Emails received by the authors since the publication of “The Political Science 400: A 20-Year Update” (Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2007) called attention to mistakes in the citation counts of a number of scholars. Corrections to the citation counts are posted in an EXCEL file at www.socsci.uci.edu/∼bgrofman/. Once we have entered all corrections, an erratum will appear in a later issue of PS. Please address any corrections to that article to BGrofman@uci.edu.

In a research note written in 2005 and subsequently rejected by three leading political science journals as too speculative and not adequately statistically anchored, we sought to update Brunell and Grofman's 1998 research note in the APSR on divided Senate delegation by showing that we were right in predicting that, in the Senate election years taking place immediately after our original data analyses, the number of states with divided Senate delegations would continue to decline. It did: from 19 states in 1996 to 18 in 1998, way down to 13 in 2000 and remaining at that level until the most recent election in 2006. However, at the end of our 2005 paper we also say: “Unlike Brunell and Grofman (1998), though, we are not prepared to predict further decreases in the number of divided Senate delegations.”

Cartoons come in many shapes and sizes, from gag cartoons and comic strips, to comic books and graphic novels. A more or less respectable cartoon format is the newspaper editorial cartoon. This symposium considers the state of editorial cartooning around the globe, from representations of gender, religion, student life, and popular culture in the United States, to visual politics in Indonesia, Yemen, Turkey, and South Africa.

Clay Bennett is the editorial cartoonist for the Christian Science Monitor, based in Boston. Bennett joined the Christian Science Monitor in 1998 and produces five cartoons a week, which are nationally syndicated by the Christian Science Monitor News Service. Previously, he was the editorial cartoonist for the St. Petersburg Times from 1981–1994. He began his career as a staff artist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Fayetteville Times after graduating from the University of North Alabama in 1980 with degrees in Art and History.

Ann Telnaes is one of the most important political cartoonists of this era. In 2001, she became only the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. Relying on sharp, elegant lines, noted use of positive and negative spaces, strong metaphor, evocative symbolism, biting satire, and pointed editorial commentary, Telnaes' editorial cartoons are distinctive both artistically and in the message they convey.

The cartoon, comic, or—as influential cartoonist Will Eisner called it—“sequential art” is an art-form that is cognitively friendly to contemporary notions of individualistic-liberal-democracy. Whereas traditional forms of art have rather hierarchical standards of aesthetics, which then enforce customary notions of power and the conventional hermeneutic pecking order, the iconography of comics and cartoons is supportive of a kind of pluralistic democratic individualism. If, as some thinkers suggest, the world is understood by cognitive images in the brain, then—as the work of C. S. Pierce, Scott McCloud, and others support—comics is an art that allows for the individual self-creation that subsequently supports democracy.

Media are not politically neutral and political cartoons are no exception. Political viewpoints can be made clear through explicit argumentation, and through the more implicit use of visual elements. One prominent example that unites argumentation with the visual to produce political persuasion is America's first political cartoon, created by Benjamin Franklin in 1754, which frames the socio-political climate of the time with an image urging the British colonies to “Join, or Die” (Katz 2004, 44). The themes of political cartoons, despite technological progress, remain unaltered by way of their continual incorporation of “domestic politics, social themes and foreign affairs” (Kemnitz 1973, 83). While members of the academic community, such as Lester C. Olson (1987), support this connection between cartooning and persuasive rhetoric, there is much we don't know about how the persuasive arguments within political cartoons work.

Originating in the late nineteenth century, the editorial cartoon began as a mutually beneficial partnership between cartoonists and publishers. Publishers hoped to capitalize on the cartoon's popularity to increase revenue while cartoonists received job security and access to broad audiences. Recently, the future of the editorial cartoon in the United States has been a topic of much debate. Monitoring the decline of employment opportunities, growing editorial controls, and the greater use of syndication gives the impression of a medium in decline. Matt Davies, the head of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), recently stated that in any given interview he is “invariably asked about the demise of the editorial cartoonist” (Nieman 2004, 6).

Assessing the current condition of editorial cartooning invites engagement in a number of potential perspectives: Cartoons may be positioned as journalism, artistic expression, entertaining satire, and political and historical record. A rhetorical perspective examines cartoons as expressions of political discourse positioned within the wider culture that defines, constructs, and frames larger social ideologies as a backdrop to events of the day. Cartoonists accomplish this task not only by devising explicit messages about their subjects, but in the implicit expression of societal norms and values in the conceptual lenses and commonplaces they employ. This essay considers the conceptual lens of gender as it has been used by cartoonists in recent years to frame politicians, and the implications of that framing.

For more than three decades no commercial nuclear project in the U.S. was ordered that was not later canceled. Recently, the groundbreaking for the National Enrichment Facility in New Mexico in August, 2006, the issuance of the first “Early Site Permit” for a nuclear power plant in March, 2007, and a massive lobbying campaign in Washington, D.C. have been signs that the nuclear power industry still dreams of a renaissance. Nuclear power's momentum was broken in the late 1970s by several factors, including a grassroots anti-nuclear movement that won tightened regulations, thus raising the costs of nuclear power plant construction and operation. Editorial cartoons in the daily press of that time are only one of a number of fields of cartooning that document this nuclear power controversy, and not the one that affords the closest look. Both the nuclear industry and participants in the anti-nuclear movement published entire comic books to explain their views of nuclear power. Besides these special-purpose comic books, editorial cartoonists in the weekly press and representations of nuclear power in mass entertainment provide further bodies of visual evidence for understanding the steps by which nuclear power won and lost the “public acceptance” that it now tries to win back.

To what extent do political cartoonists use popular culture references to make sense of political culture? Seeing images in 2004, depicting Vice President Dick Cheney as Darth Vader from Star Wars, John Edwards as the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, and John Kerry as Frankenstein's monster, it is clear that some editorial cartoonists make connections between our popular culture and our political culture. Why, and with what possible consequences?

In Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988), the U.S. Supreme Court refused to extend free press protections to student newspapers at the high school level, supporting an administrator's decision to remove two articles prior to publication. The majority held that “First Amendment rights of students are not automatically coextensive with the rights of adults in other settings, and must be applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment.” They claimed that school newspapers were not a “forum for public expression,” and authorized the prior restraint exercised by the administrator “so long as [his] actions [were] reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns.”

Throughout American history editorial cartoons have exposed corruption, offered criticism of people in power, questioned and supported policies, and in general given the public another format assisting in the understanding of current events. The freedom to caricature politicians and visually comment on social and political issues has been a hallmark of the editorial cartoonist's profession. In the aftermath of the worldwide furor over Danish cartoonists' use of the Prophet Muhammad's image in early 2006, it is useful to ask whether certain images from the War on Terror have become taboo as a subject for American editorial cartoonists.

On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed 12 editorial cartoons, several of which contained caricatures of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. This publication sparked a controversy that began in Denmark and spanned the globe. The cartoon publications stemmed from an article discussing the difficulty in finding illustrators for a book on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. According to the book's author, cartoonists refused contract out of fear of retaliation from the Muslim community, citing the example of the 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutchman, for making the documentary Submission, a film focused upon the position of women in Islam. In addition to the article, nationwide debate discussed the right to freedom of speech and the problems surrounding self-censorship. It was within this context that Flemming Rose, the cultural editor at Jyllands-Posten, asked Danish cartoonists to depict the Prophet Muhammad as they saw him with the underlying purpose to raise the issue of self-censorship and fuel further debate. The cartoons ran alongside an article on free speech and self-censorship.

Billed as the first great crisis of the twenty-first century, terrorist attacks on the United States led to unprecedented media attention. What was initially seen as unqualified worldwide support for the U.S. quickly gave way to claims in the U.S. of growing anti-Americanism around the world (Mack 2005, v). This paper uses editorial cartoons in leading newspapers in Spain and the U.S. to investigate purported anti-Americanism.

