H. Gibbs Knotts

Location, Location, Location: Precinct Placement and the Costs of Voting

This article provides a new measure of voting costs by using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to calculate the distance between the residence and polling place for registered voters in the city of Atlanta. Using this measure to predict turnout at the individual level, we find that small differences in distance from the polls can have a significant impact on voter turnout. We also find that moving a polling place can affect the decision to vote. In addition to providing a better understanding of the costs of voting, our findings have important implications regarding the location of polling places and the effects of altering precinct boundaries.

Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South

We replicate and extend John Shelton Reed’s classic work on regional identification by examining and modeling the prevalence of the words “Dixie” and “Southern” in business names across 100 cities and four decades. We find that the instances of “Dixie” have dropped precipitously, although identification with the word “Southern” has remained more constant, providing evidence of a trend we term re-southernization. We also find that the relative number of blacks in the population provides the most consistent explanation of regional identity. Population density has also emerged as a significant predictor of regional identification in more recent time periods. These findings contribute to the literature on regional identification, the politics of naming and the sociology of the South.

Rethinking Liberal Arts Skills in the New Economy

Liberal arts graduates can compete effectively for jobs in the current information-based economy. The literature overview of liberal arts advising is presented as is a discussion on the student skills needed for success in the new economy. Strategies advisors can use to help liberal arts majors develop new economy skills and specific suggestions for helping advisees market these skills to potential employers are presented.

Taking Personality Seriously: The Five-Factor Model and Public Management

This study documents the use of personality assessment in public administration and examines the relationship between personality and job outcomes among public managers. The limitations and problems with the most popular personality assessment framework, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, are discussed. The authors then present the five-factor model of personality as an empirically verified, theoretically sound framework that is widely accepted within the field of psychology. Using a survey of public administrators in three states, it is demonstrated that public managers are aware of personality assessment, use it in their jobs, and are generally convinced of its efficacy. The authors also present the results of personality profiles of public managers demonstrating the usefulness of all five domains of the five-factor model of personality for understanding key outcome measures such as job satisfaction and organizational citizenship behaviors.

The Content of Political Participation: Letters to the Editor and the People Who Write Them

rrEi Letters to the editor are an important but poorly understood form of voluntary political participation. To learn more about the content of letters to the editor and the characteristics of the people who write them we conducted a content analysis of 1,415 randomly selected printed letters from eight newspapers from 2002 to 2005. We also matched the letter writers from our sample to demographic and political information con tained in a state voterfile.

Teaching Ph.D. Students To Teach Political Science: The Emory TATTO Program.

Until fairly recently, political science graduate students at Emory University received little formal training before entering the classroom. This changed in the fall of 1991, when the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences inaugurated the Teaching Assistant Training and Teaching Opportunity (TATTO) program. Participation in TATTO is meant to prepare graduate students to enter the professoriate as competent and confident teachers. The

Overlapping identities in the American South

Abstract Despite the extensive literature on southern identity, we know surprisingly little about how regional identity competes with potential loyalties toward other groups in the South. We investigate the prevalence and predictors of four overlapping identifies—Appalachian, Southern, North Carolinian, and American. We find that people identify primarily as Americans, followed by North Carolinians, Southerners, and finally Appalachians. We also examine the correlation between these overlapping identities and test multivariate models to explain each identity using a common set of predictors: age, education, time in region, sex, political ideology, and race. Identity correlates shift depending on the group under consideration and that time in the region is the most consistent predictor, followed by age, and political ideology.

Major Competition? Exploring Perceptions of International Studies Programs among Political Science Department Chairs

