The challenge to the Department of Political Science at Duke University is to become not only a department of distinction but one of the very best political science departments in the nation. To attain that status, we need to continue to develop our existing programs while also developing a distinctive approach to the study of politics, one which crosses subfields and which enhances the thematic and interdisciplinary character of our teaching, training and research approaches. We must also continue to increase the diversity of our faculty and its international and interdisciplinary character and orientation. Finally, we must assure that in pursuing these goals we reinforce the sense of community, mutual responsibility and shared effort which have characterized departmental life and been essential to our recent progress. Political Science is on the verge of becoming one of the premiere departments in the country and of being recognized as such. Prominent additions to the faculty in all subfields, combined with the continued success of our department’s retained faculty has moved the department into the handful of departments known nationwide for superior research, graduate training and undergraduate instruction. Considering the size of our department and the composite rank of its members, our department is within reach of being considered with the "top ten" and, when considerations of size are taken into account, may already have attained such status.

We aspire to be an even better department. This requires not only sustaining successful programs we have in place but also developing new initiatives which will place us at the frontiers of the discipline. It requires as well maintaining the very highest standards in hiring, promotion and tenure, while assuring that our faculty have the best possible opportunities for career advancement within the context of a supportive and highly interactive departmental community.

Advances in our department will, in all likelihood, have to come with only modest additions in the numbers of our faculty. We are in sight of the target faculty size of our last report (33); the current budgetary environment makes further significant expansion unlikely. Our sense of how we best perform as a department makes it undesirable to add significant numbers of new faculty.

To attain our goals, therefore, we believe we need to enrich our existing programs while enhancing the thematic, inter-subfield and interdisciplinary character of our research, teaching and training. We are committed to a discipline spanning approach and to diversity in theories and methods. We should, therefore, organize and facilitate faculty and student research activities on a broad range of issues employing a variety of concepts, orientations and methods.

The department is also committed to a view of politics and a conception of political science as a discipline which both recognizes and utilizes its relationships to other disciplines in the social sciences and beyond, so as to significantly advance our understanding of politics and society.

Finally, we must continue to balance our continuing commitment to research excellence with our responsibilities to provide a broad and challenging education in politics and the discipline of political science for undergraduates and graduate students alike. More specifically, this will entail working to assure that the programmatic goals for our research and hiring are fully incorporated into our graduate and undergraduate curricula and into how we teach and train our students both inside and outside the classroom.

The Department of Political Science was established in 1934. It grew out of a joint department of economics and political science that had its origins a decade earlier. Professor Robert Wilson was the department's first chair and held the position until 1948, when he was succeeded by Professor Robert Rankin. Professor Rankin was chair until 1964 when he was succeeded by Professor John Hallowell, who was chair until 1971 and who was instrumental in recruiting Professor David Barber as chair that year. Professor Barber, in turn, was succeeded by Professors Ole Holsti in 1977, by Allan Kornberg in 1983 and by John Aldrich in 1992. Peter Lange became the new chair of the department in 1996.

The reputation of the department for some 30 years after its establishment rested largely on the strength of its faculty in comparative politics and normative theory. As chair, David Barber enlarged the cohort and enhanced the visibility of faculty in the American and International Relations sub-fields. Ole Holsti continued this process and also commissioned the department's first strategic planning document in April 1983. The guidance offered by that document (Report of the Committee on Faculty Development), the increasing popularity of political science as an undergraduate major, and the growth of our graduate program enabled us to recruit a group of talented assistant professors and two distinguished senior scholars. Many of the former now form the core of the department.

The new appointments of the last fifteen years are in part responsible for the excellent scholarly reputation the department currently enjoys within and outside of the university. This is reflected in numerous indicators of our standing including our rising rank. The department increased its National Research Council rank from 18 in 1982 to 14 in 1993 (of 98 political science departments ranked). This improvement was among the three best of all departments ranked. Further, Duke Political Science was the highest ranked Social Science department at Duke and has consistently had the best graduate matriculants as measured by GREs and the best placement record. In addition, departmental scholars and graduate students have won numerous awards from the American Political Science Association including the Woodrow Wilson Award for best book in the discipline in both 1995 and 1996.

