In recent years, a number of prominent political commentators have raised concerns about the lack of ideological diversity on college campuses (Shapiro 2004; Black 2004; Kors and Silvergate 1999; Kimball 1998). Among other accusations, they claim that liberal college professors may actually penalize students for expressing conservative opinions by assigning them lower marks on exams and assignments (Horowitz 2003; Hebel 2004). Their concern is not without merit. Researchers have found that, when evaluating a colleague's research, college professors are more critical of work that contradicts their own views (Mahoney 1977). It is logical to assume that the same bias influences professors' evaluations of students' arguments. It is also reasonable to expect that students, charged with the important task of evaluating their professors, are vulnerable to their own ideological biases.We thank Markus Kemmelmeier and Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier for their helpful suggestions and valuable guidance. We also acknowledge the valuable support of research assistants Jessica Defenderfer, Cristina Ciocirlan, and Kathleen Winters. Finally, we would like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the dozens of political science faculty throughout the country who took the time to distribute our survey to their undergraduate students. This project would not have been possible without their generous assistance. This research was funded through a Faculty Research Grant from Elizabethtown College.

Few topics are more sensitive to police and minority ethnic groups than racial profiling. Because this is a relatively new area of inquiry, researchers lack a comprehensive methodology for conducting inquiries into allegations of racial profiling. To date, most studies of profiling focus on alleged disparities between policing activities and aggregate population statistics. However, as a vast majority of this research cannot account for possible differences in group behaviour, it is impossible to conclude definitively that officers actually target minorities. By contrast, this study examines accusations of racial and demographic profiling by comparing arrest statistics between two overlapping police forces patrolling the same stretch of highway, during the same period of time. We theorise that the Louisiana State Police Criminal Patrol Unit (LSP-CPU) and certain deputies of the St Martin Parish Sheriff's Office (SMSO) conducted focused traffic stops on suspect populations in an effort to interdict drug trafficking along Interstate 10. Indeed, an examination of the arrest statistics between the CPU/SMSO and our baseline (Louisiana State Police Traffic Patrol) reveals dramatic discrepancies which are logically consistent with racial and demographic profiling on the part of the CPU/SMSO. Beyond its specific findings, the study provides a more reliable method by which researchers can assess accusations of profiling by other law enforcement agencies.

Previous research on presidential job approval has neglected to consider how elites influence public assessments of the executive, particularly as it applies to potentially private misconduct. This article suggests that, in the aftermath of a major political event (such as a scandal), citizens look to elite rhetoric as a barometer of issue importance. Utilizing two distinct experimental designs, I show that, in the wake of a personal scandal, subjects rely upon elite cues to place the events in some political perspective. The first study focuses on evaluations of a fictional Alaskan governor. Responding to what they believe was an unfolding personal scandal, subjects assess executive performance based on the account of a randomly assigned counterfeit newspaper article. An analysis of subject evaluations indicates that cues provided by the political opposition were the most important factor in predicting assessments of executive job performance. The second study reexamines the importance of elite cues by testing whether or not a slight change in a political frame (regarding the Lewinsky scandal) can influence subjects’ evaluations of President Clinton. Consistent with the theory, the findings indicate that subtle changes in elite cues (framed by the language of the political debate) were a key predictor of the subjects’ evaluations of the president. While the findings do not directly contradict the traditional “peace and prosperity” models, they do suggest that a further consideration of elite messages is warranted.

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Notwithstanding political science professors' concerted efforts to remain politically neutral in the classroom, we find evidence that students are able to successfully identify the partisan loyalties of their professors. Furthermore, we find that there is a tendency for students to drift toward the Democratic Party over the course of the semester, yet the direction of the shift appears to be unrelated to either the instructor's actual political loyalties, or to the student's perception of the professor's partisan preferences. Given that political science professors appear to exert no real influence on students' party loyalties, it is unclear whether efforts to diversify the field by hiring more Republican professors would actually reduce the "liberalizing" effects of higher education.Fe a t u r e s : I T h i n k M y P r o f e s s o r i s a D e m o c r a t