In 2012, the American Political Science Association (APSA) Council adopted new policies guiding data access and research transparency in political science. The policies appear as a revision to APSA's Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science. The revisions were the product of an extended and broad consultation with a variety of APSA committees and the association's membership.

Negative ads have become increasingly common in presidential campaigns. Figure 1 well illustrates this point (see also West 2009). The upcoming 2012 elections will almost surely augment this upward trend of more and more negativity. In fact, with the emergence of Super Pacs, the share of attack ads in 2012 will likely be significantly higher than in 2008, which in and of itself was the high-water mark for attack ads in the modern era. The harsh tone of the battle for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination certainly points toward an exceptionally nasty fall campaign.

As part of the ongoing work by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession (CSWP), we offer an empirical analysis of the pipeline problem in academia. The image of a pipeline is a commonly advanced explanation for persistent discrimination that suggests that gender inequality will decline once there are sufficient numbers of qualified women in the hiring pool. The CSWP believes that it is important to ask whether this phenomenon is actually occurring, because the implication is that we can explain inequality as a function of insufficient numbers of trained women in the pool, rather than as a result of ongoing discrimination that requires alternate remedies. Data from the American Association of University Professors suggests that merely increasing the pool of qualified women has not led to a commensurate number of women rising to the top in academia. Women are still ending up in lower paid jobs, and they continue to earn less than men in comparable positions. More aggressive policies to end discrimination are required.

Many political scientists first learned of anthropologist Mary Douglas's cultural theory (CT) through Aaron Wildavsky's APSA presidential address (Wildavsky 1987), in which he sought to explain the value of this theoretical approach for political science. Since then, much additional work has been done to develop CT as an ambitious general theory of politics.

In only 10 years, Wikipedia has risen from obscurity to become the dominant information source for an entire generation. However, any visitor can edit any page on Wikipedia, which hardly fosters confidence in its accuracy. In this article, I review thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders to assess both the accuracy and the thoroughness of Wikipedia's coverage. I find that Wikipedia is almost always accurate when a relevant article exists, but errors of omission are extremely frequent. These errors of omission follow a predictable pattern. Wikipedia's political coverage is often very good for recent or prominent topics but is lacking on older or more obscure topics.

Geoengineering, the “deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment in order to counteract anthropogenic climate change” (Shepherd et al. 2009, 1), is attracting increasing interest. As well as the Royal Society, various scientific and government organizations have produced reports on the potential and challenge of geoengineering as a potential strategy, alongside mitigation and adaptation, to avoid the vast human and environmental costs that climate change is thought to bring (Blackstock et al. 2009; GAO 2010; Long et al. 2011; Rickels et al. 2011). “Geoengineering” covers a diverse range of proposals conventionally divided into carbon dioxide removal (CDR) proposals and solar radiation management (SRM) proposals. This article argues that “geoengineering” should not be regarded as a third category of response to climate change, but should be disaggregated. Technically, CDR and SRM are quite different and discussing them together under the rubric of geoengineering can give the impression that all the technologies in the two categories of response always raise similar challenges and political issues when this is not necessarily the case. However, CDR and SRM should not be completely subsumed into the preexisting categories of mitigation and adaptation. Instead, they can be regarded as two parts of a five-part continuum of responses to climate change. To make this case, the first section of this article discusses whether geoengineering is distinctive, and the second situates CDR and SRM in relation to other responses to climate change.

Was it Al Gore's election to lose? Most political scientists, includeing us, believed that peace and a booming economy would give Gore a significant advantage in the 2000 presidential race. The election outcome—a virtual dead heat in the popular vote—has prompted two reactions that seem to us to be quite wrong-headed.

How should scholars recognize and respond to the complexities of positionality during the research process? Although there has been much theorizing on the intersectional and context-dependent nature of positionality, there remains a disjuncture between how positionality is understood theoretically and how it is applied. Ignoring the dynamism of positionality in practice has implications for the research process. This article theorizes one means of recognizing and responding to positionality in practice: a posture of “active reflexivity.” It outlines how we can become actively reflexive by adopting a disposition toward both ongoing reflection about our own social location and ongoing reflection on our assumptions regarding others’ perceptions. We then articulate four strategies for doing active reflexivity: recording assumptions around positionality; routinizing and systemizing reflexivity; bringing other actors into the process; and “showing our work” in the publication process.

Instructors constantly encourage students to learn and process information. Brock and Cameron assert, “Individuals process information, learn concepts, and solve problems in different ways” (1999, 251). Some students learn by listening, others learn by taking notes, more learn by seeing, and still others learn by doing and saying. Yet in many college class-rooms, the dominant teaching method is the traditional lecture. While lecturing may be a necessary teaching technique, it is often insufficient for teaching a large number of students with varying learning preferences.