Both the problems and opportunities that growth presented led the department to undertake two other self-studies and to formulate two other planning documents, "Building the Best Department: Political Science at Duke, A Plan for Development," Fall 1987 and "Achieving Excellence: A Plan of Development for the Political Science Department at Duke University," Spring 1992. These helped structure our efforts to sustain and improve our enhanced national and international standing. The intent of the current document is to continue this process and to bring to fruition our goal of becoming one of the nation's elite departments.

In a very real sense, the principal intellectual issues that engage political scientists today are those that have always demarcated the discipline: the nature of political power; the institutional and procedural conditions that affect its exercise; the philosophy and ethics of its use and allocation; the consequences of its use for the distribution of political, economic and other values in society; and the network of societal relationships--political, economic, social and historical--on which political institutions rest, in which politics is embedded and which influence stability and change in political life.

In the course of addressing these issues, political scientists have generated an impressive body of theoretically and empirically grounded knowledge that has helped illuminate the human condition. For example, political scientists have made significant contributions to our understanding of the causes and consequences of conflict, both between nations and within them and the means by which it can be managed; of the conditions under which political systems, especially democratic political systems, can be sustained over time; of the varying roles played by and dilemmas inherent in representative institutions and processes within democratic societies; of the consequences of different arrangements of political institutions for other political, economic and social values; of how national economic wealth and distribution affect political life and the distribution of political power and influence and how politics affects the functioning of the economy; of the reasons why people in democracies vary in the extent and the direction of their political participation and of the impact of media, especially television, on the behavior of political elites and mass publics in the United States and abroad. Political scientists also have played major roles in measuring individual, group and system behavior and in developing and refining a variety of multivariate quantitative techniques to analyze and explain sociopolitical and socioeconomic behavior.

Political Science does not, however, have a unified body of theory that integrates these and other concerns. Nor is there any broad consensus regarding the most appropriate methods to employ in carrying out our investigations. Consequently, for almost a half century, but particularly in the past decade, there has been continuing controversy over major theoretical questions concerning both politics and the acquisition of knowledge about politics and a strong felt need to generate new paradigms to guide research. Our substantive concerns have changed little, some would say since the time of the Greeks, but the ways we develop and accumulate knowledge about them continue to be subjects of substantial debate.

This is manifested periodically in statements expressing the desire to go beyond "normal science"; in the continuous reevaluation of the validity and utility of concepts and methods we take for granted; in the need to utilize aggregate social and economic indicators in ways that better illuminate the political causes and consequences of sociopolitical and socioeconomic processes; in the necessity of formulating new and better questions in mass and elite surveys and treating the data that are derived from them in ways that more effectively address a variety of significant issues that remain problematic, and in the critical reevaluation of liberalism and democracy in the modern age from both a theoretical and historical perspective. This disciplinary ferment represents an ongoing spur to creative teaching and research. Our programs should foster this creativity while respecting the need to concentrate our efforts where they are likely to be most fruitful.

It will come as no surprise that the Duke Department of Political Science enjoys an excellent reputation because these concerns are reflected in the composition of our faculty and their research and teaching activities. Historically, the department has been noted for its institutional focus at both the national and international levels and by its ability to bring together those studying politics from normative, empirical and positive theoretical standpoints. More recently, this has been augmented by an increased attention to issues of political economy, individual behavior and its interactions with a diversity of institutional settings, the linkages between individual-level behavior and aggregate outcomes and by increased attention to subnational politics. In addition, we have attained a reputation as a department in which there is a highly productive interaction between those employing rational choice and more behavioral approaches to human behavior and between the study of normative political philosophy and empirical theory and research.

These emphases are reflected in the span of teaching and research interests among our faculty and are among our greatest strengths to be preserved. By way of illustration, several department members have been recognized for their attempts to generate more elegant formal theories that also are better grounded in "the real world." Others share the renewed interest in institutions and the reciprocal relationships between rule making and structures, individual and institutional behavior, and the pursuit of political values. Still others are involved in the systematic study of international affairs, of international trade, conflict, and the institutions and processes that manage and ameliorate conflict and promote international security. A number of colleagues are interested in illuminating the complex relationships between international and domestic politics and public policy matters at all levels of government in ways that go beyond the accumulation of individual case studies. Many also explore the causes and consequences of different forms of individual political behavior, especially in elections, employing analytical frameworks borrowed from psychology, sociology, economics and theories of mass communications. Other colleagues have significantly improved the architectonics of survey analysis and the application of mathematical and statistical techniques to study political phenomena. There is also strong interest among many of us in studying the many and varied interactions between politics, economics and society -- especially, to be able to specify more precisely and accurately the manner in which both politics and economics affect the emergence and maintenance of democratic societies. Finally, a large number focus their research at the intersection of individual psychology and political culture by exploring issues ranging from public opinion, to racial, gender and religious prejudice, to ethnic conflict and social movements to political ethics, focusing on questions of race, gender, inequality, and constitutionalism.

The department has never tried to fit its faculty into any kind of Procrustean methodological or substantive bed, or privileged one sub-field over another. We intend to retain the sub-field structure. However, our judgment is that the intellectual "frontier" of the discipline and the path to our future growth and success lies in the interstices between and among the sub-fields on the one hand, and between political science and other disciplines and professions on the other. Our view is that the enhanced visibility and intellectual impact that can be generated by such an emphasis can help us to successfully meet the challenge of becoming one of the foremost departments in the country.

We further believe that the vehicle for crossing this frontier is an increased and more innovative emphasis on four intellectual areas--democratization and democracy; political institutions and organizations; political economy; and values, culture, and behavior. In addressing these themes, we must and will of course, retain our focus on the central empirical and normative concerns of our discipline:

• the nature of power and authority and how they are best employed and limited;
• the causes of conflict and war and the conditions of cooperation and peace;
• the relationship between markets and politics and thus between the logic of the marketplace and the values and practice of politics in democratic and non-democratic regimes;
• the relationship between the individual, collectivities and the political community and between rights and responsibilities;
• the sources and institutional structuring of political participation and empowerment and their consequences for political stability and change.

What we intend, however, is to use the thematic emphases to address these concerns in innovative ways which span traditional subdisciplinary boundaries and open the way to better links to other disciplines.

Democratization and Democracy

In one of a series of reports to the National Science Foundation on the phenomenon of democratization it was noted that "During the last decade and a half,...States are being born, destroyed, reconstituted, and reconceived...Change is everywhere afoot and democratization is in its third wave". (Legitimacy, Compliance, and The Roots of Justice, 1994) The report goes on to observe that the "time is ripe" for great advances in our understanding of the sources and consequences of the legitimacy of legal, economic and political institutions in democratizing societies. In addition the massive changes currently in progress in many areas of the world provide an extraordinary and unprecedented opportunity for social scientists and other disciplines to systematically study and explain them.

Another report to the Foundation argues that systematic investigations of mature democracies and appropriate measures of their success also are necessary. The authors note that the human capital of a nation is a primary determinant of its strength. Thus one indicator of the extent to which a society is democratic is the effectiveness and fairness with which it develops, mobilizes and utilizes its human capital resources. Still another report focuses on the relationships of science and technology to democracy in both emerging and mature democratic systems and the normative and empirical issues these relationships raise.

A number of such questions already are the subjects of systematic investigations by departmental members. Others are questions that are of interest and can be addressed not only by political scientists but also by other social, physical and biological scientists, historians, philosophers and colleagues in the law, business, engineering, public policy and environmental schools. A very brief listing would include:

What are the varieties of democratic systems? Is sustained democracy necessarily dependent upon the presuppositions of liberal democracy concerning religious toleration, progress and reason, and rights? Are electoral structures essential to the acquisition and maintenance of democratic legitimacy? How does the centralization or decentralization, and unity or separation of power and authority in democratic regimes affect their functioning, legitimacy, policy effectiveness? Under what conditions do political, economic, military and legal institutions and processes acquire and lose their legitimacy?

What, if any are the special claims which democratic institutions have to legitimacy - to be more free, more just or more rational?

What are the relationships between democratic institutions and social, economic and political divisions based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion and class. How do such divisions and the discriminatory practices often associated with them affect the functioning of democratic institutions, and how do democratic institutions and practices affect the evolution of such divisions?

How do we understand the non-coercive mechanisms of generating support, e.g. political rhetoric, religion, civic organization and participation etc.? What are the relationships between the legitimacy of political and legal institutions and the use of coercive mechanisms in enforcing compliance with the law?

Under what conditions do elites of polities in various stages of democratization comply with the law? Under what conditions do "rules of the game" emerge that make possible competitive elections, political parties and peaceful transfers of power?

What is the role of mass communications and the media in promoting or impeding the democratization process and in enhancing or undermining democratic values and behavior in established democracies?

How does a democracy control and manage the state's coercive power vis-à-vis its citizens and vis-à-vis other states? Do democratic nations behave differently than non-democratic nations with respect to issues of war and peace and if so, how and why?

Under what conditions did stable and effective property rights -- including to intellectual products and proprietary research -- get established in mature democracies? To what extent can these processes become models in emerging democracies?

Political Institutions and Organizations

The systematic study of institutions and organizations can provide important insights into how polities sustain themselves. No form of government, especially democratic government, can proceed without attention to problems of institutional design, mobilization of activity, or the aggregation of decisions. At the same time, serious questions have been raised as to the degree to which successful organizational structures actually depend upon extra-institutional characteristics of the culture, economy or society. The study of institutions and organizations is another major departmental strength in that it encompasses topics such as the study of domestic and foreign elections and political parties, of legislatures and legislators, of bureaucracies and interest groups, of civil-military relations, of international organizations and trade, and international regimes.

An increased emphasis on the study of political institutions and organizations could focus on a number of classic problems. One is the study of the relationships between the design and performance of organizations. The "new institutionalism" with its focus on how individual choices affect the construction of institutions and how institutions in turn constrain member behavior has been a major area of research. Particularly exciting is the intersection between these concerns and considerations of the possible role of norms and social networks. A second problem is the conditions under which organizations and institutions mobilize and structure activity on the part of their members. This is a principal component of the "collective goods/free rider" puzzle. A third problem is related to both of the former -- how do organizations aggregate individual decisions? Because political scientists often are focused on collective decision making, the individual bases of decisions are less often studied. However, many strategic interactions are small -N- situations in which it is the individual actor's construction of the stakes of the game and his/her cognitive map of the world that guide deliberations and decisions among alternative courses of action and which impact collective outcomes. Thus, it is important to investigate processes of cognitive updating, learning under uncertainty and other issues of individual strategic choice, the role of values and beliefs in these processes and how these, in turn, affect macro outcomes.

The crossing of micro-macro barriers also involves a host of related questions. Examples include:

Under what conditions can institutions overcome limited individual cognitive capacities? And conversely, how do effective leaders overcome organizational limitations and reform institutional structures?

Under what circumstances are unitary rational actor assumptions sustainable in complex organizations?

Under what conditions will the interaction between highly hierarchical organizations such as the military and less hierarchical organizations such as legislatures and political parties affect the direction and content of domestic and foreign policies? Under what conditions do varying levels of citizen support for democratic institutions of governance and for the political system more generally affect their willingness to comply with the authoritative edicts of government?

How do we judge when a political institution is working well?

What is distinctive about political institutions and organizations as opposed to economic, religious, business organizations, etc.?

What are the sources of institutional change? What is the role of tradition and organizational norms in sustaining organizational systems and in shaping the processes of change?

Political Economy

Political Economy has been one of the great strengths of our department for most of the last decade. Our focus has been the reciprocal influences of polity and economy and the grounding of causal relationships between these two arenas in micro-foundations: the behavior of individuals and organizations acting as units to understand the workings of the macro-political economy. These foci will remain central to departmental research and teaching, because the research agendas they represent are far from complete and developments in the world continue to increase their relevance.

Particularly noteworthy in this regard has been increasing global interdependence and its implications for both international and domestic politics. Also of interest has been the transformation--at times gradual, at times rapid--of state-dominated to market-dominated political economies. The themes of distribution, inequality, poverty and social and political equity and their relationships to economic development at all levels of the domestic and international political systems also have attained renewed prominence.

The department is well positioned to address teaching, training and research matters pertinent to these issues. Moreover, it can do so in innovative ways that cross sub-field boundaries. Crossing such boundaries should include, but not necessarily be limited to: self-conscious integration of international, national and sub-national theorizing; the critical use of insights from political philosophy and public policy in the analysis of growth, distribution and equity issues; analysis of the politics of race, gender and inequality as questions of human capital development, and the integration of the United States and the research tools used to study the United States into comparative political analysis.

