Simulations are increasingly prominent in classrooms, and research shows that such activities provide an array of benefits. In general, simulations tend to situate students as “lab rats” (Asal 2005) who get to discuss the experiment. We call for bringing students into a simulation not as lab rats but instead as “mad scientists.” We specifically propose using a simulation’s debriefing step as an opportunity for students to imagine how they might revise the simulation that they experienced and to defend their revisions using concepts from class. We argue that such student-led revisions cultivate agentic engagement, a form of engagement in which students recognize themselves as co-constructors of knowledge with and for their peers. To test this notion, we modified the “Isle of Ted” with an expanded post-simulation debriefing. We found that our approach cultivated student engagement and buy-in, required students to think of concepts dynamically, and was relatively simple to implement. Our study contributes to the literature on simulations as effective and engaging classroom tools, and it also emphasizes the potential for simulations to spark agentic learning.

The articles in this symposium underscore at least three common points about understanding and combatting sexual harassment in the context of social science fieldwork:

Feminist standpoint theorists highlight how relations of power and inequality impact our knowledge of the social world (Smith 1974). The hierarchical positioning of different social groups creates a world in which the experiences and perspectives of certain people are acknowledged while others are silenced (Hartsock 1998; Hekman 1997). Moreover, a researcher’s personal background—her race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other factors—condition what she is able to learn and how (Collins 2000). Together, this literature underscores how the social world—and who we are within it—shapes knowledge production.

What are the ethical responsibilities that social science researchers have, not only to the people we study but also to ourselves as scholars and other scholars? This article argues that as political and social scientists, we need to expand our notion of research ethics, to adopt a notion that embraces treatment of our subject–participants and ourselves as researchers. This study is anchored in the still-growing literature on research ethics in fieldwork and draws on political science work on the ethical implications of the risks and realities of sexual violence for scholars who conduct fieldwork. The article looks beyond political science to feminist-informed research in the social sciences as it develops the argument about the ethical responsibilities of social scientists. In investigating the overarching question, the article addresses resources for survivors of sexual harassment and assault during field research.

During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et al. 2000). Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) reintroduce this debate, arguing that “objective” measures of democracy show little evidence of recent global democratic backsliding.1 By extension, they posit that time-varying expert bias drives the appearance of democratic retrenchment in measures that incorporate expert judgments. In this article, we engage with (1) broader debates on democracy measurement and democratic backsliding, and (2) L&M’s specific data and conclusions.

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.

This article introduces and demonstrates the utility of a new event dataset on democratic erosion around the world. Through case studies of Turkey and Brazil, we show that our Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED) can help to resolve debates about the extent to which democracy is backsliding based on prominent cross-national indicators, focusing in particular on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and Little and Meng (L&M) indices. V-Dem suggests that democracies are deteriorating worldwide; L&M argue that this may be an artifact of subjectivity and coder bias and that more “objective” indicators reveal little to no global democratic backsliding in recent years. Using DEED, we show that—at least in these cases—objective indices may underestimate the extent of democratic erosion whereas subjective indices may overestimate it. Our analyses illustrate the ways in which DEED can complement existing indices by illuminating the nature and dynamics of democratic erosion as it occurs on the ground.

Multiple well-known democracy-rating projects—including Freedom House, Polity, and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)—have identified apparent global regression in recent years. These measures rely on partly subjective indicators, which—in principle—could suffer from rater bias. For instance, Little and Meng (2023) argue that shared beliefs driven by the current zeitgeist could lead to shared biases that produce the appearance of democratic backsliding in subjectively coded measures. To assess this argument and the strength of the evidence for global democratic backsliding, we propose an observable-to-subjective score mapping (OSM) methodology that uses only easily observable features of democracy to predict existing indices of democracy. Applying this methodology to three prominent democracy indices, we find evidence of backsliding—but beginning later and not as pronounced as suggested by some of the original indices. Our approach suggests that the Freedom House measure particularly does not track with the recent patterns in observable indicators and that there has been a stasis or—at most—a modest decline in the average level of democracy.

The literature on democratization has experienced radical mood swings in recent decades, from extreme optimism in the 1990s to extreme pessimism today. These mood swings have resulted in not only misguided claims about the state of democracy in the world but also a muddied understanding of what drives both democratization and democratic erosion.

Despite the general narrative that the world is in a period of democratic decline, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies that assess whether this is systematically true. Most existing studies of global backsliding are based largely if not entirely on subjective indicators that rely on expert coder judgment. Our study surveys objective indicators of democracy (e.g., incumbent performance in elections) and finds little evidence of global democratic decline during the past decade. To explain the discrepancy in trends between expert-coded and objective indicators, we consider the role of coder bias and leaders strategically using more subtle undemocratic action. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that the world is becoming less democratic exclusively in ways that require subjective judgment to detect, this claim is not justified by existing evidence.

We are humbled by the quantity and quality of the commentaries on our article in this special issue. Our goal was not to answer definitively how global democracy has changed in recent years but rather to provoke a debate about how we collectively can improve the scholarship on this question. The range of viewpoints raised in this special issue have made important advances on this goal.

