This article considers from a Wuffeauldian serio-comical point of view some fundamental insights into governance and public policy.

The 200-year gestation and birth of the 27th Amendment to the US Constitution is nothing short of miraculous in its duration and improbable finish. The 27th Amendment represents a story of tenacity and personal vindication in the face of steep odds. This article recounts the event and its meaning through interviews with the protagonists.

How can scholars conduct field research when there is limited access to the field? This article first identifies how limited and uncertain field access can affect field research and then provides recommendations to address these challenges. We focus on conducting field research in Japan because of our substantive expertise, but we believe that the problems and solutions outlined in this article are applicable to a broad range of countries. Our hope is that this article contributes to the developing literature on conducting research during times of emergency and to the larger literature on best practices for field research.

Although ethnographic methods have yielded important insights into the inner workings of many political institutions, their use in the study of institutions engaged in national security policy making and practice has been more limited. Common features of security institutions raise methodological and ethical concerns for participant observers: they are hard to access, handle classified information, and their proximity to the use of violence creates challenges for researchers who adopt critical perspectives toward the framing and practice of national security. This article reflects on how critical ethnographers might respond to these challenges, drawing on experiences from a 14-month ethnographically influenced study of UK government departments involved in national security policy making. I argue that even though questions of informed consent and avoiding harm are complicated by the core functions of security institutions and their cultures of busyness and secrecy, navigating these tensions can itself generate useful ethnographic insights into institutional cultures.

This article describes a course designed to help political science majors formulate career goals, apply for internships and full-time positions, and eventually succeed on the job. Students benefit from exposure to guest speakers representing a range of careers and from collaborations with other campus institutions (e.g., the career center and graduate programs). Additionally, students produce job-market materials that highlight how their education has prepared them for life and work. Offering a similar professional-development course can help departments to increase enrollments and majors by increasing students’ confidence in the career prospects associated with their major.

Start-up packages vary enormously, particularly across institutions, and not all faculty know what items they may negotiate for to support their probationary period. To demystify this part of the hidden curriculum, we discuss the components of start-up packages and other benefits that may be provided to new faculty at the time of hire. We focus on five broad topics: compensation and personal support, general support, research support, teaching support, and service and professional development. Drawing on the results of a survey of tenure-track assistant political science professors in the United States, we also provide an overview of the prevalence of a variety of items at different types of institutions and discuss other considerations in the negotiation process to close the knowledge gap for candidates during negotiations.

Considerable research finds that male political scientists publish more research on average than do female political scientists. Yet the reasons for this difference are not entirely clear. Those findings may also overestimate the relative productivity of men because they do not account for the longer time that more men have been in the profession and thus have been publishing longer than women. For a prominent survey dataset of political scientists, we demonstrate notable cohort differences in the research productivity of both men and women across time. Our results also indicate that the overall greater productivity of men results in part from senior women scholars not generally enjoying the same benefits of long tenure on their research output as men do.

Graduate students are primarily socialized into the political science profession in departments, with networks of peers and informal mentors providing crucial sources of support. This article describes one model of departmental professional socialization that the authors have led—the Graduate Student Caucus—which can improve graduate students’ day-to-day lived experiences. In this model, a small cross-cohort group of students is elected for a year-long term to develop professional and social programming for graduate students and to assist them in navigating university bureaucracy, teaching and research responsibilities, and the job market. The Caucus also regularly compiles and presents student concerns to their department administrators to steer the program’s direction. We describe the structure of the Caucus and its activities to highlight the benefits of this model and its adaptability to other institutional settings. Governance mechanisms like a Caucus cultivate trust, boost confidence, and demystify the “hidden curriculum” in the profession.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a shift to online academic meetings such as the webinar and virtual conference. We add to the conversation about how these modes of knowledge mobilization may be more inclusive, accessible, and environmentally friendly than in-person conferences through a discussion of the Twitter conference—during which participants produce threaded tweets of their research and engage in both real-time and asynchronous scholarly discussion. In this article, we discuss how to host a Twitter conference; we claim that Twitter conferences require different skills and have different strengths and weaknesses than virtual conferences or webinars; and we recommend that they should be a permanent addition to the roster of academic knowledge-mobilization events.

The COVID-19 pandemic is hastening the shift of the world of work and study to online, remote, and flexible hours. The political science profession and its attributes of conferencing and workshopping will likely follow suit. To help direct this flow into relationships of reciprocity and scholarly co-creation, this article details the experiences of a successful online workshopping community known as the Normative Theory of Immigration Working Group (NTIWG). For the past 10 years, this voluntary association comprising 88 migration ethics scholars has been meeting routinely and exclusively online to workshop penultimate drafts of research papers. Three workshop conveners here reflect on the joys of group participation and mutual learning and listening. With the intention of smoothing the way for like-minded groups to emerge and solidify, we elaborate our group’s animating values and its learned-by-doing rules for scheduling, moderating, and offering feedback online. In the spirit of collectively facing the diversity and equity challenges confronting the future of political science, we conclude by reviewing steps that we are taking to address our own challenges of inclusivity.