The time does seem to be ripe for revisiting the urban-rural divide, with an eye toward understanding what lies beneath it. The last two presidential elections have revealed an urban-rural cleavage that is hard to ignore. Most observers now recognize that the “red” vs. “blue” Election Night maps really mask an urban-rural divide within states—a gap that has increased in recent years according to a range of definitions. In 2004, the difference in Democratic support between the most and least populous counties in the nation exceeded 25 points (see Figure 1). Survey marginals are comparable, although rural populations are not well represented in most national polls. Tabulations from the 2004 American National Election Studies (ANES) indicate a 20-point gap in presidential preference between inhabitants of counties with more than a million people and those in non-metro counties of less than 25,000.

Many contentious elections end in disputes about alleged fraud, irregularities, and malpractices. How do we know when these claims are valid and when they are false complaints from sore losers? This article describes a new dataset developed by the Electoral Integrity Project. Based on a survey of election experts, the research provides new evidence to compare how national contests around the world are meeting international standards of electoral integrity. The questionnaire includes 49 key indicators clustered into 11 stages of the electoral cycle, as well as generating an overall summary Perception of Electoral Integrity (PEI) 100-point index. The evidence displays high levels of external validity, internal validity, and legitimacy. The PEI datasets allow researchers to gauge the perceived quality of elections worldwide. This study summarizes the PEI’s research design, compares the quality of elections around the globe, and illustrates how electoral integrity is linked with both democracy and development.

What drives candidates to “go negative” and against which opponents? Using a unique dataset consisting of all inter-candidate tweets by the 17 Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 primaries, we assess predictors of negative affect online. Twitter is a free platform, and candidates therefore face no resource limitations when using it; this makes Twitter a wellspring of information about campaign messaging, given a level playing-field. Moreover, Twitter’s 140-character limit acts as a liberating constraint, leading candidates to issue sound bites ready for potential distribution not only online, but also through conventional media, as tweets become news. We find tweet negativity and overall rate of tweeting increases as the campaign season progresses. Unsurprisingly, the front-runner and eventual nominee, Donald Trump, sends and receives the most negative tweets and is more likely than his opponents to strike out against even those opponents who are polling poorly. However, candidates overwhelmingly “punch upwards” against those ahead of them in the polls, and this pattern goes beyond attacks against those near the top. Sixty of 136 dyads are characterized by lopsided negativity in one direction and only one of these 60 involves a clearly higher status candidate on the offensive.

Modern liberal democracies owe their stability and relative success to the coming together of two ideals which originate in distinct historical periods: the ideals of self-governance and territorially circumscribed nation-state. Self-governance defines freedom as the rule of law among a community of equals who are citizens of the polis and who have the right to rule and to be ruled. This ideal emerges in 5th-century Athens and is revived throughout history in episodes such as the experience of self-governing city-states in the Renaissance, the Paris commune of 1871, the anarchist and socialist communes of the Russian Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War.

Many journalists and politicians believe that during the Bush administration, a majority of Americans supported torture if they were assured that it would prevent a terrorist attack. As Mark Danner wrote in the April 2009 New York Review of Books, “Polls tend to show that a majority of Americans are willing to support torture only when they are assured that it will ‘thwart a terrorist attack.’” This view was repeated frequently in both left- and right-leaning articles and blogs, as well as in European papers (Sharrock 2008; Judd 2008; Koppelman 2009; Liberation 2008). There was a consensus, in other words, that throughout the years of the Bush administration, public opinion surveys tended to show a pro-torture American majority.

The effect of voter-identification (voter-ID) laws on turnout is a hot-button issue in contemporary American politics. In April of 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Indiana's voter-ID law, the nation's most rigorous, which requires voters to arrive at the polls with a state-issued photo ID containing an expiration date (Crawford v. Marion County 2008). In a famous incident highlighting how Hoosiers were dealing with their state's voter-ID law, representative Julia Carson (D-IN) was initially blocked from voting during Indiana's 2006 primary election for failing to comply with Indiana's voter-identification standard. Carson identified herself with her congressional ID card; since that card did not include an expiration date and therefore did not meet Indiana's voter-identification law, she was turned away at the polls before later being allowed to vote (Goldstein 2006). The rising wave of public, political, and legal debate crested two years later in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling and during the Indiana primaries, with reports of a dozen nuns being denied ballots at the polls due to their lack of appropriate identification (Urbina 2008).