It is quite an honor to be selected for this John Gaus Award Lecture by a committee of my peers. I want to thank my husband, Bill Berry—my partner for 48 years and sometimes coauthor—and certainly my children, Katie Berry and David Berry, who have diverted my attention from policy studies for 35 years now and made life much more enjoyable by their personalities. I especially want to thank my many coauthors who have kept research and writing an engaging endeavor while we have developed friendships that will last a lifetime.

The Ithiel de Sola Pool Award is for work throughout my career—work that I have done with many and with the help of so many more. I thank the committee for this honor and, with it, the opportunity to honor another: Merrill Shanks.

The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly changed political science higher education—shifting courses and instructors online with little preparation. What might be the long-term effects of teaching through this crisis? Combining both open-ended and forced-choice survey questions with focus-group conversations, the data reveal a picture of faculty who are doing more for students and feeling strained by the efforts. Despite the challenges of teaching online during these difficult circumstances, attitudes toward online teaching did not decline universally. Those with more experience teaching online before the pandemic held a more favorable view of online teaching when they were surveyed during the pandemic. The data also show that the emotional burden on faculty increased, with female faculty members carrying a particularly heavy load. Because online classes likely will play a major role in the future of teaching political science, understanding the pandemic’s effects—both positive and negative—is critical.

To what extent did the COVID-19 pandemic impact PhD candidates in political science? To what extent were their supervisors aware of this impact? PhD candidates in political science are not strangers to the lack of available and stable academic employment and the potentially isolating experience of research. Our survey of Australian PhD candidates in political science and international relations (N = 109) confirms that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these preexisting challenges. By comparing political science PhD candidates and their supervisors in relation to their experiences during the pandemic, our survey also reveals that there has been a disconnect between the two groups relative to the former’s experience of COVID-19. Although supervisors recognize the stressors that candidates have faced, they are more likely than candidates to report that department support relative to pandemic-related challenges was available, and they appear to be somewhat unaware of the impact that COVID-19 has had on candidates’ career plans. The survey also reveals substantial disagreement between candidates and supervisors about perceived career-mentoring styles. These points of disconnect must be addressed to ensure the success and well-being of current and future PhD candidates.

This study examines the division of labor among political scientists during different periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article explores the hypothesis that the pandemic increased inequalities, especially by exacerbating the burden of housework and care responsibilities for women. We ground our analysis on the results of two surveys conducted in Brazil: one shortly after the onset of the pandemic in June 2020; and the other, more recently, from March 2022, after the ending of social-distancing measures. Brazil is a relevant case study because it was an epicenter of the virus for many months. This public health crisis occurred while a denialist and authoritarian government was in power. Considering gender and race variables, the data show a transformation of the dynamics of time organization during the period. At the beginning of the pandemic, men—primarily white men—devoted more time to academic work; in 2022, the most substantive difference was one of race. We observed a greater convergence among white people, as opposed to Black people, about household chores, with the latter group more overloaded than the former group. Traditional class and race inequalities concerning the Brazilian population can contribute to the explanation for this. When in-person work returned, white political scientists began to outsource domestic care more than their nonwhite counterparts.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in mask mandates on college campuses across the United States, and the reasons for disagreement with them by students in conservative regions are unknown. This study sought to explain the affective, behavioral, and cognitive (ABC) components of college students’ attitudes toward wearing a mask in the classroom according to the ABC model of attitude formation. Participants (N = 40) responded to eight open-ended, anonymous written interview prompts, which were coded and themed according to the grounded theory of qualitative research. Results indicated that cognitions about masking in general were varied, even among students in a predominantly conservative region. Participant cognitions about wearing a mask in the classroom ranged from the desire to protect self and others to discomfort and annoyance. Participants frequently reported experiences of negative affect while wearing a mask in the classroom, with perceived isolation reported as the most frequent issue related to negative affect. Participants frequently reported less classroom participation because of the mandate to wear a mask in the classroom, but they also frequently reported that they complied despite the cognitive and affective problems due to their desire to obey, social responsibility, and values regarding the care of others.

This article examines how one political science department used data and student feedback to make pedagogical choices about course modalities and pedagogical approaches during the COVID-19 pandemic. This case demonstrates that gathering data from students through surveys and other means and then utilizing that data in decision making is a valuable practice. However, there are constraints on collecting quality data in a crisis. With a need to react quickly and to gather and analyze data in a timely fashion, data-informed and student-empathetic decision making is a more accurate characterization of the outcomes in this case and a more achievable goal for the future than data-driven and student-centered decision making in a crisis. This study concludes that data-informed and student-empathetic decision making may be preferable in circumstances in which the data are inconclusive or support multiple conclusions as well as when there are conflicting needs and preferences among both faculty members and students.

What influenced women to volunteer for service in the US military during World War II? Whereas previous literature focused on potential intrinsic and extrinsic individual-level motives, we consider the broader structural context that may have played a role in female volunteerism. We leverage original data containing information on all volunteers who served in the US Army during World War II, with detailed county-level economic, political, and demographic data, to explore patterns of female volunteerism in the military. Our findings suggest that racism and sexism played a role in female volunteerism in many parts of the country, which may have undermined the government’s goals of mobilizing the entire country in support of the war effort.