Given the growth of international studies (IS) programs and the reciprocal relationship between political science and IS, this article explores perceptions of IS among political science department chairs. We found that the relationship between political science departments and IS programs is largely positive—that is, a majority of chairs supports the existence of IS at their institution, believes the job prospects for political science and IS majors are about equal, and perceives a low level of fi nancial competition between programs. However, we discovered two points of contention: (1) the perception of lower academic rigor of IS programs, and (2) a high level of competition for majors and the “best students.” Perceptions of IS programs are related to a host of factors, including whether a program is housed within the political science department. Finally, we provide suggestions for improving the relationship between political science and IS. H. Gibbs Knotts is professor and chair of political science at the College of Charleston. He can be reached at knottshg@cofc.edu . Jennifer S. Schiff is assistant professor of political science and public aff airs at Western Carolina University. She can be reached at jsschiff @wcu.edu . Undergraduate programs in international studies (IS) fi rst began to appear at colleges and universities in the 1970s, ostensibly to provide an interdisciplinary lens through which students could study an increasingly globalized and interconnected world. The initial idea for such an approach was that the world’s growing interdependence was fracturing traditional disciplinary lines, and that a more holistic and multidisciplinary perspective was necessary to understand fully the dynamics underlying global events (Rosenau 1973 , 19). In response, some universities developed multidisciplinary curricula to better address this changing global landscape. The IS undergraduate programs that emerged challenged students to examine global phenomena from several diff erent social science perspectives, including but not limited to political science, history, economics, geography, and sociology. This new interdisciplinary approach was not without detractors, however, and some universities found that their extant departments resisted “interdepartmental arrangements that threaten[ed] vested interests” and displayed a “myopia” in terms of viewing their own more traditional training as superior to this multidisciplinary approach (Adams 1972 , 1). Despite these initial reservations, undergraduate IS programs multiplied throughout the university landscape and have become increasingly popular—in the past decade alone, many programs have doubled in size within only a few years (Blanton 2009 ). University IS faculty also have become players in a new wave of revamped general-education curricula that feature “global awareness and intercultural competencies” as major components (Ishiyama and Breuning 2006 , 327). What is perhaps most impressive is that IS programs have achieved this rapid growth in a time when higher education faces dwindling fi nancial resources. Ultimately, the “tension between the pull of disciplinary and the push of interdisciplinary work affects all of the social sciences”; this dynamic is especially important for political science because of its reciprocal relationship with IS (Katzenstein 2001 , 789). Indeed, political scientists frequently publish in international relations (IR) journals, political science classes often dominate IS curricula, and IS programs most often are administered by political scientists and/or political science departments. Previous scholarship on IS identifi ed important trends within the structure and curriculum of such programs; however, at present, very little literature exists that investigates the perceptions of IS among political scientists. https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096514001681 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.202.195.117, on 12 Apr 2017 at 21:47:28, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at PS • January 2015 143 ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... As a result, we approached this study with two overarching research questions: (1) How do political science chairs view the academic rigor and job prospects of IS programs(2) For department chairs that have IS programs on their campus, how do they rate the level of competition for majors, fi nancial resources, and the best students? WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT INTERNATIONAL STUDIES? There is no obvious roadmap indicating which types of colleges and universities decide to create IS majors. The literature suggests that factors infl uencing the decision to create an IS major include the size of a school, the number of faculty, and its location near an urban population center that allows for internationalinteraction opportunities, such as the opportunity for travel, proximity to cultural centers, and ability to practice foreign-language skills (Ishiyama and Breuning 2004 ). Another factor in determining whether an institution has an undergraduate IS major is the existence of a graduate program with an IS component (Ishiyama and Breuning 2004 ). Where IS programs exist, they often lack cohesion and a sense of identity. Indeed, the IS fi eld has become “a little like the Tower of Babel, fi lled with a cacophony of diff erent voices”; as a result, IS programs sometimes lack “an intellectually coherent area of inquiry” (Hermann 1998 , 606). On most campuses, IS programs are loosely structured, allowing students “wide latitude” in terms of their choice of classes (identifi ed in the literature as the “bigumbrella approach”), whereas other programs are more structured and emphasize a “key set of common courses” that act as the core of the major’s curriculum (Ishiyama and Breuning 2004 , 134). Exacerbating this confusion, the term “international studies” often is used synonymously with the term “international relations,” which is a subfi eld of the political science discipline (Brecher 1999 , 213). THE CONNECTION BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES AND POLITICAL SCIENCE A common thread among IS programs is that they often are dominated by political science (Hey 2004 ). Although there is some diversity in the training of IS directors, a 2009 study found that political science retains a “hegemony” within IS programs; that is, 52.6% of IS undergraduate program directors received their graduate training in political science. At 15.4%, history was the next largest disciplinary category of IS program directors. Only 9% of IS program directors had specifi c graduate training in IS (Blanton 2009 , 227). Moreover, the infl uence of political science over IS is evident in the administrative arrangements surrounding undergraduate IS programs. Administratively, IS programs sometimes “fall between the cracks” in terms of support because of their interdisciplinary nature; however, they most often are housed within either a traditional department—most commonly political science— or a larger administrative entity (Blanton 2009 , 229). The literature suggests that IS programs often are administered by political science departments because of the primacy of international politics in their curricula, even though they are fundamentally interdisciplinary programs of study (White, Malik, and Chrastil 2006 ). The influence of political science over IS is further exemplified within the IS academic research community; IS research often draws from the same body of theory and literature as IR. Thus, although interdisciplinarity “may be at the heart of undergraduate IS programs...it is still not central to IS research” (Hey 2004 , 397). Indeed, the primary professional group for IS scholars is the International Studies Association (ISA), which sponsors several peer-reviewed scholarly journals, the articles of which are dominated by academics with a political science background. Additionally, the research questions explored in these articles “overwhelmingly emanat[e]from the discipline of political science” (Hey 2004 , 397). At the core, then, ISA as a research organization is not as much about an interdisciplinary approach to international aff airs as it is IR-centric, focusing on “that branch of political science that deals with questions of confl ict, peace, trade, foreign policy, and other matters of cross-border politics” (Hey 2004 , 397). Thus, IS—as envisioned by its premier professional association—“is primarily IR a la political science” (Hey 2004 , 398). Certainly, many scholars dispute the confl ation of IS and IR, claiming that IS is a multidisciplinary fi eld of study primarily focused on a broad range of international and global issues. According to these scholars, this means that IS is influenced by IR but remains a distinct scholarly fi eld on its own merits (Breuning and Ishiyama 2004 ; Brown, Pegg, and Shively 2006 ). Ultimately, however, although interdisciplinarity and independence of the fi eld may be the goal of its advocates, the literature suggests that in practice, political scientists and the subfi eld of IR tend to dominate the bureaucratic administration of IS programs, as well as the research and curriculum emphases surrounding them. Thus, because of the strong infl uence of political science, it is important to assess empirically how political science chairs view undergraduate IS programs.

