This article introduces how to teach an interactive, one-semester-long statistics and programming class. The setting also can be applied to shorter and longer classes as well as introductory and advanced courses. I propose a project-based seminar that also encompasses elements of an inverted classroom. As a result of this combination, the seminar supports students’ learning progress and also creates engaging virtual classes. To demonstrate how to apply a project-based seminar setting to teaching statistics and programming classes, I use an introductory class to data wrangling and management with the statistical software program R. Students are guided through a typical data science workflow that requires data management and data wrangling and concludes with visualizing and presenting first research results during a simulated mini-conference.

The importance of slideware presentations at conferences remains underestimated. Although several articles in the profession focus on this topic, emphasis on aspects of design and aesthetics appears scant. Changing trends and advances in software, instructional design, and human–computer interactions demand political scientists adapt and pay greater attention to balance and harmony, learning to distinguish between design and decoration. Building on Salmond and Smith’s (2011) work, this article offers 10 tips for creating cleaner, more visually appealing, minimalist slideware presentations. In a world of smartphones and social media, audiences are accustomed to visual aids; therefore, clearly and succinctly conveying a presenter’s core argument and/or results is not only crucial but also paramount.

The blended flipped classroom is a partially online, partially offline course to teach social science research methods. Online, students watch video lectures, do readings, and complete short exercises to acquire basic knowledge of research methodologies and academic skills. Being set up modularly, the online environment offers flexibility regarding not only when to study but also what to study: students choose the methods they find useful for their thesis project. They then apply these methods and skills in a series of face-to-face workshops, which incorporate several forms of active learning, such as small-group work, mini-games, and in-class writing. Although more demanding than a traditional lecture course, the blended flipped classroom has had a positive effect on student performance in the research methods course as well as in subsequent thesis projects.

Twitter has been a prominent forum for academics communicating online, both among themselves and with policy makers and the broader public. Elon Musk’s takeover of the company brought sweeping changes to many aspects of the platform, including public access to its data; Twitter’s approach to censorship and mis/disinformation; and tweaks to the affordances of the platform. This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform mean for this academic ecosystem? Using a snowball sample of more than 15,700 academic accounts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, we show that academics in these fields reduced their “engagement” with the platform, measured by either the number of active accounts (i.e., those registering any behavior on a given day) or the number of tweets written (including original tweets, replies, retweets, and quote tweets). We further tested whether this decrease in engagement differed by account type; we found that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets and quoting others’ tweets) but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting and replying to others’ content).

With the 2012 presidential elections approaching, student interest in (and frustration with) the US two-party system is likely to grow. Although many explanations exist for this phenomenon, their number and complexity often overwhelm students. This article describes an iterative game, designed for a single class session, that illustrates one of the major institutional explanations for the US two-party system—Duverger's Law. The game can also spur discussion of some of the major criticisms of the Law.

Until recently, the nomination of a justice to the U.S. Supreme Court had little public opinion relevance. Questions might be raised about the nominee's qualifications, perhaps including his or her liberalism or conservatism, but the American people tended to acquiesce in Court appointments. That changed during the Reagan administration, when opponents of the president's choice of Robert Bork decided that public opinion did matter and effectively campaigned to turn the public against Bork.

The Thomas nomination, however, raised even more questions about public opinion. Race and the role it should play in Court nominations was as important as Clarence Thomas's legal opinions. And, as soon as Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment became public, other aspects of public opinion came into prominence.

We explore the implications of sequential presidential primary elections for turnout in selecting the presidential party nominees. Drawing from a micro-level theory of participation in sequential elections, we develop a set of aggregate-level hypotheses that tease out different ways that candidate mobilization efforts as well as the legal and institutional structures within a sequential contest influence turnout in presidential nomination contests. Using data from all state primary elections from 1972–2016, we find that electorates facing winnowed candidate pools, and those with contests after the effective endings to presidential contests have substantially reduced turnout that effectively disenfranchises voters in many states. Sequenced primary elections lead to lower overall turnout and less meaningful participation for many voters during presidential nominations contests.

To determine whether our undergraduate curriculum fulfills the pedagogical goals of our department, the authors conducted a semester-long curriculum assessment. This article discusses five main lessons and three lingering questions to demonstrate potential benefits of curriculum assessment and to prompt further disciplinary conversation about how undergraduate teaching should be structured. The overarching lesson, however, is that although student needs may be quite diverse, an emphasis on core aspects of the program can yield better training for all undergraduates.

Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) question the prevailing narrative of widespread democratic backsliding by showing that various objective indicators of democracy are flat over time. However, because recent democratic decline is concentrated in democracies, the objective indicators can accurately test for backsliding only if they can track democratic quality within democracies. This response article shows that they cannot, for conceptual and empirical reasons. The indicators generally can distinguish democracies from autocracies but are blind to variation in quality within democracies. L&M, therefore, are showing that one form of variation in democracy is stagnant but are systematically missing the very type of variation that has most informed current warnings about backsliding.

Introduction

For over a decade, the Southern Political Science Association has been committed to assessing the status of women faculty members by regularly administering surveys to political science programs within the South. These surveys, sponsored by the SPSA and administered by the Committee on the Status of Women, have resulted in numerous recommendations for creating diversity within departments and gender equity within programs. In this article we examine the results of the Millennium Survey, the latest effort to evaluate the progress of female political scientists within the South. Our findings suggest that in the last 10 years women faculty have made great progress, especially in Ph.D. granting institutions where the number of women in tenured positions at the rank of associate and full professor has doubled since the last survey. This is an important shift from a trend noted in an earlier CSW survey and in a national report in the September–October 1998 issue of Academe where the author remarked that “Women, unlike men, traded off rank for institutional prestige. For women, the more prestigious their institution, the lower their rank; for men there was no such relationship” (Valian 1998). Contrary to the national trend dynamic, women in the South are making the most progress at the most prestigious institutions. Perhaps there are a greater number of faculty positions within doctoral departments and that in the last 10 years these programs have had more opportunities to hire and promote women. Our survey suggests that there have been fewer tenure-track positions available for women within departments at smaller, bachelor's degree-granting institutions. While the number of female associate professors has increased within baccalaureate-granting programs, the number of female full professors has actually declined. However, the overall number of women faculty members at all ranks has increased in the majority of political science programs within the South.

On October 26, 1992, the Canadian people, for the first time in their history as a political community, acted as Canada's ultimate constitutional authority—in effect, as a sovereign people. In the referendum conducted on that day, a majority of Canadians in a majority of provinces, said “No” to the Charlottetown Accord proposals for constitutional change.

Though the referendum was only consultative and not legally binding, nonetheless the governments that supported the Accord—and these include the federal government, all ten provincial governments and the two territorial governments, plus organizations representing the four groupings of aboriginal peoples (status and non-status Indians, Inuit, and Metis)—will not proceed with ratification of the Accord in their legislative assemblies. The politicians will respect the vox populi.

The referendum may have killed more than the Accord. It may very well be the last time this generation of Canadians attempts a grand resolution of constitutional issues in order to prevent a national unity crisis. If in the next few years Canada plunges once again into the constitutional maelstrom, it will be because it is confronted with an actual, not an apprehended, crisis of national unity.

The presence of women candidates in both major parties’ presidential primaries, including a likely woman Democratic nominee, has increased the attention paid to gender dynamics in the 2016 US presidential election. However, the presumption that previous presidential elections—without female prominent contenders—were gender neutral is false: gender dynamics have been at play in all US presidential elections to date. The nation’s top executive office is arguably the most masculine in American politics. Duerst-Lahti (1997) describes the presidency as a gendered space in which masculine norms and images are reified as the ideal, adding, “the masculinist assumption-made-normal is strong and is made even stronger when it goes unnoticed for its gendered aspects” (22). Presidents and presidential contenders, whether male or female, are expected to meet the masculine expectations of the office through words and actions, and those around them—family, spouses, and advisors—often play a role in shaping the degree to which they are successful. In navigating American politics, candidates also face gendered treatment by opponents, voters, and media, reminding us that presidential politics is far from gender neutral. These gender dynamics have been detailed by scholars, particularly in analyses of the presidential candidacies of women (Beail and Longworth 2013; Carlin and Winfrey 2009; Carroll and Dittmar 2009; Dittmar and Carroll 2013; Duerst-Lahti 2013; Falk 2010; Han and Heldman 2007; Heldman, Carroll, and Olson 2005; Lawrence and Rose 2009; McClain, Carter, and Brady 2005). However, the depth and nuance in scholarly analyses are rarely evident in popular dialogue about the ways in which gender shapes presidential elections.