Government By the People, Basic, Election Update

James MacGregor Burns is a Senior Scholar at the Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland, College Park, and Woodrow Wilson Professor Emeritus of Government at Williams College. He has written numerous books, including The Power to Lead (1984), The Vineyard of Liberty (1982), Leadership (1979), Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (1970), The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America (1963), and Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956). With his son, Stewart Burns, he wrote A People's Charter: The Pursuit of Rights in America (1991); with Georgia Sorenson, Dead Center: Clinton, Gore, and the Perils of Moderation (2000); and with Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts (2001). Burns is a past president of the American Political Science Association and winner of numerous prizes, including a Pulitzer Prize in History.

J.W. Peltason is a leading scholar on the judicial process and public law. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. As past president of the American Council on Education, Peltason has represented higher education before Congress and state legislatures. His writings include Federal Courts in the Political Process (1955), Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegration (1961), and with Sue Davis, Understanding the Constitution (2000). Among his awards are the James Madison Medal from Princeton University, the Irvine Medal from the University of California, Irvine, and the American Political Science Association's Charles E. Merriam Award.

Thomas E. Cronin is a leading student of the American presidency, leadership, and policy-making processes. He teaches at and serves as president of Whitman College. He was a White House Fellow and a White House aide and has served as president of the Western Political Science Association. His writings include The State of the Presidency (1980), U.S. v. Crime in the Streets (1981), Direct Democracy: The Politics of Initiative, Referendum, and Recall (1989), Colorado Politics and Government (1993), and The Paradoxes of the American Presidency (1998). Cronin is a past recipient of the American Political Science Association's Charles E. Merriam Award.

David B. Magleby is nationally recognized for his expertise on direct democracy, voting behavior, and campaign finance. He is dean as well as Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University and has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Virginia. His writings include Direct Legislation (1984), The Money Chase: Congressional Campaign Finance Reform (1990), Myth of the Independent Voter (1992), and is editor of Outside Money: Soft Money and Issue Advocacy in the 1998 Congressional Elections (2000). He was president of Pi Sigma Alpha, the national political science honor society, and has received numerous teaching awards. In 1996 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Nuffield College, Oxford University.

David M. O'Brien is the Leone Reaves and George W Spicer Professor at the University of Virginia. He was a Judicial Fellow and Research Associate at the Supreme Court of the United States, a Fulbright Lecturer at Oxford University, held the Fulbright Chair for Senior Scholars at the University of Bologna, and a Fulbright Researcher in Japan, as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation. Among his publications are Storm Center: The Supreme Court in American Politics, 5th ed., (2000); a two volume casebook, Constitutional Law and Politics, 4th ed., (2000); an annual Supreme Court Watch; and To Dream of Dreams: Religious Freedom in Postwar Japan (1996). He received the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for contributing to the public's understanding of the law.

Paul C. Light is currently the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service and Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Professor Light has a wide-ranging career in both academia and government. He has worked on Capitol Hill as a senior committee staffer in the U.S. Senate and as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in the U.S. House. He has taught at the University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has also served as a senior adviser to several national commissions on federal, state, and local public service. He is the author of 15 books on government, public service, and public policy.