We examine the changing patterns of knowledge production and diffusion in political science over the past five decades using a dataset of over 200,000 SSCI-indexed research articles from 1970 to 2020. We analyze how author identity and team diversity influence research outputs and outcomes. The results show that historically excluded groups of scholars have gradually improved their representation and expanded their collaboration networks over time. Although the publication gaps are narrowing, obscured gaps in evaluation and citation practices persist. Research specialties with higher proportions of minority researchers tend to have lower average citation impacts. The least cited research specialties are largely studied by women and racial/ethnic minority scholars. Papers written by racial/ethnic minorities and Global South scholars are significantly less cited. However, collaborating with outgroup scholars can effectively overcome this citation gap. We also find that papers written by women receive more citations than those written by men, after controlling for journal prestige and research topics. Furthermore, when we limit our investigation to leading universities, citation gaps diminish. However, scholars of African descent continue to experience entrenched citation disadvantages even if they are affiliated with highly prestigious universities. This study provides multidimensional measurements to advance diversity debates and adds nuances to our understanding of opportunity structures in political science.

Presidents possess vast authority to change policy unilaterally. But their power depends on the compliance of unelected officials, who typically have more information. We examine the conditions under which presidents invest in costly oversight of the bureaucracy. We identify an underlying political process—the polarization of an agent’s potential principals—and argue that because this increases the potential for future policy losses for presidents, they create new means of overseeing agency behavior. To test this argument, we examine abortion restrictions in foreign aid, leveraging archival records and interviews with former officials. Most importantly, this allows us to study prohibitions that were proposed but not adopted. We find that as abortion became an essential part of party competition for the presidency, Republican presidents increased their investment in oversight, which eroded bureaucrats ability to moderate presidential power over abortion abroad.

Inspired by developments in artificial intelligence, space engineering, and genetics, discussion of post-human visions of the future is now widespread, especially in the tech world. This reflective essay analyses various ideological configurations of “transhumanism,” a body of thought centred on the pursuit of radical human improvement through technoscientific intervention. It focuses on the political values and world-making projects transhumanists have advocated since the early twentieth century. We argue that transhumanism constitutes a significant strand of international political thought: transhumanists have articulated extraordinarily ambitious visions of global order. Through analysing the work of key transhumanists from the interwar era to the present, we show that assorted socialist and liberal iterations have aimed to overcome the irrationality of a state-centric international order, with projects ranging from Marxist accounts of a world state to anarcho-capitalist visions of market order through to dreams of space colonization. Analysing transhumanist world-making visions helps to clarify the political ideas underlying current techno-utopian projects and debates about existential risks to humanity.

A number of important studies have documented gender gaps in the effectiveness or performance of individual representatives. Yet whether these differences are observable when it comes to responsiveness to public opinion is unclear. In this article, I examine the degree to which representatives use social media to dynamically respond to shifts in issue salience among the electorate. After combining nearly 400 bi-weekly repeated public opinion surveys from YouGov asking voters about their issue priorities, I trained a large language model to classify the universe of elected U.S. and UK representatives’ social media messages on Twitter to the same issues. Findings reveal that women representatives demonstrate greater responsiveness than their male counterparts to shifts in issue salience according to both women and men constituents. Despite an overall bias toward male constituents, female representatives play a crucial role in narrowing the gender gap by consistently aligning their attention with the issues prioritized by female constituents. These findings not only contribute to our understanding of elite-voter responsiveness but also underscore the substantive benefits that women representatives provide for all constituents.