Committees from the American Political Science Association (APSA) on the status of graduate students in political science conducted digital surveys in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Distributed using listservs from APSA, the surveys asked about a range of realities facing graduate students including employment opportunities, industry or academic support, and overall well-being. Analysis of the data pre-, during-, and post-pandemic revealed high anxiety in 2018 as part of students’ experience looking for jobs. By 2020 and 2022, anxiety worsened, such that the well-being of graduate students in political science should be addressed. We recommend a change in the structure of graduate academic programs to include stronger institutional support and an emphasis on alternative paths for work that does not entail teaching at an academic institution.

Political scientists rely on complex software to conduct research, and much of the software they use is written and distributed for free by other researchers. This article contends that creating and maintaining these public goods is costly for individual software developers but that it is not adequately incentivized by the academic community. We demonstrate that statistical software is used widely but rarely cited in political science, and we highlight a partial solution to this problem: software bibliographies. To facilitate their creation, we introduce softbib, an R package that scans analysis scripts, detects the software used in those scripts, and automatically creates bibliographies. We hope that recognizing the contribution of software developers to science will encourage more scholars to create public goods, which could yield important downstream benefits.

Do all PhD students aspire to an academic career? Do PhD programs appropriately prepare students for the realities of the job market? There is a well-established gap between political science PhD graduates and tenure-track academic postings. The mismatch between PhD graduates and academic positions may point to alternative models of doctoral education as a possible solution. However, the survey of Canadian and Australian PhD students described in this article suggests that issues and challenges are common regardless of the model of doctoral education. Canadian PhDs report more mentoring activity, but they also are more fixated on securing academic positions. However, we find important gender differences across countries: men are more interested in an academic career and only a (disproportionately male) minority is confident that they will succeed in securing a faculty career. This raises questions about diversity in the future of the profession. This research suggests that although students have different experiences under different doctoral models, issues of academic jobs and a mismatch are common in both systems.

This article investigates the dynamics of discrimination in political science PhD programs with a survey of current political science graduate students in the top 50 departments. The study focuses on mentorship, funding, sexual harassment, racism, homophobia, and labor exploitation: 20% of respondents reported labor exploitation, 19% experienced racial discrimination, 9% reported sexual harassment, and 6% experienced homophobia. Discrimination is uneven across individuals; some groups of graduate students experience widespread discrimination, especially racial discrimination, whereas other groups are largely unaware of these issues. We conducted a survey experiment to gauge the impact of misconduct on formal reporting mechanisms and find that hearing about racial discrimination has a chilling effect on reporting. We find that experiencing discrimination harms how satisfied students are in their program. We find that factors linked to student vulnerability, such as international status and funding, are significantly associated with harassment and that reporting discrimination predicts more discrimination.

This article reports new rankings of journal research productivity for PhD-granting political science departments during the past three decades. Using data on all authors and articles published in 19 leading general and subfield political science journals from 1990 to 2018, we compiled a count of department publications in these journals, weighted by the number of authors, department faculty size, and journal impact measures reported by Garand et al. (2009). We find that there is a discernible ranking of political science departments in terms of journal research productivity. The observed rankings are strongly but imperfectly related to the U.S. News & World Report (2022) reputational rankings of political science departments. We do find, however, that some political science departments have higher or lower levels of research productivity than would be suggested by their reputational rankings.

In Fall 2020, political science instructors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) partnered to conduct a virtual-learning wargame centered on Taiwan. This article presents its design and execution along with the results from pre- and post-game surveys and interviews with the participants that were conducted to measure the achievement of its learning objectives. The game conduct and empirical results demonstrate two main findings. First, wargames are effective tools of active learning that aid in classroom instruction and grab the attention of students—even over Zoom—in a way that traditional methods of instruction do not. Second, wargames can bridge gaps between different fields. The MIT–NPS wargame tackled the civil–military divide by bringing together military officers at NPS and academics from MIT. These results show that wargaming holds promise as a bridge-building tool of instruction that can engage students, scholars, and practitioners in achieving positive learning outcomes.

How can instructors best foster connections among students when learning is fully remote? This article describes a pedagogical experiment conducted in two large introductory political science courses at a large public university in the 2020–2021 academic year. We randomly assigned groups of students to different sets of instructions on how to study together remotely for an exam. Our strongest finding is that almost any effort by an instructor prompting students to work together helps students to feel more connected to one another; however, students often need to see and hear one another to feel connected. We find this to be tremendously encouraging—relatively easy interventions can result in significant improvements in learning.

This case study reviews a social movement course that centered on a 10-week simulation of a contemporary contentious event in Washington, DC, involving six movement organizations and four police agencies. To our knowledge, it is the first classroom simulation of a Trump-era police–protester contentious episode or of any political science simulation that places an episode of insurrection in the contemporary United States. Three goals animated this project: (1) promote learning concerning extra-institutional political conflict in the American case; (2) combine scholarship and role playing to explore the dynamic interaction of movement, countermovement, and enforcement organizations; and (3) teach the complex relationship between social science theory and political practice in an engaging way. Students used theoretical frameworks drawn from the literature to assess and develop protest capacity and repertoires for their assigned organization and chose strategic goals and tactical means to attempt to generate political leverage. Student organizations made concurrent “moves” and instructors iteratively developed the contentious episode. This article discusses the results of students’ evaluations of the simulation. In addition to extensive online appendices, it provides a detailed explanation and design for instructors who are considering a similar approach.