The substantive questions of concern to political economists are at least as old as Aristotle, while the dominant methodological assumptions in the field trace their conceptual roots back to Hobbes. Building on a tradition begun with the Olin Program in Normative Political Economy, we will continue to pursue across subfield lines questions of the meaning and limits of political rationality, the role of labor in political society, the importance of economic ideologies, and other aspects of the relations between property and power, between the marketplace and the polity, between efficiency and equality and between the creation of wealth and its distribution on a national and international scale.

The development of teaching, training and research around the political economy theme offers as well the possibility for productive and useful collaborations with other parts of the university. The most obvious are with the other social science departments and with the business, law and environment schools and the Sanford Institute. Particularly important might be themes of transnational organizations and human rights, conflict resolution at the national and international levels, economic and non-economic sources and consequences of globalization, and issues of the environment, sustainable development, the exploitation of common pool resources and their political and economic causes and consequences.

Finally, other political economy themes articulate extremely well with the three thematic foci emphasized, as well as with a variety of other intellectual interests pursued by department members. For example, the complex and varied relationships between economic development and the generation and maintenance of democratic institutions and processes has been a fertile intellectual ground for a substantial number of departmental members in all sub-fields. It should continue to be so. Similarly, our anticipated emphasis on institutions and organizations, their internal dynamics and their interaction with one another will play a critical role in illuminating our understanding of political economy. At the same time, it will bring to the fore issues surrounding the sources of compliance and defiance in organizational settings at the local, state and interstate levels.

Values, Culture and Behavior

It has become increasingly clear in recent years that questions of the relations between political values and culture, individual behavior and political action are critical for our understanding of politics. The growing "culture wars" in American politics, the explosion of ethnic and religious conflict around the globe, the questions raised by the end of the Cold War era with its clear ideological battle lines in international politics are all indicators of the continuing importance of the issues of political culture. So too is the growing debate between theories of rational choice and theories that focus on values, beliefs and culture in framing political decisions. "Political culture" is used here in an expansive sense. We are concerned with the formation of and products of human consciousness and with their reciprocal relation to political processes. Research involving the political impact of thought, opinion, belief, ideology, philosophy, tradition and education is included under this heading.

Many of our faculty are currently engaged in such research. Some explore the various dimensions of the formation and expression of public opinion or its manipulation by the media. Others are concerned with ethnic, racial, and ideological identities and the possibilities for cooperation and toleration, as well as for conflict, that they generate. Still others explore the ways in which our conceptions of political ethics and our ethical alternatives are grounded in our intellectual inheritance or shaped by the cultural practices of our political communities.

Opportunities for interdisciplinary work abound in this area. For example, research on moral judgment and decision making crosses disciplinary lines with psychology; public policy; sociology; women's studies; and religion. The same could be said of most of the research questions that follow: What is human capital; what is its political importance; and how is its development related to communities, political and subpolitical (e.g., family, voluntary associations, schools, etc.), and to practices of discrimination based on gender, race, religion and ethnicity?

Does democracy require certain sorts of cultural practices, opinions and beliefs?

How does economic development and globalization affect domestic political culture?

Under what conditions can tolerance be taught?

How do the same political structures operate differently in pluralistic communities than they do in homogeneous political communities (or communities in which political ties are coterminous with religious, racial, linguistic and ethnic ties)? What are the consequences of such differences for the generation and maintenance of democratic societies?

Can we develop methods of investigation in this area that will yield a satisfying level of certainty and generalizability in our results?

To what extent is our own activity as political scientists the product of, and constrained by, a particular political culture which is the legacy of the Western Enlightenment? And how do the theories and paradigms which we employ in the social sciences - including the differing assumptions made about human behavior - affect our own behavior and that of those we teach?

How can the tensions between universalistic claims of justice and established particularistic norms and practices be understood; for example, in the area of international law and human rights as well as in domestic politics?

