The “Seats in Trouble” forecasting model predicted in mid-August that Republicans would gain a landslide number of seats in the 2010 elections to the U.S. House of Representatives, and that this number would be sufficiently large to restore their majority control of the House, which was lost in the 2006 midterms. Republicans were predicted to gain approximately 51 or 52 seats, about the magnitude of their 1994 midterm victory and the largest seat change since the Truman-Dewey election of 1948. As predicted, on Election Day, Republicans won a landslide number of seats, enough to give them a substantial House majority.

The editors of Comparative Politics appreciated the article by Stephen Yoder and Brittany Bramlett on journal transparency both for the wealth of data it contained and for the authors' efforts to identify professional dilemmas that can arise from a “lack of transparency” in the procedures of many political science journals. In surveying the editors of the top thirty political science journals, Yoder and Bramlett found that most journals do not publicly release submission and decision data, which they suggest may owe in part to poor recordkeeping due to staff shortages, rapid staff turnover, and the migration of journals from one sponsoring institution to another.

Figures 3–5 were printed incorrectly on pp. 351–52 of the above publication. The correct figures, titles, and captions, are presented below.

Many political scientists first learned of anthropologist Mary Douglas's cultural theory (CT) through Aaron Wildavsky's APSA presidential address (Wildavsky 1987), in which he sought to explain the value of this theoretical approach for political science. Since then, much additional work has been done to develop CT as an ambitious general theory of politics.

As a pracademic for my entire career and a department chair for almost 20 years, I found the wonderful symposium on pracademics to be right on target. The examples and the advice for faculty and administrators are invaluable to our profession. Thank you for publishing it.

Based on information available in July, we predicted that the Republicans would receive 52.9% of the total House vote and end up holding 229 seats, gaining control from the Democrats in the process (Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien 2010b). Our national vote forecast proved to be nearly correct, undershooting the actual Republican share (53.8%) by slightly less than one percentage point. Our seat forecast was a little less accurate. Although we did foresee the House changing hands, we did not predict such a large Republican windfall in seats—we forecast a “mere” swing of 50 seats, which was short of the actual outcome by about 13 seats. The Republican seat total of 242, however, was well within the 95% confidence interval (199 to 259).

Most Americans lack any substantial degree of ideological sophistication (Kinder 1998), yet they often manage to express coherent views across a range of issues. The conventional explanation for this is that people rely on judgmental shortcuts (e.g., Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991). These “heuristics” permit individuals with sufficient political sophistication to sort and filter incoming messages to form relatively consistent views that align with preexisting values (Zaller 1992).

This lecture was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September 3, 2010.

In our recent article forecasting the 2010 U.S. congressional elections, we argue for a model based on theory rather than tracking (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2010). A sound theoretical explanation of vote choice in House races should, ceteris paribus, predict better than a simple dependence on variables that proxy the vote, such as the generic ballot question. We posited a simple but classical explanation of the 2010 House vote—the referendum model—in which voters punish or reward the party in power according to its performance in office and the time available for that performance. In words, the model reads: House Seat Change = f(Economy, Popularity, Midterm). A measurement of these variables, at lags appropriate for forecasting, yields the estimates (OLS) of model 1, shown in column 1 of table 1. Model 1 gives a forecast of −22 seats for the Democrats in 2010, when, in fact, they scored about −60 seats. The model 1 forecast appears “wrong” in two senses. First, substantively, it fails to predict the Republican takeover of the House. Second, scientifically, it is off by over two standard errors of estimate (i.e., 38/17 > 2.0). Why did the model get it wrong this time, when the forecast was off by only one seat in the last midterm in 2006? To answer this question, the specifications of the model need consideration. Such consideration signals the scientific value of the forecasting exercise in providing a systematic trial-and-error method for model improvement.

I read the article titled “The Logic of the Tenure Decision: In Dubio Contra “Reum” that was published in the most recent issue of PS. I am particularly interested in this discussion and re-evaluation of tenure because it is a timely issue (within and outside of academia) and because I have been personally and professionally involved in the process at many levels for many years.

In President Obama's words, the Democratic Party experienced a “shellacking” in the 2010 elections. In particular, the net loss of 63 House seats was the biggest midterm loss suffered by a party since 1938—the largest in the lifetimes of approximately 93% of the American population.

A bare-bones, “economic performance” model of the number of seats won by the president's party in U.S. House of Representatives elections, estimated over the 1914–2008 period, yielded a point forecast of 227 seats for the Democrats, a net loss of 30 seats relative to what the party held at the start of the 111th Congress (if estimated with midterm elections only; 27 seats, if estimated with all elections). However, there was a great deal of uncertainty around that number, to the degree that there was “one chance in three or four that the Democrats [would] lose at least 40 seats,” enough to deprive them of a majority (Cuzán 2010a). Moreover, “the historical distribution of incumbent midterm losses” since 1914 suggested “that the odds of such an outcome occurring [were] around two in five,” so that “although the model forecasts lean against it, a change in party control cannot be dismissed tout court” (Cuzán 2010a, 640–41).

