Political Science

Reading this book is a little like quaffing a double espresso on an empty stomach — it's a jolt. For this reader it was a welcome jolt. Others will find it less palatable. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have been Washington fixtures for three decades. They are two of the brightest, best informed and most scholarly students of our politics. They started out together as graduate students of political science...

WASHINGTON — Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings is scheduled to give the keynote address at the Howard University's School of Social Work Honors graduation ceremony. The Democratic congressman will give the speech on Wednesday in Washington in the Cramton Auditorium. About 1,000 faculty, graduates and guests are expected to be in attendance. Cummings earned his bachelor's in political science from Howard 1973. Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material...

With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue. "Climate-gate," as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle -- the same circle whose work...

Political scientists, such as Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann [" T his is no way to govern ," op-ed, April 19], often believe that economists, such as Lawrence Summers [" Sometimes, gridlock is good for America ," op-ed, April 15], should stick to their discipline and leave explaining the broader pathologies of the American political system to the political scientists. In demonstrating that government leaders can deliver significant policy change by steering around these pathologies,...

Lee P. Sigelman, 64, a political science professor at George Washington University whose wit enlivened political research, died Dec. 21 at his home in Washington. He had colon cancer that had metastasized to his liver. Dr. Sigelman delighted in using sophisticated statistical tools to identify real but amusing relationships in social science data while gently satirizing the sometimes overly serious, self-absorbed world of academia. In a semi-scholarly paper, "Presidents, Extramarital Sex and the Public: Testing a Rational Theory," he...

The Republican-dominated House has passed an amendment to cut off funding for political science research through the National Science Foundation (NSF), and you and I should be outraged. It's not the money, of course: Only $11 million of the NSF's $7 billion-plus budget goes to poli sci research. It's the principle of the thing. We just can't let politicians like Jeff Flake , the Republican from Arizona who sponsored the ban, decide what constitutes science worthy of...

Democrats and Republicans may be worlds apart on most things, but at their headquarters just two blocks away from each other on Capitol Hill, each is confronting the same question: Have political parties lost their purpose? In the wake of two presidential defeats, the Republican National Committee on Monday unveiled its Growth and Opportunity Project , an effort to give the party engine a top-to-bottom tuneup. The winning side of last year's presidential election has been doing some reexamination, too. This...

MANDAN, N.D. — The economy is so good in North Dakota, it's almost like being in another country. Although Friday's lackluster national jobs report may have intensified the already deep anxiety among voters about the sluggish state of the economy, here in the nation's northern reaches, the concerns are exactly the opposite: how to build roads and schools and houses fast enough to keep up with an astounding population boom that has sprung up...

A recent study provides one more argument against government officials who tout "industry clusters" as the Holy Grail of regional growth and innovation. The formula for creating these clusters is always the same: Pick a hot industry, build a technology park next to a research university, provide incentives for businesses to relocate, add some venture capital and then watch the magic happen. But, as I have noted before , the magic never happens. Most of the top-down cluster-development projects in the...

In the annals of Maryland political scandals, the saga of John R. Leopold ranks as one of the most salacious and absurd. The Anne Arundel county executive, who is scheduled to go on trial Wednesday on charges of misconduct and misappropriating county funds, isn't just accused of having his security detail ferry him to and from parking lot assignations with his mistress . Prosecutors say the Republican leader of Maryland's fourth-largest county...

Democrats and Republicans may be worlds apart on most things, but at their headquarters just two blocks away from each other on Capitol Hill, each is confronting the same question: Have political parties lost their purpose? In the wake of two presidential defeats, the Republican National Committee on Monday unveiled its Growth and Opportunity Project , an effort to give the party engine a top-to-bottom tuneup. The winning side of last year's presidential election has been doing some reexamination, too. This past week has...

The Post has once again chided me [" One job too many ," editorial, March 7] for keeping my promise to Virginians that I would serve my full four-year term as state attorney general. The Post reasoned that I should resign because several other Virginia attorneys general resigned when they ran for governor, in line with a "tradition" that has been consistently observed only since 1985. Recently, Politifact Virginia found that no other state in the country has such a tradition of attorneys general resigning to run for some...

When Burma's Zin Mar Aung was placed in solitary confinement in 1998 for trying to organize students, Bill Clinton was president of the United States. When she was released, Barack Obama was in the Oval Office. Zin Mar Aung says she had never heard of George W. Bush or his wife, Laura, who used her own bully pulpit to push for liberation of Burma's most famous political prisoner, democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, then under house arrest. Aung San Suu Kyi is known to many now because of the largely unacknowledged work of the...

In the annals of Maryland political scandals, the saga of John R. Leopold ranks as one of the most salacious and absurd. The Anne Arundel county executive, who is scheduled to go on trial Wednesday on charges of misconduct and misappropriating county funds, isn't just accused of having his security detail ferry him to and from parking lot assignations with his mistress . Prosecutors say the Republican leader of Maryland's fourth-largest county...

RICHMOND — Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling traveled to Danville on Friday to announce his opposition to lifting a ban on uranium mining in Virginia , a surprise move by the state's chief jobs-creation officer that put him uncharacteristically out in front of Gov. Robert F. McDonnell. Bolling (R), who was raised in coal country and spent much of the past three years trying to bring new jobs to Virginia, said he considered the potential economic benefits of mining. But he ultimately decided that the...

JERUSALEM — Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak abruptly announced Monday that he is leaving politics and will not run in parliamentary elections in January, quashing speculation that he might unite with other centrist candidates to challenge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu . Barak, who declared that he will step down when a new government is formed after the elections, said he felt he had "exhausted my involvement in politics, of which...

It has become part of political mythology that a candidate cannot win the presidency without carrying Ohio. (John F. Kennedy pulled off this feat in 1960, winning the general election even though he lost Ohio by 273,000 votes.) But can a candidate be elected president without winning his or her party's Ohio primary? History suggests that Hillary Rodham Clinton is wrong on this point. The senator from New York made the claim in an interview with an Ohio TV station while waiting for the election results to arrive.

For months, Israel has threatened to strike Iran's nuclear sites. The United States has urged restraint. If such an operation were launched, how might Tehran react? Hamid has been awake since midnight, when Israeli bombs struck the Tehran Nuclear Research Center in nearby Amirabad. The boom reverberated throughout the city nearby, sending plumes of smoke into the night. Sirens punctuated the hours till the gray-pink dawn. With the Internet down, Hamid crouches before Radio Tehran, which reports that key nuclear sites at...

● Despite my profound disagreement with his politics, I cannot agree more with Michael Gerson about the sorry state of political science. The insistence of many political "scientists" on reducing politics to prediction and precision is indeed a perversion of what politics is all about. Some in my field (I managed to get a degree from a department commendably named "Politics") call this "physics-envy" and they have a point. Mr. Gerson is right — politics is about judgment, opinion and how people in a community determine their future.

Like Michael Gerson, I, too, pine for the "good ol' days" when issues such as "poverty, social mobility or unsustainable debt" drove the national debate, or when we felt that the "heart of a noble enterprise" was at the core of selecting a president. But Mr. Gerson's critique of Nate Silver and his statistical model was unfair [" The trouble with a Silver lining ," op-ed, Nov. 6]. Mr. Gerson criticizes Mr. Silver's forecast for not being innovative; this may be true, but that misses the point.