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Aaron Wildavsky has argued that it is theoretically more useful to think of political preferences as rooted in political culture than to entertain alternative bases such as schemas or ideologies. In the APSA presidential address in which he made his case, Wildavsky also advocated a program of research on political cultures, and welcomed "challenges and improvements." David Laitin accepts the invitation; he variously takes issue with Wildavsky's concept of political culture.

The article is dedicated to the comparative content-analysis of the two excerpts, considering foreign political leadership theories for the Russian readers and researches and related to the different stages of Soviet and Russian political science development. There are also quotative and quotative analyses of the theories provided by the author.

AbstractThis article contributes to the discussion regarding the relationship between idealisation, de-idealisation and cognitive scientific progress. In this, I raise the question of the significance of the gradual de-idealisation procedure for constructing political science theories. I show that conceptions that assume the reversibility of the idealisation process can be an extremely useful theoretical perspective in reconstructions of political science modelling and analyses of scientific progress in political science. I base my position on the results of the methodological reconstruction of Richard Jankowski's theory of voting. My reconstruction and results of empirical studies show that by gradually removing simplifying assumptions, models can emerge that more accurately identify the determinants of the voting decision and the corresponding relationships. In the case I analysed, the transition from coarse-grained to fine-grained models likely demarcates the line of scientific progress.

While the 2015 General Election produced mixed electoral fortunes for the major parties, the results for women have been historic – 191 women were elected to the House of Commons on 7 May, including a record number of Scottish women MPs. This article reports on the 2015 GE from the perspective of women's representation, providing a gendered analysis of the election campaign and assessing the parties' efforts to increase the number of women elected in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. It argues that while the 2015 elections may have made some cracks in the political 'glass ceiling', further increases in women's representation are unlikely without greater commitment by all of the parties and without the use of strong equality measures, including legislative gender quotas.

Researchers in political science are devoting increasing attention to the ontological commitments of their theories – that is, to what those theories presuppose about the nature of the political world. This article focuses on a recent contribution to this 'ontological turn' in political science ( Sibeon, 1999 ). Tensions are identified in Sibeon's account of the causal interplay between agency and social structure. It is argued that these tensions can be resolved by reflecting explicitly on ontological issues, in particular the causal efficacy of social structure, using a particular approach to the philosophy of the social sciences known as critical realism. The value of such reflection for the explanatory power of political analysis is highlighted.

An introductory chapter notes that the volume grew out of a 2001 meeting of political scientists & sociologists held at the U of Maryland to assess the status & future potential of knowledge about mobilization & repression. Although there is a large body of literature dealing with these topics, attention has been imbalanced, & empirical results are extremely variable. A review of the literature on the impact of repressive behavior on protest highlights data sources & varied methodologies used for analyses. The complexity of the repression-mobilization nexus is pointed out & a model for effectively conceptualizing the relationship between dissidents & state authorities is presented. Attention is called to how the Maryland conference challenged & changed the understandings of participants & the fundamentally different model of state-dissident interactions that emerged from the research presented at the conference. The contributors to this volume analyze existing research & offer new insights. A synopsis of each chapter is included. 2 Figures, 83 References. J. Lindroth

An introductory chapter notes that the volume grew out of a 2001 meeting of political scientists & sociologists held at the U of Maryland to assess the status & future potential of knowledge about mobilization & repression. Although there is a large body of literature dealing with these topics, attention has been imbalanced, & empirical results are extremely variable. A review of the literature on the impact of repressive behavior on protest highlights data sources & varied methodologies used for analyses. The complexity of the repression-mobilization nexus is pointed out & a model for effectively conceptualizing the relationship between dissidents & state authorities is presented. Attention is called to how the Maryland conference challenged & changed the understandings of participants & the fundamentally different model of state-dissident interactions that emerged from the research presented at the conference. The contributors to this volume analyze existing research & offer new insights. A synopsis of each chapter is included. 2 Figures, 83 References. J. Lindroth

ABSTRACTWhat information can I trust? What sources should I include in my paper? Where can I find a quote that fits my argument? Undergraduates ask instructors, classmates, and/or librarians these questions. Meanwhile, instructors bemoan the gap between their expectations for student writing and the finished products. Navigating a large volume of scholarship and critically evaluating potential sources is straightforward for faculty who have long passed key information literacy (IL) thresholds. However, students usually have not reached these thresholds themselves. We offer practical tools—grounded in a new framework for teaching IL—to address these challenges. We demonstrate how instructors can (and should) teach IL skills, with or without direct assistance from librarians. We recommend encouraging students to build context around information sources and slow down as they search. Implementing these tools moves students from passively synthesizing a limited set of (possibly biased) materials to engaging in genuine scholarly inquiry.