There is a passage in Richardson Dilworth's “Privatization, the WorldWater Crisis, and the Social Contract” (PS, January2007, 49) that requires careful attention.

I'm happy to report that I agree wholeheartedly with Roger Mastersthat we humans have a biological rather than a socially constructedneed for water. In fact, Prof. Masters and I are so much inagreement on this point that I don't feel it necessary to consult“the literature on mammalian biological needs” as he suggests. As amammal myself, I firmly believe that I would die were I denied waterfor a sufficient length of time, though I plan on keeping this anuntested hypothesis.

The October, 2006 issue of PS (923–4) published aquiz on the U.S. Military alongside a call for submissions on whatwe should be teaching students about our military. The essays hererepresent a fraction of the response. Other proposals have beenincorporated in several panels that will be presented at the APSAAnnual Meeting in Chicago this fall. Still others have beenincorporated in a volume contracted to Palgrave Press andprovisionally titled Inside Defense.

Symposium authors' bios.

When the U.S. deploys its forces around the world, an increasinglyimportant part of its operations is no longer managed by the U.S.military, per se, but rather by what some call contractors, otherscall private military and security companies, and still others callmercenaries. In this essay, I will briefly describe the privatesecurity industry and the larger global market for force that it isa part of and how the U.S. military's increasing reliance on privateforces brings both benefit and risk.

The conduct of war is among the most important acts of the state. Inthe last century alone, failure in this undertaking has toppledgovernments and imposed hostile occupation under a conqueror's rulefor hundreds of millions from Paris to Warsaw and Tokyo to Jakarta.Military failure in World War I destroyed the Ottoman,Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires and created a host ofnew states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in their stead. Alliedmilitary victory in World War II made global superpowers of theUnited States and the Soviet Union, and split Germany into twocountries; the success of Soviet arms ended Latvian, Lithuanian, andEstonian independence, and resulted in a generation of subjugationunder Soviet satellite rule for the peoples of Eastern Europe.Pyrrhic victory in two world wars exhausted Britain and brought anend to its global economic hegemony. Failure in internal war hastoppled governments from Afghanistan to Vietnam; variations in theconduct of such wars can mean the difference between decades ofmisery in grinding stalemates as in Lebanon or in a rapid, decisiveconclusion as in Rwanda's.

The current condition of Army manpower, like the situation in Iraq,is grave and deteriorating. The January 2007 decision by the GeorgeW. Bush administration to send additional ground combat and supporttroops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has thrown the Army'smanpower shortages into stark relief. This latest escalation,however, not only runs the risk of breaking the all-volunteer Armybut also undermines our national security. Several questions musttherefore be addressed: Is an all-volunteer Army desirable? What arethe current difficulties facing Army recruitment and retention? Whatconsequences have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had on theservice? Before engaging a more substantive discussion whichincludes the present demographics of the force and the recruitmentprocess, one point should be made clear. We believe theall-volunteer model is the right one and should be maintained if atall possible.

“What Kinds of Guns Are They Buying for Your Butter” was the subtitleof a 1982 “People's Guide to National Defense.” It needs updating 25years later. This essay cannot offer a comprehensive catalogue ofU.S. weaponry; its goal is to outline what every citizen should knowabout the range and capabilities of our arsenal.

On many campuses, the sight of a student in a military uniform iscommon. On other campuses, the military is a distant institutionwith few visible affiliations. Why are some students in uniform,what are they doing, what are the costs and benefits to theindividual, and what are the implications for the nation? Thisarticle will discuss these questions, along with a brief history ofthe Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program and itsrelationship to the often-discussed civil-military gap.

From the time of the conflict in Vietnam until the end of the ColdWar, NGOs and the military rarely thought of themselves as havinganything in common. In fact, people like ourselves—a career navalofficer and a career pacifist—almost never met.The positions presented in this article do notrepresent either those of the Defense Department or Search forCommon Ground.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) is one of the most important—if notthe most important—public policies developedover the last half century to increase access to the U.S. politicalsystem for people of color. The VRA also provides an importantcontext for understanding the ascension of nonwhite groups into theelected 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 thepresent-day significance of the VRA for the political representationof communities of color by examining the implications ofmajority-minority districts and other key provisions in the VRA forthe election of nonwhite officials in the beginning years of thetwenty-first century.

Evidence suggesting that the growth of civic roots in adolescence maybe crucial to the long-term development of citizenship hasstimulated research into factors that might influence civicdevelopment during this time. One interesting finding to emerge fromthat exploration is the apparent importance ofdiscussion to the development of civiccompetence. Adolescents who discuss politics and current events withtheir parents, peers, or teachers tend to score higher than otheryouth on measures of civic behaviors, attitudes, and skills. Theydevelop higher levels of political knowledge, show greater intentionto vote in the future, and do better on a range of civic outcomesfrom petitioning and boycotting to raising money for charities andparticipating in community meetings (Torney-Purta et al. 2001; Andolina et al. 2003).

