This brief essay deals with an attempt to teach students how to watch a network news show. It is a somewhat painstaking but entertaining experiment which allows the teacher to demonstrate that televised news has unique properties that can be distinguished from those of the print media. It avoids the ideological debate that televised news is biased—left or right—and focuses attention on the adversarial and dramatic properties that inhere in the visual media as practices by networks that are competing for ratings. And it has a modest goal, minimizing such important but ultimately judgmental inquiries as to whether the networks should have allowed live interviews with American hostages who were menaced by off-camera terrorists, or whether their coverage of Hanoi's celebration of the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon took sufficient note of the boat people.

“Inside the Beltway” is the phrase most often used by observers of national politics to capital area. Apparently, according to critics, the only people who really follow or care about the “inside baseball” of Washington intrigue are the people who live within the 257 sq. miles of roadway. The rest of the country is either unconcerned or unaware, since a) the Washington Post is not available for home delivery in their area, b) they are not invited to Georgetown cocktail parties or intimate Chevy Chase dinners, c) they aren't in contact with the 40,000 plus lawyers in D.C. or d) all of the above.

Despite the difficulty of following Washington politics on a daily basis, it is something that cannot be totally avoided.

The political science major requirements at Bryn Mawr are characterized by a great deal of flexibility. This is at first glance a good thing, but on second thought we may begin to feel a bit guilty about our relative lack of structure, as though we were getting away with something—especially in the context of the Bryn Mawr ethos in which rigidity and departmental insularity are generally taken to be the surest signs of academic excellence. (The really best, most respectable, majors are the toughest—i.e., the ones that require students to take the most courses within the department.) Is the political science major at Bryn Mawr respectable? Or does this department treat its students as the pastry cooks in Plato's Gorgias treat children, stuffing them with the yummies they foolishly desire, and so easily defeating the heroic attempts of good doctors to persuade the young to take the salutary medicine their health requires?

Political scientists, whatever skeptical pretensions they have in theory, cannot help but believe that political knowledge is good for human beings. This belief is based on another: well-informed citizens are better citizens. Scientific enlightenment makes citizens better. Political scientists cannot help but be concerned with the education of citizens.

Consider the early survey research that seemed to show American citizens are mostly ignorant and apathetic. Its purpose was not to undermine responsible citizenship by showing that such citizenship is not possible. Instead, its purpose was to make it possible, perhaps for the first time. For some, it signaled the need for a project of citizen education to eliminate ignorance and apathy. For others, the proper conclusion was that democratic normative theory must be reformulated to make the idealism of citizens responsible and effective by locating it within the boundaries of the possible. Either way, it was clear that the significance of the research findings were not viewed as purely or even primarily theoretical. They could and were used to improve political practice, to improve the American regime in accordance with its citizens’ values.

The emergence within the past two decades of implementation as a distinct subject for analysis has been an important development in both public administration and policy studies. Since the Pressman and Wildavsky study of the activities of the Economic Development Administration in Oakland, there has been a steady stream of books and articles presenting case studies of implementation or suggesting methodological approaches for understanding the process or for improving it. Despite this growth in the literature, the teacher of implementation continues to be without broad conceptual frameworks for presenting the available material. The teaching of implementation remains an eclectic endeavor because of the lack of viable theory. Indeed a major writer in the area has urged scholars to focus on providing policy relevant data because he can not foresee at this time the development of generally applicable theory. I shall argue here that the conceptual failings of the study of implementation can be traced to its origins as a separate area for study and that an understanding of these limitations may point the way toward better theoretical structures.

In the fall of 1983, I used, “Women, Political Action and Political Participation,” by Virginia Sapiro, as part of a group of materials in a course on “Ethnic and Minority Politics.” The purpose of the course was to evaluate the experience of different groups in their struggle to achieve political power, to examine how these struggles resembled one another and how they differed, and to take a closer look at some major political actors.

The following note describes a skit designed primarily as a pedagogic device to illustrate in a meaningful (and, hopefully, provocative and humorous) way Marx's analysis of capitalism. Numerous concepts and phenomena are “brought to life” in the skit: exploitation, immiseration and alienation of workers, maintenance wage, labor theory of value, mechanization and the division of labor, systemic tendencies toward economic crises, relationship of various superstructural components (welfare, religion, etc.) to the economic base, and the radical theory of the state. More specifically, the economic base of a hypothetical capitalist society consists of a stylized production process involving “resources” (Oreo cookies), “labor” (students selected from the class) and eventually “capital” (table knives). The ability of the monopoly capitalist to accumulate surplus by exploiting workers becomes manifest. Other elements of the social superstructure (unions, government, religion, etc.)

“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Although this adage may apply to many aspects of politics, it certainly does not apply to the methodology used in studying this field. As a midcareer student returning to complete a Ph.D., two incidents brought the changes that have occurred in methodology to my immediate attention. First, I was not able to find one of my old research sources in the periodical section of the library. I soon discovered that the Midwest Journal of Political Science is now the American Journal of Political Science. Once I found the journal, I discovered that I could not understand at least one half of the articles in it. Fortunately, I was in a graduate program that required statistics courses and computerized data analysis for all students. After one statistics course and mastering the use of statistical packages for computers, a new approach to the study of politics became available to me.