scientists. The truth, however, is that this area of inquiry is relatively unexplored. In fact, to say that a field of study on local elections exists would be a bit of an overstatement. Not only is the literature rather small and not particularly cohesive, but the data collection and methods of analysis are also somewhat primitive, particularly compared to research on state and federal elections. While, on the one hand, this lack of subfield development means that there are many unanswered and even unexplored questions, on the other hand, it means that the possibilities for future research are practically limitless.

To answer the question posed by the title of this article, we sketch what we mean by the concepts of civility and argument and engagement; note the ways in which the rise of partisan media menaces civil engaged argument; and close with analysis of an exchange between a prominent Democrat and Republican that illustrates the importance of common definitions and sources of trusted evidence.

Schneider and Ingram introduced the pivotal theory of social construction of target populations in the American Political Science Review nearly 25 years ago. There, they developed four ideal type groups: advantaged, contenders, dependents, and deviants. They noted that there may be contention around the construction of the groups but implied an expectation of consensus. There has not been, however, a systematic categorization of politically salient target groups based on these categories, nor has there been an empirical assessment of whether or the extent to which consensus around the social constructions of salient target groups exists. We revisit this theory to offer a novel perspective and do so by leveraging advances in technology and methodological strategies. By crowdsourcing the task of evaluating the social construction of various target populations, we are able to assess underlying assumptions of theory as well as outline avenues for future research on policy design.

This article investigates the impact that the decision to switch an academic conference to an online event had on its carbon footprint. Using the example of the biggest European Political Science conference, the European Consortium for Political Research General Conference, it comprehensively estimates the amount of greenhouse gases produced by the virtual event and by the hypothetical case, if the event had taken place physically, including emissions from electricity usage, travel, heating, and catering. The carbon footprint of the virtual conference turned out to be between at least 97 and 200 times smaller than it would have been if the meeting had taken place in person. Hybrid conferences, particularly if those participants from far away join the event online, combined with the promotion of land-bound travel for those attending in person—even if this means longer travel times than flying—could be a feasible compromise to reduce emissions by almost 90%.

From the establishment of the United States Postal Service and the invention of the telegram, to the introduction of C-SPAN and the explosion of the Internet, the development of new communication technologies has always affected the functioning of Congress. Not surprisingly, recent innovations such as e-mail and social networking have spurred Congress to alter the way it operates as an institution, and rethink the manner in which it engages the public. In this brief examination, I discuss recent changes in congressional behavior and practices due to technological innovation, specifically the proliferation of social networking Web sites. Then, I cautiously predict future trends in the use of social networking and related technologies as they become more integrated in congressional offices and increase the capacity for more robust internal and constituent communications over time.

The current method for selecting presidential nominees by the two major parties went into place mostly in 1972 and certainly by 1976, after Buckely v. Valeo. It was the natural culmination of reform efforts over the history of the republic in that, while prior reforms consistently invoked greater openness and democratic governance as rationales for their adoption, this method actually empowered voters as the central figures in determining who would be nominated (see Aldrich 1987). This fact became fully evident almost at once. The selection via primaries of senator George McGovern in 1972 and governor Jimmy Carter in 1976 as the Democratic presidential nominees arguably not only would not have happened, they would not have even come close to winning nomination without successful appeal to the voting public.

The 2012 presidential campaign takes place at a time of deep political division in the United States. Democrats and Republicans differ sharply over Barack Obama's performance in office as well as a wide range of issues ranging from government spending and health care to immigration and gay marriage. These divisions are shaping the strategies of the candidates and the outlook for November. Overwhelming majorities of Democrats and Republicans, including overwhelming majorities of independents who lean toward a party, can be expected to support their own party's nominee. As a result, the outcome will depend on which party does a better job of mobilizing its supporters and appealing to a small group of swing voters in 10 or 12 battleground states.