Research on the public approval of American governors has focused almost exclusively on the impact of economic conditions on fluctuations in such approval. This article adds events variables to a model of gubernatorial public approval including the more commonly used economic variables, and tests this model in a time-series analysis in three states. The results suggest that the effect of political events is minimal and mixed. Furthermore, the analysis does not clearly support any general theory of gubernatorial approval. Instead, the factors that influence public support for governors seem to vary across time and state.

This research seeks to explain the fiscal transparency practices of individual U.S. counties by examining the extent of information shared with constituents via county government Web sites. This study evaluates a random sample of 400 U.S. counties, where 19 percent of those represented have populations of 100,000 or more residents, matching the same ratio of counties with populations of 100,000 or more residents nationally. We create a four-level categorical dependent variable measuring fiscal transparency and use a generalized ordered logit analysis with eight independent variables to explain the extent of fiscal transparency among the sample.

In two recent studies, Morgan and Fitzgerald and Robey ranked American political science departments on the basis of their faculty's research productivity in the major political science journals. The rankings which they produced were at some variance with the reputational rankings reported by Somit and Tanenhaus, Cartter, and, more recently, Ladd and Lipset. In particular, Robey reports that "… some southern universities seem to have made great strides in the last ten years while some Ivy League schools do not seem to be producing at a rate equivalent with their reputations. " Morgan and Fitzgerald reach a similar conclusion about the relationship between reputation and productivity for the Ivy League and southern schools. These studies and their implications have generated a great deal of discussion among political scientists and, as might be expected, have been subjected to a variety of criticism. Criticisms, for example, have focused on the journals selected to measure productivity, the use of frequency of articles produced rather than their importance for the profession, and the failure to incorporate books and monographs in such evaluations. Disciplines

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