Scholars have used cultural theory (CT) to explain risk perceptions and opinion formation across an impressive array of public issues, ranging from environmental, regulatory, and energy policy to public health and economics. Although disparate, all these issues concern domestic policies. This article breaks with this trend by exploring the extent to which CT can help scholars better understand public beliefs about national security. Of critical importance in debates about national security are perceptions of individual versus collective threat and the appropriate role of authoritative institutions in protecting society from these threats. Because CT provides a framework that explicitly addresses these dimensions, national security issues provide an illuminating canvas for evaluating the theory's explanatory utility.

I thank Professor Ugarte for his comments and reflections and am glad that my essay, published in a political science journal, has elicited scholarly interest far beyond the confines of our discipline, in a department of Spanish literature. While it would take too much space to respond to all comments (for instance, concerning a “turf battle”), I want to clarify a few important points.

This brief note reports the accuracy of my two forecasts for the 2010 state legislative elections, one made on July 22 and reported in the October 2010 issue of this journal (the “PS model”; Klarner 2010a), and the other made on September 18 and reported in the October issue of Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics (i.e., the “Forum model”; Klarner 2010b). Both models used presidential approval, the state of the economy, and midterm loss as national-level predictor variables, while the later forecast also used Gallup's generic ballot question asking respondents which party they would vote for in the upcoming U.S. House election. The PS model predicted the Republicans would pick up 11 chambers, while the Forum model forecast a 15-chamber pickup. In actuality, the Republicans picked up 21 chambers, in contrast to the average 3.2-net chamber shift in party control toward one party or the other from 1962 to 2008. While both forecasts understated the extent of the Republican wave, the July forecast especially did. Overall, the Forum forecast did a good job of predicting the Republican wave, calling about three-fourths of its magnitude.

College professors are evaluated for promotion and tenure on the basis of their accomplishments in three areas: teaching, research, and service. All too often, however, service is considered the poor cousin of the trio. In political science in particular, we believe that this imbalance is detrimental to the individual scholar, our students, the discipline, and the general public. The goal of this symposium is to contribute to what we see as a nascent revitalization and rehabilitation of service—especially public service—as a respectable and integral part of a political science career. We encourage our colleagues to engage the political world more often, more directly, and more reflectively, and we encourage the profession—the APSA, our departments, and our colleagues—to value such engagement institutionally and through our social norms.

My talk honors the contribution of Ithiel de Sola Pool to empirical political theory, a field pioneered by Pool, David Easton, and Gabriel Almond, inter alia. Pool's 1967 edited volume, Contemporary Political Science: Toward Empirical Theory illustrates some of the important early works in this field, a field designed to generate political theory from the systematic examination of empirical data. To demonstrate the kind of work Pool developed, I begin my talk by suggesting what studying altruism and genocide taught me about broader themes in political, social, and moral theory. I then suggest how I developed a new theory of moral choice in order to explain the surprising finding that identity trumped choice for all the participants I interviewed about their actions during the Holocaust and World War II, from Nazis and bystanders to rescuers of Jews. This paper thus summarizes the highlights of the 2010 Pool Lecture to provide a few illustrations of the empirical findings that led me to develop an identity-based theory of moral choice.

Climate change is easily one of the most contentious policy problems facing the United States. A majority of climate scientists agree that the earth has warmed over the last 100 years and that human-made greenhouse gasses are the cause (e.g., Doran and Zimmerman 2009; IPCC 2007; Oreskes 2004, but also see Bray 2010), yet a nontrivial portion of the US population diverges sharply from this dominant scientific position (see, for example, Jenkins-Smith, Herron, and Silva 2010, 41–45; Leiserowitz 2006; Nisbet and Myers 2007). Why? Past research usually points to the public's lack of climate change knowledge (e.g., Kellstedt, Zahran, and Vedlitz 2008), finds that media over report the views of climate change skeptics in a misplaced quest for “balanced” reporting (e.g., Boykoff and Boykoff 2007, but see Swedlow and Wildavsky 1995), or the public simply take cues from opinion leaders whom they trust (e.g., Malka, Krosnick, and Langer 2009). This article moves beyond the predominant concern with climate change knowledge, messaging structures, and cue taking in past research, and shifts the focus to characteristics intrinsic to the individual. The research presented here assesses the extent that the cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, and others (see, e.g., Schwarz and Thompson 1990; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990) can help political scientists understand why so many Americans do not align themselves with the majority of scientists and can help policy makers broker compromises on climate change policy.