This article conceptualizes the relative absence of youth in legislatures, a feature we perceive as a democratic deficit with detrimental consequences. It introduces a new operationalization: the Youth Representation Index. Rather than calculating youths’ representation by the percentage of Members of Parliament 35 or 40 years old and younger or legislatures’ median age, we argue that scholars should assess youths’ parliamentary presence relative to their proportion of the voting-age population. We contribute by assessing the magnitude of youths’ underrepresentation across countries, finding that adults 35 years old and younger are generally underrepresented in legislatures by a factor of three and those 40 years old and younger by a factor of two. We illustrate that youths’ presence increases under proportional representation electoral systems and with candidate age requirements set at 18 years. Finally, our results illustrate that countries with a younger population display a stronger discrepancy in youth representation.

Candidates with STEM backgrounds ran for Congress in record numbers in 2018. Understanding who participates in this form of “mobilized science,” and whether they are successful, is important because these candidates may campaign—and ultimately take action—to advance science-informed policies. However, whereas there is ample journalistic coverage of individual candidates, few scholars have studied them collectively. I constructed a novel dataset that allowed me to descriptively profile almost 200 STEM candidates who ran in 2018 and to explore correlates of their electoral success. I find that three quarters of the candidates were first-time congressional candidates, most of whom were Democrats and men. Democratic incumbents and candidates endorsed by the 314 PAC were significantly more likely to advance to the general election. I also find that women Democrats with STEM backgrounds are as likely (and perhaps more likely) to advance to the general election. I conclude by discussing how these findings advance the study of mobilized science in an increasingly partisan era.

Political scientists have long contemplated whether candidates are better off taking more ambiguous policy positions. Taking advantage of a lack of clarity in Senator Kamala Harris’s healthcare position, I use an original survey experiment to apply these theories to the case of the 2020 presidential election. I find that ambiguity offers Harris little to no advantage over two of her leading Democratic primary opponents and, among certain subjects, harms her relative to Senator Elizabeth Warren. I also find negative effects on Harris’s favorability relative to President Donald Trump. These results have interesting implications for both the 2020 election and the broader study of candidate rhetoric because they illustrate potential downsides to avoiding clear issue statements.

The study of microfoundations, especially individuals, is enjoying a renaissance in international relations (IR) scholarship. Yet, this rise is more difficult to find in publication data. Using the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) journal-article database, we show that only 13.7% of IR articles in 12 leading journals use the first image. This proportion remains approximately the same from 1980 through 2018. Interrogating the data, we show that this distribution does not stem from epistemological or methodological commitments, such as positivism, quantitative analysis, or formal modeling. We suggest several reasons for this apparent disjuncture between qualitative assessments of the rebirth of first-image theorizing and the quantitative data that imply a slower or perhaps more limited return.

Recent decades have seen a productive methodological debate about how political scientists “do history.” However, on one important point, the discussion has been surprisingly thin. This concerns the problem of reading history backward rather than forward. To understand this problem, we need to embed it in broader methodological discussions of how the selection of evidence is shaped (and potentially biased) by all sorts of prior assumptions going into the evidence-collection process. Thus, reading history backward makes scholars refrain from posing certain questions, become blind to certain descriptive developments and explanatory factors, and fail to enlist certain historical data. This article pulls together the fragmentary insights about this problem and devises an alternative, prospective approach centered on an open reading of the work of historians. Although this is a “low-tech” issue, it is one that has huge ramifications for the way we do historical analysis as political scientists.

Community-based research can improve validity and benefit its subjects, but building trust with communities and research subjects can be challenging. Social media is a powerful tool that can be used to build connections and share information. Yet, little research has been done on how social media can be used as a recruitment and communication tool for community-based research (CBR) projects. Our study used Facebook to advance the goals of a community-based social science research project in Little Rock, Arkansas. We compared participation and results distribution rates for this longitudinal research project in 2012, 2016, and 2018, and we found increases in 2018, the year we used social media. The results indicate that social media can aid CBR by helping to build trust, improve credibility, and facilitate communication.

Fieldwork often is seen as a challenging and misunderstood intellectual enterprise. Long perceived as the domain of the few, fieldwork and immersion continue to be the chosen methodological techniques for many political scientists. Focusing on my own fieldwork experience in Indonesia since 2015 as an early-career researcher, I discuss and reflect on three types of activities: (1) policy research, (2) dissertation research, and (3) activist work. In particular, I highlight fieldwork serendipities, fieldwork logistics, and my experience in gathering data and interacting with various interlocutors. It is hoped that this self-reflection will help readers to better understand the relationship between researchers and their interlocutors and collaborators, demystify the fieldwork process, and better prepare political scientists who use fieldwork in their research.

This reflection article presents insights on conducting fieldwork during and after COVID-19 from a diverse collection of political scientists—from department heads to graduate students based at public and private universities in the United States and abroad. Many of them contributed to a newly published volume, Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Krause and Szekely 2020). As in the book, these contributors draw on their years of experience in the field to identify the unique ethical and logistical challenges posed by COVID-19 and offer suggestions for how to adjust and continue research in the face of the pandemic’s disruptions. Key themes include how contingency planning must now be a central part of our research designs; how cyberspace has increasingly become “the field” for the time being; and how scholars can build lasting, mutually beneficial partnerships with “field citizens,” now and in the future.

Considerable research assesses research success in political science. Yet this work has not considered widespread findings that scholars can follow various career research paths that complicate how we envision scholarly success. Further, we have no systematic information on these career paths in any scientific discipline. I present an empirically validated research career-path typology for political scientists who began their career in a research institution. The typology demonstrates that many scholars follow paths different from the most conventional expectations, and research success by measures of publications and citations is associated with only some of these paths. Thus, existing research on aggregate publications and citations likely addresses only a subset of the career paths revealed in this article. Understanding research activities in our profession requires consideration of the various career paths, their motivation, and their place in our research community.

Drawing on my field research experiences in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia, I present a personal narrative that creates a vivid picture of field research in challenging environments and contemplates what research ethics look like in post-genocide societies. Working in violent, traumatized, or oppressive conditions reveals the fragility of traditional political science methods when confronted with the realities of human suffering. Part of the intrinsic value of field interviews is the unique interactive experience between researcher and respondents, which can never be fully replicated. Addressing the controversies about research methods, I argue that the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) versions of protection, replicability, and transparency undermine the integrity of field research and can threaten the security of researchers and respondents. This article also reflects on the personal experience of working in three post-genocide societies, including the effects of trauma and empathy. Despite the difficult subject matter and personal challenges, I continue to champion field research for the unmatched understanding it offers researchers. This reflection encourages a broader discussion about the value of human interaction in the research process, even if those interactions do not fit neatly into a methodological template.