The controversy over the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in cartoons that swept the globe at the beginning of 2006 was arguably the second major event after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that brought “Muslims” as a group of political actors to the forefront of international politics. The crisis was sparked in late September 2005, by the publication of political cartoons, depicting Islamic prophet Muhammad, in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. While the original cause of controversy was limited to a small country in northern Europe, political actions spread worldwide, ranging from peaceful protests to diplomatic sanctions to consumer boycotts, and finally to open violence against anything symbolizing “the West.” The levels of political action were muddled, and responsibilities as well as the potential to act were confused. Almost all of the actors involved in the controversy were left without an appropriate counterpart to address. For example, the Arab League and Muslim organizations blamed the Danish government for the publication of the cartoons, and for not taking action against the independent publisher of Jyllands-Posten. Enraged Muslim citizens of countries as geographically distant as Lebanon, Sudan, and Indonesia attacked and ransacked Danish embassies, and threatened anyone coming from a country belonging to the European Union. The editors of several newspapers—e.g., in France and Jordan—who had decided to reprint the cartoons either in an act of journalistic solidarity with Jyllands-Posten or to inform their Muslim readership about the cartoons, were fired. And, terrorist group Al Qaeda put the editor and cartoonists of Jyllands-Posten, as well as all of Denmark, at the top of its target list. The diplomatic fallout from the cartoon publication was enormous and has severely shattered relations between European and Arab countries. Despite the enormity of the event, the question of how the publication of 12 cartoons in Denmark could lead to a global crisis that dominated the news and kept diplomats and politicians on alert for more than three months remains unanswered.

Does the fallout from the now infamous Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad reflect inherent mass radicalism or irrationality on the part of Muslim societies? Judging from the news coverage broadcast to Western audiences, one would think so. Most media images focused on bearded men or veiled women demonstrating and burning flags reinforced by dramatic sound bites, as when the usually sober BBC (2006) cited one protester as saying: “They want to test our feelings. They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and their newspapers.” These reactions seemed disproportionate, if not irrational, because of the medium: they were, after all, just drawings.

The recent international uproar caused by the publication of the “Muhammad Cartoons” has had the useful side effect of stimulating thought about the roles newspaper editors and editorial cartoonists ought to play in our increasingly globalized world. This symposium article is based on my 10-year study of cartoons related to watershed changes in the Indonesian political system.This article draws on previous articles by the author. See the References section.

Flipping through the recently published collection of R. K. Laxman's cartoons chronicling Indian democracy (titled Brushing Up the Years: A Cartoonist's History of India 1947–2004, 2005), I was intrigued by the dynamic nature of the material collected together. It is indispensable as a teaching tool that displays the many vicissitudes of Indian democracy over the years. But also, the active nature of actual democratic life pulsated through each and every framed visual satiric political presentation. What is it about his visual melancholic humor that seems to question democratic functioning at its kernel? There is nothing funny/trivial about democratic governance, but by drawing in the comical aspect of a functioning democracy, Laxman's cartoons draw out a democracy alive to its inherent possibilities; a democracy laughing at itself for the aberrations from its idyllic potential.

Political humor directed at President Alyaksandr Lukashenka is beyond the official boundaries of the permissible in Belarus, a former Soviet Republic tucked away on the eastern border of the European Union and oft labeled “Europe's last dictatorship.” In August 2005, KGB officers raided the Minsk office of the civic group Third Way, confiscated the computer equipment, and threatened criminal charges for posting animated cartoons on the group's web site (http://mult.3dway.org). Oleg Minich, the cartoonist and founder of the virtual cartoon club Multclub, faced imprisonment of up to five years. His alleged crime falls under Article 367 of the Criminal Code, “Defamation of the President of the Republic of Belarus.” This flagrant attack on the freedom of expression was part of a broader crackdown on the mass media in preparation for the 2006 presidential election.