Although senior capstone courses and projects globally are growing in popularity for undergraduate students in political science, with the potential to integrate prior curriculum and assess student learning, students generally undertake this milestone as individuals. In contrast, we present a teamwork-based capstone course wherein key student submissions—including the final project—are created in teams. Having conducted this course for several years, we describe in this article how we incorporated teamwork and demonstrate how students evaluate teamwork in in-person, online, and hybrid course formats.

In an increasingly tight job market, the selection of an adviser has never been more important to help guide young scholars in their career development. Advisers play a critical role in students’ careers and beyond, from providing substantive help with the dissertation to sharing the norms of the discipline, helping them navigate the job market, and introducing them to potential collaborators. Yet, many graduate students do not know how to go about identifying the best adviser for them. Here, we provide some suggestions to graduate students for how best to pick a dissertation adviser and other mentors, noting some of the most important aspects of the relationship and highlighting some of the most critical elements to look for in finding an appropriate and helpful adviser.

This article examines the effectiveness of guided peer discussion in building news media literacy. Our longitudinal study finds that this instructional approach increased students’ interest in news headlines, particularly among those with initially low interest. Furthermore, qualitative results show students’ increased awareness of the quality and potential bias of news sources. We conclude that guided peer discussion is an effective means of promoting news media literacy.

Recent research suggests that many faculty members believe that their students are lacking the information literacy (IL) skills needed to be successful in their college career. Reports also suggest that there is a broader issue about the uncertain position of IL in the university curriculum. This article uses data from a worldwide survey of political science faculty to better understand how widespread this perception is, what is being done about this perceived problem, and what steps can be taken to encourage faculty to implement IL training in the classroom. We find that faculty believe that there is a problem but many are not explicitly teaching IL as part of their courses. We also find that faculty members who have received IL training are far more likely to include it in their courses. This leads us to suggest that IL training should be provided at the faculty level, which will have positive downstream effects on the IL training that students receive. We also contend that IL deserves a more prominent place in the university curriculum.

Research on gender and politics is becoming increasingly mainstreamed within political science. To document this process, we introduce a comprehensive dataset of articles published in 37 political science journals through 2019 that can be considered “gender and politics” research. Whereas recent related literature has explored the descriptive representation of women in political science by examining authorship and citation patterns, we argue that the identification of publications substantively focused on gender and politics not only illuminates trends but also can contribute to broader conversations about substantive representation and methodological diversity in the discipline. This article highlights the theoretical challenges of identifying gender and politics research and analyzes major trends in the substantive representation of gender in the journals over time. This dataset is useful for scholars who are interested in the evolution of salient topics in gender and politics research and patterns of citation.

In recent years, political scientists increasingly have used data-science tools to research political processes, positions, and behaviors. Because both domestic and international politics are grounded in oral and written texts, computerized text analysis (CTA)—typically based on natural-language processing—has become one of the most notable applications of data-science tools in political research. This article explores the promises and perils of using CTA methods in political research and, specifically, the study of international relations. We highlight fundamental analytical and methodological gaps that hinder application and review processes. Whereas we acknowledge the significant contribution of CTA to political research, we identify a dual “engagement deficit” that may distance those without prior background in data science: (1) the tendency to prioritize methodological innovation over analytical and theoretical insights; and (2) the scholarly and political costs of requiring high proficiency levels and training to comprehend, assess, and use advanced research models.

Despite winning the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump alleged “millions of illegal votes” and other election fraud. He continued using this rhetoric throughout his tenure as president and ultimately suggested that if he did not win reelection in 2020, it would be because it somehow was stolen from him. Through an original survey experiment, this article explores how such allegations of fraud influence the public’s attitudes toward the conduct of elections, election outcomes, representation, and democracy as a whole. In doing so, we found that respondents expressed significantly and substantively more negative attitudes toward elections and democracy after being exposed to claims of fraud (even without evidence). Additionally, Republican identifiers were more likely than Democrats or Independents to doubt that their vote was counted fairly. These results bear important implications for our current understanding of politics in the United States.

Political scientists are increasingly using digitized documents from archives. This article is a practical introduction to doing digital archival research. First, it explains when and why political scientists use evidence from archival research. Second, it argues that the remote accessibility of digitized records provides new opportunities for comparative and transnational research. However, digital archival research also risks aggravating five types of biases that pose challenges for qualitative, quantitative, interpretive, and mixed-methods research: survival, transfer, digitization, and reinforcement bias at the level of record collection and source bias at the level of record creation. Third, this article offers concrete strategies for anticipating and mitigating these biases by walking readers through the experience of entering, being in, and leaving an archive, while also underscoring the importance of learning the structure of an archive. The article concludes by addressing the ethical implications to archival research as a type of field research for political scientists.

Former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated vote-fraud claims following the 2020 presidential election divided the Republican Party. Numerous Republicans supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, others did not. These futile attempts reached a flashpoint during the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. Even in the wake of such violence, many House Republicans continued to amplify Trump’s baseless claims by voting to exclude the election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania. This article analyzes these roll-call votes to determine the likely motivations for why some House Republicans were still willing to support Trump’s position following the Capitol riot. We then replicate our analysis with the January 13 impeachment and the May 19 vote to establish a bipartisan National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex (January 6 Commission) to investigate the insurrection. Our findings indicate the relevance of constituent preferences, Trump’s popularity, legislator ideology, and the racial diversity of constituents represented by Republicans.