The recent censorship requests made by Chinese authorities to Western academic publishers have sent shockwaves throughout the academic world. This article examines the high-profile The China Quarterly incident as a case in point. Because the censorship is expected to be followed by similar demands to other publications, it is important for the academic community to explore the logic behind it. This research article provides a preliminary analysis of publications on the censorship list and compares them to uncensored articles on similar themes. This exercise allows us to draw important insights. Theoretically, this article makes an original contribution by going beyond the censorship within to outside China. Empirically, it offers a comprehensive analysis of what China wants to censor and the context for its actions.

Reassuming the role of a “regular” faculty member after serving as department chair presents a common set of challenges that often are overlooked and underappreciated in the discipline. To provide former chairs with guideposts for navigating this pivotal moment in their career, we offer a few thoughts on what our experience suggests are the keys to a successful transition. Among the issues to consider are time and space to regroup, mining what you have learned as chair to revamp research and teaching, careful management of your new social status in the department, and envisioning how you can lead without holding a formal position.

This article updates the Masuoka, Grofman, and Feld 2002 dataset that identified the then-3,719 faculty in political science PhD-granting departments in the United States. That dataset contained information about each faculty member, including date and PhD-granting department, lifetime citation counts, fields of interest, and school of employment. We similarly create a database with the 4,089 currently tenured or tenure-track faculty, along with emeritus faculty, at US PhD-granting departments ca. 2017–2018. Using Google Scholar Profiles, along with manual counts for those who do not have a profile, we sort the dataset by citation count, PhD cohort, field of interest, and gender. This article identifies the 100 currently most-cited scholars, the 25 most-cited in each PhD cohort and subfield, the 40 most-cited women scholars, and the 25 most-cited emeriti. The full list of The Political Science 400 is available in an online appendix.

This article develops a number of measures of the research productivity of political science departments using data collected from Google Scholar. Departments are ranked in terms of citations to articles published by faculty, citations to articles recently published by faculty, impact factors of journals in which faculty published, and number of top publications in which faculty published. Results are presented in aggregate terms and on a per-faculty basis.

Many observers of the international relations (IR) discipline express concern about the decline in policy-relevant research within the academy. Some blame an academic culture and academic institutions that incentivize abstract, quantitative, or theoretical work that speaks to scholarly debates rather than real-world problems. This article asks how IR scholars value both scholarly and policy publications. Using data from the TRIP survey, we found that publications generally considered policy relevant are undervalued in academic tenure decisions. These findings hold regardless of whether faculty have attained tenure or whether they consider their own research to be policy relevant. However, scholars who consult, teach at colleges rather than research universities, or teach in Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs schools rather than political science departments are likely to believe: (1) that policy-relevant research products are currently valued more highly than their colleagues estimate; and (2) on the normative question, that these policy publications should be valued even more highly than they are. Overall, these results suggest an openness to increasing the value of policy-relevant research in tenure decisions as part of an effort to increase the amount of policy-focused work in the discipline.

This article uses descriptive statistics and social-network analysis to examine which regions and countries were selected in studies comparing-two countries that have been published in America’s renowned academic journals in comparative politics (CP): Comparative Political Studies and Journal of Comparative Politics. Which regions and countries are favored (and disfavored) by these studies? Analysis shows that the US-based CP journals strongly favor research on the countries of Western Europe and North America. There may be several explanations for this, but the uneven distribution of research publications with respect to continents and countries may be a source of several biases that should be of concern in the CP field.

External referee letters can, in principle, provide essential inputs for tenure and promotion decisions. But scholars’ reluctance to prepare critical, not to speak of “negative” assessments has led to a skewed self-selection: Potential referees tend to accept the task only if they see a tenure or promotion case as worthy of support. The resulting overabundance of praise has devalued the content of referee reports; they are difficult to interpret and of limited use for distinguishing deserving from undeserving candidates. Maybe a simple reform can mitigate these problems: Departments should pay external referees a generous honorarium, perhaps up to $2,000 at well-endowed research universities. This substantial incentive will induce more scholars to provide these assessments, thus counterbalancing the current self-selection on candidate supportability. Moreover, a large honorarium clearly turns the commissioning department into the contractual “principal” of these assessments, leading referees to prepare more searching, balanced evaluations. The main criterion will be whether a promotion really improves the department’s academic quality and scholarly standing.

How does learning about democratic erosion in other countries shape opinions about the state of democracy in the United States today? We describe lessons learned from a collaborative course on democratic erosion taught at nearly two dozen universities during the 2017–18 academic year. We use survey data, student-written blog posts, exit questionnaires, and interviews with students who did and did not take the course to explore the effects of studying democratic erosion from a comparative perspective. Do comparisons foster optimism about the relative resilience of American democracy or pessimism about its vulnerability to the same risk factors that have damaged other democracies around the world? Somewhat to our surprise, we find that the course increased optimism about US democracy, instilling greater confidence in the relative strength and longevity of American democratic norms and institutions. We also find, however, that the course did not increase civic engagement and, if anything, appears to have exacerbated skepticism toward activities such as protest. Students who took the course became increasingly sensitive to the possibility that some forms of civic engagement reflect and intensify the same threats to democracy that the course emphasized—especially polarization.

Why do students enroll in political science courses? I conducted an experiment designed to test the appeal of three possible motivations: students might hope to develop valuable skills, look for a better grasp of current events, or expect a deeper understanding of how the world works and their place within it. The experiment involved visiting several sections of Introduction to American Government courses. In each section, I advertised a political science course offered in the following semester. However, I varied the way in which the course was described and subsequently tracked whether students enrolled in it. I find that highlighting opportunities to develop skills does not have a significant effect on enrollment. In contrast, emphasizing “how the world works” is most effective at increasing enrollment. Qualitative evidence suggests that students are attracted to this type of course because it offers the opportunity for personal development and growth.

As professors, we seek not only to impart knowledge about issues and concepts in American politics but also to engage and inspire students to become more knowledgeable and more active in politics. This article explains how a student-run exit poll conducted on Election Day 2016 accomplished both goals. Seven faculty members from four universities pooled our students and carried out an exit poll in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio. By the time the polls closed, our students had spoken to more than 2,300 respondents, providing a memorable experience and creating a shared dataset that served as the centerpiece for many final class projects. Through this project, students gained hands-on experience in survey design, sampling, research ethics, polling, and data analysis.

Although research methods and statistics play an increasing role in political science and beyond, students all too often find statistics classes intimidating and boring. This need not be the case, however, because statistics classes provide opportunities to pose and answer questions about which students care. This article highlights four steps to making our methods and statistics classes more engaging and meaningful.