Scholarly Productivity in Non-Ph.D. Departments

Political scientists hail from large, research-intensive universities like the Ohio State University, regional comprehensive schools like Western Kentucky University, and small teaching-intensive institutions like Mars Hill College. Despite this diversity, most studies of the political science discipline overlook the contributions of individuals from non-Ph.D. departments. To address this oversight, we compare the publishing rates of scholars with four types of affiliations: non-Ph.D. departments, Ph.D. departments, non- U.S. departments, and nonacademic institutions. We focus particularly on whether faculty from non-Ph.D. departments publish in different types of journals than faculty from other departments, and whether the institutional affiliations of editorial board members corre- sponds to the institutional affiliations of published authors. We find that people from non-Ph.D. departments represent 16% of the authors in our sample of political science journals, and their contributions are particularly noteworthy in certain types of journals. We also demonstrate that the institutions represented on editorial boards generally do not reflect the institutional affiliations of the authors who publish in these journals.

Picturing Political Science

What do political scientists study? As part of a larger project, we coded every article in 25 leading journals between 2000 and 2007. We then created a word cloud of the 6,005 titles using www.wordle.net. The 150 most-used words appear in the word cloud. The size of each word is proportional to the number of times the word is mentioned. Draw your own conclusions. Christopher A. Cooper is associate professor, director of the Public Policy Institute, and MPA director at Western Carolina University. His work on state politics, political communication, and political behavior has appeared in Public Administration Review, Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and other outlets. Todd A. Collins is assistant professor of political science at Western Carolina University. He has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Georgia and aJDfrom the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research and teaching interests center on judicial politics, public law, and American government. H. Gibbs Knotts is associate prof essor and department head of political science and public affairs at Western Carolina University. His work on public opinion, southern politics, and public policy has appeared in journals including Journal of Politics, Public Administration Review, and Social Science Quarterly. He also co-edited the New Politics of North Carolina (UNC Press, 2008) with Christopher Cooper. doi:io.ioi7/SiO49O9O5O9O9O49O PS • April 2009 365 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.149 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 04:03:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms