Legitimacy is a bulwark for courts; even when judges engage in controversial or disagreeable behavior, the public tends to acquiesce. Recent studies identify several threats to the legitimacy of courts, including polarization and attacks by political elites. This article contributes to the scholarly discourse by exploring a previously unconsidered threat: scandal, or allegations of personal misbehavior. We argue that scandals can undermine confidence in judges as virtuous arbiters and erode broad public support for the courts. Using survey experiments, we draw on real-world judicial controversies to evaluate the impact of scandal on specific support for judicial actors and their rulings and diffuse support for the judiciary. We demonstrate that scandals erode individual support but find no evidence that institutional support is diminished. These findings may ease normative concerns that isolated indiscretions by controversial jurists may deplete the vast “reservoir of goodwill” that is foundational to the courts.

Congressional candidates regularly turn their frustration into posts on Facebook, fueling extreme partisanship and “echo-chamber” dialogue with their negative sentiment. In this research, we provide new evidence demonstrating the power of that negative sentiment to elicit more user engagement on Facebook across various metrics, illustrating how congressional candidates’ use of negativity corresponds with greater negativity in public responses. To fully comprehend the impact of these online political messages, we use a dictionary-based computational approach to catalog the tone of US House of Representatives candidates’ messages on Facebook and the user responses they elicit during the 2020 election. This research speaks to the power of elite rhetoric to shape political climates and pairs candidate strategies with user responses—contributing new insights into the mechanisms for voter engagement.

Competitive elections are essential for democratic accountability, yet most US House of Representatives elections are uncompetitive. Using district-level data from 1982 to 2018, I examine the relationship between redistricting institutions and election competition. I extend the work of Carson, Crespin, and Williamson (2014) by separating independent and political commissions and find that, relative to legislative redistricting, independent commissions are 2.25 times more likely to have competitive elections, and they decrease incumbent party wins by 52%.

In “In Laws of Politics and How to Establish Them,” Erik Weber contends that my arguments for the existence of “five laws of politics” are “inconclusive.” Although the “empirical evidence is impressive,” he avers, the “underlying social mechanisms” responsible for the adduced relationships are missing. Without it, he adds, no empirical relationship rises to the special status of a “law” of politics. Helpfully, Weber did not stop there. Using the example of Duverger’s laws, he suggested ways to close the “argumentative gap.” In this article, I aim to do just that.

Pursuing a PhD is an exigent endeavor entailing various psychological and organizational challenges. This article proposes our adaptation of the agile method Scrum, which we call “ScrumAdemia,” as a solution. We illustrate how ScrumAdemia helps us to overcome the challenges related to workflows, working conditions, and mental health during doctoral research. We use data from a self-evaluation survey executed over 18 months, as well as an extended focus-group discussion to assess ScrumAdemia’s usefulness. Our experiences show that ScrumAdemia helps us to (1) overcome limitations of organization and structure relating to working conditions; (2) solve time-management problems affecting workflows; and (3) remedy the lack of support. This study has broader implications for doctoral research: more attention should be given to creating structures for peer-to-peer support.

A recently published dataset of Middle East and North Africa (MENA)–focused scholarship in journals selected to represent the disciplinary “core” of political science sheds empirical light on key publishing trends, from the balance between quantitative and qualitative studies to the growth in experimental and “large-N” statistical methods. Cammett and Kendall’s (2021) analysis shows that between 2001 and 2019, MENA-focused studies declined as a share of publications but that slightly less than half of that work is qualitative. However, the definition of qualitative research that the study uses significantly overstates the number of such articles in the Cammett and Kendall dataset. Our analysis rectifies this, distinguishing among research studies that use qualitative evidence, qualitative methods, theoretical traditions, and paradigms (i.e., positivist/post-positivist). This yields a more accurate and significantly starker picture of the marginality of MENA qualitative research in core politics journals. These results raise the question of why methodologically sophisticated scholarship outside of the “top journals” has not been published there.

News databases, such as Factiva and Nexis Uni, are vital for the construction of many commonly used datasets of political events because they provide researchers with access to thousands of diverse news sources. This article raises several issues with news databases that pose a threat to the quality and replicability of data-collection efforts. We recommend best practices for using news databases to gather event data.

Online surveys of public opinion are less expensive and faster to administer than other surveys. However, nonprobability online samples diverge from the gold standard of probabilistic sampling. Although scholars have examined the quality of nonprobability samples in the United States and Europe, we know little about how these samples perform in developing contexts. We use nine online surveys fielded in six Latin American countries to examine the bias in these samples. We also ask whether two common tools that researchers use to mitigate sample bias—post-stratification and sample matching—improve these online samples. We find that online samples in the region exhibit high levels of bias, even in countries where Internet access is widespread. We also find that post-stratification does little to improve sample quality; sample matching outperforms the provider’s standard approach, but the gains are substantively small. This is partly because unequal Internet access and lack of investment in panel recruitment means that providers are unlikely to have enough panelists in lower socioeconomic categories to draw representative online samples, regardless of the sampling method. Researchers who want to draw conclusions about the attitudes or behaviors of the public as a whole in contexts like Latin America still need probability samples.