Hiring

This report is clearly intended not only to guide the Political Science department’s intellectual development but its hiring as well. It should do so by establishing a presumption in favor of filling vacancies and hiring opportunities consistent with the intellectual directions set out in the preceding pages. As has been stated previously, we do not foresee, or see the need for, substantial departmental growth over the next five years. We do, however, expect to complete the current hiring initiatives (in American Politics, one senior position; in Comparative Politics, one senior position; in International Relations, one position) and to make replacements as they become necessary. As a result, it is conceivable that the department will have five or so searches over the period.

Three principles should guide the search decisions, both in terms of defining the searches and selecting specific candidates.

• Hiring decisions ought to be made, after extensive faculty discussion, consistent with the department’s intellectual plan and needs as outlined in this report and future modifications.
• For replacement searches, the first assumption is that the new hire will be in the same subfield, but not necessarily the same specialization, as the departing faculty member. This assumption should, however, be examined by the department in light of its consistency with the goals of this report, the intellectual development of our faculty, and our needs in the areas of teaching and training.
• We must always remain vigilant to the balance between tenured and non-tenured faculty. While senior leadership is important, the department’s growth in prestige over the last decade has come, in substantial part, through its excellent selection of junior faculty and their maturation into potential leaders in their fields. Furthermore, a strong cohort of non-tenured faculty helps assure intellectual renewal and high energy;

The most effective way of incorporating the intellectual priorities of this report into the department’s hiring decisions is by seeking to intersect considerations of theme and subfield. In doing so, we need to retain attention to subfields because they remain important reference points in the discipline, especially for those hiring our graduate students. At the same time, we intend to assure that we have excellent coverage of the thematic emphases previously outlined, and to do so in ways which assure that our teaching of undergraduates and training of graduate students crosses subfield boundaries.

Careful examination of the current allocation of faculty by subfield and theme points to several areas as ones in which additional hires would seem best to complement, but not overlap, existing strengths while also enhancing our ability to meet the goals of this report.

• Comparative Political Economy and Development, outside the advanced industrial countries;
• American Political Development;
• Comparative Institutions or Public Policy
• Values, Culture and Behavior, with a focus on cross-national behavior such as gender and race politics, ethnic and regional conflict or political participation;

These represent areas on which we should first focus when considering new hires. Given our existing strength, however, there is clearly also an opportunity as positions become available to either conduct "open" searches, looking for the "best player". In the discussions within the department and on the committee, furthermore, we have concluded that there would be a distinct advantage to being able regularly to bring a significant visiting scholar to the department for a semester or year. As a result, an additional priority for hiring is to create a "Visitor Slot" which would be a regular component of our faculty complement and which would be filled through discussions among the faculty with considerable (a year or more) advance preparation and notification. Such a slot will allow us to bring to the department persons working on research which can enrich work going on in the department, especially in one of more of the thematic areas, as well as enhance collaborative opportunities and the department’s reputation.

Programs

Ideally, an increased emphasis on the themes of democratization, political institutions and organizations, political economy, and culture and behavior would entail a series of activities improving (1) communication among members of the department in order to (2) stimulate cutting edge research and (3) innovative undergraduate teaching and graduate student training.

Communication

The exchange of ideas and interpretations of current research is a critical first step in the definition of research objectives and course topics. We propose three new initiatives to improve opportunities for intra-departmental discussion.

First, we propose a revision of our invited speakers’ series around the four cross-cutting themes outlined above. For each theme, a steering committee of three or four faculty from different traditional subfields and conducting research pertinent to that theme will cooperate on the design of the annual speakers’ series. In addition to departmental funding, the Political Economy and International Institutions programs where appropriate should be asked to supply some funding to get seminars around these themes off the ground.

Second, departmental resources, supplemented by external funding, could be used to establish one or more post-doctoral fellowships for newly minted PhDs whose interests are consistent with the themes outlined and who may come from disciplines other than political science. They would have opportunities for extended research and/or teaching collaborations with departmental members, as well as with scholars in other parts of the university.

Third, resources should be employed to bring to the department and the university a series of distinguished visiting scholars for various periods of time. Inter alia, they could be charged with organizing a colloquium, workshop or mini-conference on a problem or issue of special interest to them. The funding for these visitors should come from the creation of a departmental "visitor’s slot" as one of our forthcoming hiring opportunities. Future hires could also be directed at individuals whose research and teaching interests would fall into a traditional disciplinary sub-field, but who, because of their research, could be expected to engage in cross-disciplinary activities focused on democratization, organization, political economy or cultural issues.

