Suchergebnisse

For some time, the growing stature of political science as an independent social science has been a notable feature in American universities. Yet, up to the present time, the categories of this new field of scientific endeavor have not found their way into the indexing departments of libraries, nor have they been recognized by indexers of other collections. Even the editors of encyclopedias, people of great learning and ability, have omitted some of the most significant topics of political science, because of the lack of any accepted index indicating the range of the field and focusing attention upon its primary categories. The American Political Science Review itself is confronted with the problem of a suitable subject-index. The growing complexity of all kinds of materials bearing upon the work of political scientists, and more particularly the increasing mass of public documents, has become more and more baffling. Even the skillful indexers of the Congressional Record, for example, seem unaware of the major topics of interest for political science, and thus no sign-posts of the usual kind have been made available to workers in our field.

AbstractPrediction markets are designed to aggregate the information of many individuals to forecast future events. These markets provide participants with an incentive to seek information and a forum for interaction, making markets a promising tool to motivate student learning. We carried out a quasi-experiment in an introductory political science class to study the effect of prediction markets on student engagement with the course topics. Although we found no significant improvement in students' enthusiasm or extent of topical reading, we did find that those students who were already reading broadly at the course start were more likely to trade actively in the markets. These findings indicate that prediction markets may be most successful as an education tool in settings, like graduate education, where individuals are already knowledgeable about the topics of the market, instead of an introductory learning context.

AbstractThe political development of contemporary China defies existing political theories. The framework of "political science" based on the 'rational man hypothesis' has proven to be fallible in terms of correctly envisioning China's future. Appertaining to the Chinese political history, historical political science offers not only epistemology and methodology of the subject, but also an ontological element, for observation. With respect to historical political science, contemporary Chinese politics is considered to be the natural genetic extension of the Chinese civilization as well as a continuous and unified development process spanning over a period of 70 years ever since the People's Republic of China was founded. Historical political science, deemed to be a tailored research approach for the development of contemporary Chinese politics, essentially adds further value and significance to this discipline.