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ABSTRACTDespite positive findings, small-group activities continue to lag behind lectures in political science classrooms. This article argues that one barrier to wider adoption of more innovative activities is uncertainty about how to efficiently and fairly create teams that each are heterogeneous and as a set are balanced across relevant characteristics. We first describe recent findings and strategies for creating teams; we then detail our concrete, general approach for incorporating several student characteristics into team creation. We then describe implementations of this approach using freely available software in two undergraduate political science courses—one in American politics and one in political methodology. In these applications and in a variety of simulated data, we demonstrate that teams created using our method are better balanced than those created by randomly allocating students to teams.

Contends that Claude Lefort is both a contingency theorist & a postfoundationalist. Both contingency & the emptiness of the place of power indicate that society is not built on a stable ground: they designate the absence of social or historical necessity, the absence of a positive foundation of society. What they also designate, though, is that the dimension of ground does not simply disappear since it remains present as absent. This is the point where democracy enters the stage. This interpretation of Lefort's work substantiates the claim that democracy must be understood as the ontic recognition of society's ontological condition. By this, we understand the institutional recognition & discursive actualization of the absence of a positive ground of society. By actualizing the absent ground within the particular institutional, cultural, & discursive dispositive of democracy, a place, or rather, a "non-place" is symbolically allocated to it. It is obvious that this can only be a paradoxical enterprise since it is impossible to fully institutionalize something purely negative & absent into a presence. Therefore, democracy has to aim at the recognition of absence as absence, ie, the recognition of the impossibility of founding society once & for all. By accepting the logic of groundlessness & self: division as constitutive, the dimension of ground does not disappear. Rather, it is emptied of any positive content & retained as something that is absent. This is what makes democracy -- & Lefort's theory of democracy -- postfoundational: unlike any other form of society, democracy is founded on the recognition of the very absence of any definite foundation. 21 References. Adapted from the source document.

Frontmatter -- Cover -- Jerzy J. Wiatr: Political Leadership Between Democracy and Authoritarianism. Comparative and Historical Perspectives -- Contents -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Chapter One: The essence of leadership -- 1. Philosophy of history: determinism versus activism -- 2. Leader's personality: a psychological interpretation -- 3. Ethics of leadership -- Chapter Two: A typology of political leadership -- 1. Max Weber's pure types of legitimate rule -- 2. Controversies over the charismatic leadership -- Chapter Three: Democracy and political leadership -- 1. Leaders and citizens in democracy -- 2. Presidential leadership -- 3. Leadership in parliamentary systems -- 4. Democratic leadership and party systems -- 5. Conservatives, reformers, and nation-builders -- Chapter Four: Autocratic leaders in modern times -- 1. A typology of non-democratic regimes -- 2. The men on horseback -- 3. Totalitarian and authoritarian party leaders -- Chapter Five: Political leadership in the transition to democracy -- 1. Alternative explanations of transition -- 2. Modes of extrication from non-democratic regimes -- 3. Different outcomes: democracies or renewed authoritarianism -- 4. Democratic consolidation: the importance of leadership -- 5. Dilemmas of transformative leadership -- Chapter Six: New authoritarianism and political leadership -- 1. Nationalist populism in the 21st century -- a) Russia -- b) Belarus -- c) Turkey -- d) Hungary -- e) Slovakia, Serbia and Croatia -- f) Poland -- 2. New and old authoritarianism: similaritiesand differences -- 3. New authoritarianism and the post-communist heritage -- 4. Political leadership in new authoritarianism -- Conclusions -- Backmatter -- References -- Keywords -- About the author -- Back cover.