In addition to these specific measures we need to assure that, as we undertake the steps outlined in this plan, we sustain and reinforce qualities of our departmental community which have been essential to our progress to date. These include a democratic and inclusive style of decision making which assures that faculty, regardless of rank, are as involved as possible in determining the strategy of the department and specific decisions to implement it, including especially hiring and promotion. We need also to assure that we maintain informal and formal practices of mentoring junior and younger faculty, conjoined to departmental practices intended to assure that they can most effectively advance their research and teaching. Finally we should reinforce the integration of graduate students into the intellectual life of the department through both informal and formal mechanisms designed to assure involvement in research, teaching and less obtrusive but essential forms of training, and to develop their knowledge of the discipline even as they pursue their specialization.

Research

We propose two initiatives to improve the chances that research conducted by members of the department contributes to the four themes in our report. A first step would be to offer incentives for departmental members to generate research proposals and to seek external funding for individual and collaborative research on significant issues pertinent to the four themes. We envision developing a fund which can provide small seed grants of no more than $1,000 to employ a research assistant, acquire data resources or meet with prospective research collaborators. Second, we propose to offer incentives to department members who are willing to develop proposals seeking support from outside funding agencies for theme-related departmental programs, including seminars, collaborative research and graduate training.

Teaching

Almost inevitably, the above actions would result in the development of new and revised graduate and undergraduate courses that are configured around the four themes. Faculty hiring is a big factor in promoting the expansion of our teaching menu. As a special initiative that cross-cuts undergraduate and graduate teaching, we propose to revise existing departmental rules which act as disincentives to joint teaching by colleagues inside the department or with faculty members from other departments. Preparing and teaching a course jointly typically is at least as labor intensive for each instructor as teaching a course individually.

For this reason, we propose that each full-time member of the department, with the consent of the chair, be allowed to teach a maximum of one course per year jointly with another faculty member from within or outside the department, with both members receiving full credit for the course. For part-time faculty members the frequency of permitted joint courses should be adjusted appropriately, with the consent of the chair. This proposal strikes a balance between our need to offer a large number and variety of classes and the benefits of collaborative teaching. The proposal would not extend to courses taught by more than two faculty members, to courses with multiple guest lecturers or to courses which do not entail regular class sessions. We propose that the efficacy of this policy and its compatibility with our overall teaching program be reviewed after three years.

Undergraduate Education

Undergraduate education is a historic strength in the department. We believe the quality of our undergraduate program has remained high. However, changes in the composition of the faculty, in the number of majors, and in enrollments by non- majors, as well as the proposed focus on the four themes present the department with a distinct opportunity to improve undergraduate instruction.

We are also pressed to do so by the recent decline in our overall enrollments and majors. While this decline is consistent with a national trend, this should not deter us from seeking ways to improve our enrollments, consistent with the goals of this report.

Our undergraduate education should seek to afford young men and women an unparalleled opportunity to develop an understanding of political institutions and behavior at the international, national and sub-national levels and to question the ends and principles of political life and the role of human agency within the nexus of society's political institutions and processes. In pursuing this goal, we should recognize that most Duke undergraduates do not pursue professional careers in the discipline of political science, and that therefore our undergraduate curriculum need not mirror our graduate one. We need, instead, to construct our curriculum to develop both the undergraduates’ understanding of politics and political life and their ability, as citizens, to analyze and critically evaluate political developments from both an empirical and normative standpoint. Both our empirical-analytic as well as our normative courses should contribute to this opportunity.

The Undergraduate Affairs committee, under the leadership of the Director for Undergraduate Studies, is responsible on an ongoing basis for evaluating how well we are fulfilling our undergraduate education mission. The committee should undertake a review of our current undergraduate curriculum to examine its compatibility with the goals sketched above. The committee should be cognizant of the fact that we have only recently restructured our undergraduate curriculum and that there will be a thorough review of the Arts and Sciences curriculum and requirements in 1997-1998. It may, therefore, be wise to wait to make any major changes. Nonetheless, the following specific options for enhancing our offerings and enrollments under the current system should be considered:

1. Assessing the balance between large lectures and seminars;
2. Introduction of any required courses;
3. Developing more freshmen and senior seminars, especially in the four thematic areas.
4. Encouraging team teaching across sub-fields and areas of concentration among colleagues within and outside of the department.
5. Evaluation of how changes in scheduling, titling, requirements and other features of our course might contribute to enhanced enrollments.