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

As political scientists, many of us encourage our students to getinvolved in community activities and local politics; and in factmany of our political science colleagues have run for state andlocal (and, less frequently, national) office. While the literatureon parties, elections, and voting behavior may help provide us withsome context when we (or our students) enter the political arena,there is a striking dearth of literature on voting behavior (andcandidate behavior) in local elections. What Herson (1957) referred to as “the lost world ofmunicipal government” can still be so characterized today, though afew recent studies have attempted to predict winners of municipalraces (for example, McGleneghan and Ragland 2002; Lieske 1989). Thisarticle analyzes my own education in local politics, which resultedfrom my candidacy for the Town Council of Cazenovia, New York inNovember, 2005. I came to the experience of participating in a localcampaign with expectations shaped by my teaching and research inAmerican politics at the national level, and found that theseexpectations often gave way to the specifics of context. JenniferLawless, 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 ingiving to one or more of the following programs from 1996 through2006: APSA awards, programs, the Congressional Fellowship Program,and the Centennial Campaign. APSA thanks these donors for ensuringthat the benefits of membership and the influence of the professionwill extend far into the future. APSA will update and print thislist annually in the January issue of PS.

While many bemoan the increasingly large role rankings play inAmerican higher education, their prominence and importance areindisputable. Such rankings have many different audiences, rangingfrom prospective undergraduates or graduate students, to foundationsand government funders, to university administrators identifyingstrengths and weaknesses of their school. This diverse audiencenecessarily has varying hopes for what “quality” is measured inschool rankings, and different uses for the rankings themselves. Butalthough there are currently a wide variety of ways to assessgraduate school quality, most existing surveys have recognizedfailings that compromise their usefulness to at least one of thesedifferent constituencies.The authorsextend their thanks to William Bowen, Derek Bruff, JonathanCole, Philip Katz, Gary King, Robert Townsend, HarrietZuckerman, and two anonymous PS reviewers fortheir valuable comments on and criticisms of earlier drafts ofthis paper.

There are many different ways to develop rankings of Ph.D.-grantingacademic departments. Perhaps the most common method isreputational: we simply ask knowledgeable scholars in the disciplineto provide their rankings and aggregate these in some fashion. Otherways involve more “objective indicators.” But, of course,departments have multiple attributes, e.g., we might be interestedin how good a department is as a place to get a Ph.D., or we mightbe interested simply in the research record of its faculty, etc.Thus, we might want to use different indicators to measure differentaspects of the department.

“Publish or perish.” Every graduate student has heard the phrase.Many junior scholars understand that it reflects the cold reality ofprofessional survival in any political science department that basestenure and promotion decisions, in whole or in part, on a record ofdemonstrated scholarly achievement. Despite occasionalpronouncements by college presidents or faculty committees thatteaching should be given greater weight in personnel decisions, thepressure to publish will not soon subside. If anything, it may bebecoming more acute, as graduate students entering the job marketstruggle to publish some portion of their dissertation in arespected scholarly journal so as to distinguish themselves from thepack of applicants presenting otherwise similar credentials.I wish to thank Jack Jacobs, LennyMarkovitz, Michael Hiscox, and the graduate students at the CUNYGraduate Center and Harvard University for many usefulsuggestions and comments on the presentations that served as thebasis for this article. I have incorporated ideas offered by JimJackson, Marianne Stewart, and John Geer at an editors'roundtable in which we participated at the 2006 MidwestPolitical Science Association meeting. Bob Lineberry and twoanonymous referees helped me to clarify certain points in themanuscript. I am responsible for any errors thatremain.

Just as there was a boom in the establishment of Master's of BusinessAdministration programs over the past 30 or more years, today thereis an equivalent boom in graduate programs in the field of publicpolicy. This is so for the transition states of Central and EasternEurope (CEE) and the former Soviet Union where the dynamics ofglobalization and “Europeanization” are apparent and the pressuresfor reform pronounced (Verheijen and Connaughton 2003, 843). Appointing personnel with the educationalprerequisites necessary for managing reform and meeting thechallenges of globalization has been problematic for both officialactors such as national education ministries, internationalorganizations, and bilateral development agencies, as well as fornon-state actors such as the business sector, philanthropicfoundations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The need forgraduates who can function in international and cross-culturalcontexts is prompting institutions to create new courses andprofessional degree programs (Mallea 1998,16).

Tom Mann is, well, beaming. Five months ago he wrotea Sunday Outlook piece for the Washington Postarguing that “the prevailing view in Washington today”—namely, that“there's probably no way congressional Republicans can lose thisfall”—is “wrong.” Tom was vindicated on Election Day when theDemocrats won control of both houses of Congress, and here at the“America Votes 2006” conference in Little Rock, co-sponsored by theClinton School of Public Service and the State Legislative LeadersFoundation, he is accepting the congratulations of, among others,me. Other elections prognosticators at the conference, such asCharlie Cook and the Washington Post's ChrisCillizza, have already moved on to speculating about what's going tohappen in 2008, but Tom is rightly enjoying the moment.