In an important contribution to scholarship on measuring democratic performance, Little and Meng suggest that bias among expert coders accounts for erosion in ratings of democratic quality and performance observed in recent years. Drawing on 19 waves of survey data on US democracy from academic experts and from the public collected by Bright Line Watch (BLW), this study looks for but does not find manifestations of the type of expert bias that Little and Meng posit. Although we are unable to provide a direct test of Little and Meng’s hypothesis, several analyses provide reassurance that expert samples are an informative source to measure democratic performance. We find that respondents who have participated more frequently in BLW surveys, who have coded for V-Dem, and who are vocal about the state of American democracy on Twitter are no more pessimistic than other participants.

A distinctive feature of 21st-century constitution making is the role assigned to citizens through various forms of direct participation, as well as special efforts to include groups underrepresented and marginalized in ordinary politics. The legitimacy of these processes increasingly requires a role for actors and groups previously excluded from crucial institutional decisions (Elster 1998; Fishkin 2011; Reuchamps and Welp 2023; Rubio-Marín 2020; Welp and Soto 2020). However, vested interests have proven challenging to overcome amid a global crisis of representation. The failed Chilean process of 2021–2022 provides valuable lessons about the triumphs and pitfalls of embracing an open approach to constitution making.

In recent years, many emerging actors (e.g., new social movements and parties) associate democratic problems with representative institutions. Accordingly, as a solution, they propose to introduce direct citizen participation in constitution and law making. However, three fallacies undermine the potential benefits of citizen participation: (1) attributing a moral and/or epistemic superiority to “the people”; (2) assuming that superiority, expecting to replace representation with direct participation; and (3) supposing that the legitimacy deficit will be resolved automatically by introducing inclusive direct participation. This article argues against these three ideas by providing a framework to understand participatory constitution making and briefly examining the cases of Chile and Iceland.

Chile’s 2021–22 Constitutional Convention was the first in the world to feature mechanisms that guaranteed gender parity among constituents (Arce and Suárez-Cao 2021). This was not an easy win. Feminist activists and women politicians pushed for gender parity in 2020-21 in a country that had adopted gender quotas relatively late (Figueroa 2021; Reyes-Housholder, Suárez-Cao, and Le Foulon 2023; Suárez-Cao 2023; personal interview #1, April 21, 2023). Reserving seats for Indigenous groups and using other mechanisms to allow space for independent constituents further broadened the convention’s ostensible inclusiveness. After the September 2022 rejection of the 2021–22 Constitutional Convention’s draft, political parties immediately started over by crafting an elite-controlled process. Lawmakers—this time with surprising speed—again coalesced around the idea that an equal number of men and women should write the new draft.

In 2019, Chile was struck by an uprising that shook its political structure to the core. Mobilization was so overwhelming that political elites decided—against what they had defended vigorously during past decades—to allow for a comprehensive reform of the Constitution enacted in 1980. Because constitutions allocate decision rights and define their political system as they do so, the process reopened the debate regarding the country’s imbalanced presidential design. This article contributes to the debate on checks and balances in the Chilean political system by examining a specific procedure that promotes imbalance: the urgency prerogative.

On November 15, 2019, following almost a month of massive daily demonstrations across Chile, most political parties agreed to initiate an unprecedented constituent process. This process introduced institutional innovations for the Constitutional Convention elections, including gender parity, reserving 17 seats for indigenous individuals, and allowing nonparty candidates to run as independent candidates (Heiss 2021; Suárez-Cao 2021).

Engaging with audiences and communities beyond academia is now a common practice for political scientists. Yet, political scientists rarely are trained in how to conduct public or policy engagement, and we know little about the impact that training programs have on their preparedness to communicate with the public and policy makers. In this study, we evaluate whether professional training equips scholars with the skills needed to perform public and policy outreach. We find that a four-day training program generates remarkably large increases in the number of participants reporting that they possess high levels of knowledge, preparation, and confidence for public and policy engagement. This finding suggests that investments in public-engagement training by universities and the discipline of political science have the potential to significantly boost public outreach by faculty members.

Scholars recognize the important role that diasporas play in conflict dynamics, including efforts to build peace in conflict-affected communities. Broader academic research emphasizes a focus on local conditions and actors, as well as site-specific understandings of peace and peacebuilding practices. This focus on specific communities and contexts often draws on qualitative, narrative-driven data, predominantly collected through interviewing. This article identifies some of the core challenges related to data collection encountered during semi-structured interviews in a study of Somali diaspora members in Melbourne, Australia. We emphasize how issues associated with cross-cultural and gendered understandings of concepts related to peacebuilding can affect each stage of a research project, from the preliminary collection of data to the analysis and discussion of research implications. Specifically, we address challenges related to instances of conceptual dissonance that occur when researchers employ cross-cultural and gendered concepts—in this case, peace, peacebuilding, and leadership. The findings will benefit conflict researchers who work with socially distant groups and ethnically divided populations more broadly, along with those who employ interpretivist methodologies that focus on how meaning making might ultimately influence peacebuilding practices and outcomes.

Engaging with higher education institutions from the People’s Republic of China (China or the PRC) raises difficult tensions for universities in liberal democratic contexts. Universities in China are overseen by a political party that routinely silences dissent and does not respect principles of academic freedom in the social sciences and humanities. For decades in the post–Mao era, this tension remained relatively muted outside of the PRC, but it has gained newfound significance as China’s power and assertiveness have grown globally.