In addition, the Undergraduate and Graduate Affairs committees should jointly examine the teaching responsibilities of graduate students with an eye to assuring that they are receiving the best training and preparation for teaching, consistent with the quality of teaching in the classroom and the development of their research careers.

Graduate Program

Historically our graduate program has been oriented and will continue to be oriented to the production of PhDs who have received both strong theoretical and substantive training, combined with strong methodological skills. The success of our program is manifested in the extraordinary number of our students who have won national prizes for their dissertations, who have placed articles and essays in leading scholarly journals, who have given papers and served as discussants in professional meetings and who have obtained tenure track positions in a very tight job market. As in the past we anticipate that our students principally will seek employment at top research universities and liberal arts colleges. We recognize, however, that some may choose other academically related careers in government and the private sector.

Students are attracted to our graduate program for a variety of reasons, including, of course, our placement success. Principally, however, it is faculty quality, opportunities for learning to teach and the ability for one-on-one research relationships with faculty early in their graduate careers that attract them to Duke. The flexibility of the program enables them to tailor their studies to their substantive and theoretical interests while still having the opportunity to acquire a variety of cutting edge methodical skills. These are qualities which we must foster in the coming years, and it may well be opportune to undertake a review of our graduate curriculum and training, to assure that we are doing so as well as is possible and consonant with our undergraduate education mission.

In particular, in order to permit our students to take advantage of the department’s emphasis on themes and the introduction of jointly taught courses, we encourage reexamination of the battery of requirements in the graduate program. Such a reexamination should include evaluation by the subfields (where appropriate), the Graduate Affairs Committee and eventually the Department of the following:

• the total number of courses required of graduate students
• the distribution of courses required of graduate students
• the number of required courses in each subfield. As a rule, we expect each field will have no more than one required core seminar and an array of sometimes linked electives from which graduate students choose, consistent with their interests and effective training. Initial determination of this should be left to the subfields; with consultation with the DGS and Graduate Affairs Committee.
• the two course theory requirement; · the statistics and language requirements;
• the requirements for Prelims · the Dissertation Colloquium requirement

Review of these issues should begin immediately, with recommendations on some issues coming either this spring or early in the fall and all other items coming to the department for review of recommendations prior to the end of the fall, 1997 semester.

We must also aggressively pursue a small number of additional graduate slots from the Graduate School. In recent years we have downsized our program as part of the Graduate School’s effort to develop a budget which would allow awards competitive with our major competitors for top graduate students. Nonetheless, recent data reveal that by all indicators we continue to enroll the best social science graduate students at Duke and to have the best placement record for them. In fact, comparatively we appear to have one of the better placement records among major Ph.D. granting Political Science departments. We are training young scholars of high quality whose research and teaching credentials make them attractive to departments of high caliber and who are going on to make substantial contributions to scholarship. If we are to maintain the high quality of our graduate program and to satisfy our highly active research faculty, we need moderately to increase the number of graduate students to whom we are able to offer new fellowships each year. Were we to be able to add two or three fellowships, we would still be admitting fewer Ph.D. candidates than we were admitting five years ago. In most substantive areas, furthermore, we believe that such an expansion will not entail additional difficulties in placement.

For more than a decade, we have tried to convey to our graduate students a desire to find important, interesting and timely problems and to develop an attitude that makes them willing to engage in imaginative pursuits that carry potential risks but also higher rewards. A number of subfields and programs already are among the very best in the country. A sharper and more sustained focus on significant issues in democratization and democracy; political institutions and organizations; political economy; and values, culture, and behavior will help move other areas in the department into the top echelons, thus markedly contributing to our goal of becoming one of this country's ten best departments.

John Brehm ____________________________________

Peter Feaver ____________________________________

Michael Gillespie ____________________________________

Herbert Kitschelt ____________________________________

Ellen Mickiewicz ____________________________________

Allan Kornberg, Chair ____________________________________

John Aldrich, ex-officio Peter Lange, ex-officio

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