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ABSTRACTIntroductory American government is a common component of college and university core curricula and, as such, it often is taught in large sections. This makes active learning more difficult, which may contribute to student dissatisfaction and lower levels of student achievement. In turn, this can affect larger issues of university retention. This article considers whether different models of instruction in large classes affect student success and satisfaction. We compare a lecture-only class and one that combined lectures with smaller student breakout sessions. To our surprise, we found that students in the breakout—lecture class were not more satisfied and did not succeed at higher levels as compared to their peers in the lecture-only class. Above all, attendance is the key predictor of student success.

This paper investigates the religious dimension of Republican legislators' participation in one-minute speeches during the 104th Congress (1995–1996). Many have characterized the House Republican Conference that emerged after the 1994 elections as a highly cohesive majority party. Even in that context, however, legislators represent varied personal agendas, and in part these are informed by religion. We topically coded a subset of floor speeches to measure the extent to which variation is observed in the issues addressed by Members of Congress. The findings demonstrate that on key policy domains, such as the role of government, culture, and social welfare, speech participation varies systematically on the basis of member religion. This suggests that legislative participation is influenced by genuine personal preferences in additional to strategic political factors.

Existing studies of executive orders tend to focus on two issues: how the frequency of executive orders has changed over time and whether the nature of presidential power has changed such that we should reconsider Neustadt's thesis that bargaining is the essence of presidential power. Although institutionalists bemoan the literature's focus on the "personal presidency," no study of unilateral uses of power has taken into account the systematic influence of presidents' personalities. Instead, studies that consider why some presidents issue more executive orders than others focus on contextual factors, not attributes of the presidents. In this article we address this gap in the literature by examining whether presidents' personality traits significantly influence their propensity to issue executive orders. The results of our analysis demonstrate that both personality and institutional factors play a significant role in presidents' decisions to act unilaterally.

AbstractThis article investigates the attitudes of Israeli Jews on the proper relationship between religion and the state, using data from the 2009 Israeli National Election Study. Specifically we test whether association with the secular or religious communities structures mass attitudes on this important dimension of Israeli politics. Mass level disagreement in this area dates back to the pre-state period and represents a longstanding cleavage in Zionist thought and Israeli politics. We find that mass attitudes toward religion and public life are associated with religious observance and identification with religious parties and social groups.