Scholars tend to assume that consolidated democracies are free from the global retreat of democracy due to their strong institutions and economic development. Yet, populist forces that challenge the liberal democratic model have started to increase their support even in Western countries. However, in no country has democratic backsliding taken scholars by more surprise than in the United States. This article addresses the question of how a populist figure like Donald Trump managed to win the presidential election and subsequently undermined the democratic institutions in one of the world’s oldest democracies. We contend that the upsurge of populist leaders in contemporary Western democracies resulted from the political establishment’s failure to juggle responsiveness and responsibility simultaneously. In addition to our discussion of American politics, we draw parallels with the Turkish case to demonstrate our causal argument and offer suggestions on how to reverse democratic backsliding in the United States.

Politicians bequeath an important legacy after they leave office: the public’s memories of their time in office. Indeed, the media often discuss legacy concerns as a key motivation of politicians. Yet, there has been little empirical analysis of how politicians’ legacies are interpreted and used by the mass public. Analyzing millions of comments from online discussion forums, we show that citizens frequently mobilize memories of past politicians in their discussions of current events. A randomized survey experiment rationalizes such invocations of past politicians: they bolster the persuasiveness of contemporary arguments—particularly bad ones—but only when made in the context of a policy domain specifically associated with a past politician. Our findings suggest that politicians have a strong interest in cultivating a positive, broad, and enduring legacy because memories of them influence policy debates long after they leave office.

In this follow-up to “Five Laws of Politics,” I show that the original estimates of electoral outcomes describing the five “laws” hold up with twice the number of elections and three times as many countries as in the original article. The analysis yields long-run equilibrium values for several electoral parameters that set limits to incumbent support in a democracy. The evidence lends additional support to the notion that elections in democracies appear as if governed by “laws of politics.”

More than a decade after the observation that an “interpretive turn” was percolating through political science, there are clear indications of growth in the perceived legitimacy of interpretive scholarship. Both accompanying and contributing to interpretivism’s ascent has been the regular staging of Methods Cafés at various conferences in and beyond the discipline. First held at the 2005 meeting of the Western Political Science Association, the Methods Café subsequently landed at the 2006 conference of the American Political Science Association. The Methods Café has become an institutionalized feature of these and other conferences. This reflection looks at the past, present, and future of these events, as well as the key role they have played in making interpretivism visible in the discipline. In particular, I highlight their function as non-hierarchical intellectual spaces that promote teaching, learning, and interpretivist community building. Further, I offer friendly but not uncritical commentary on the successes and limitations of the Methods Café.

Graduate-program decision makers face a similar challenge: how to design an admissions process that screens out applicants who are unlikely to succeed but does not provide too high an entry barrier for students who can be successful. This study catalogs the use of standardized testing in Master of Public Administration admissions and finds that less than one third of programs require standardized tests for all applicants. Moreover, program prestige, program diversity, and program size do not affect the likelihood that a program requires the Graduate Record Examination. This study also reviews the various standards that universities use to provide test waivers and also discusses other common application materials. The results should be of interest to undergraduate academic advisers and graduate-program directors as well as scholars and practitioners of higher-education administration more generally.

The politics of public policy is a vibrant research area increasingly at the forefront of intellectual innovations in the discipline. We argue that political scientists are best positioned to undertake research on the politics of public policy when they possess expertise in particular policy areas. Policy expertise positions scholars to conduct theoretically innovative work and to ensure that empirical research reflects the reality they aim to analyze. It also confers important practical advantages, such as access to a significant number of academic positions and major sources of research funding not otherwise available to political scientists. Perhaps most importantly, scholars with policy expertise are equipped to defend the value of political science degrees and research in the public sphere.