This article introduces, describes, and evaluates a program designed to broaden the PhD pipeline in political science to achieve greater equity and inclusion. In its fifth year, the program brings undergraduate students from two Historically Black Colleges and Universities to an R-1 political science PhD department for a seven-week summer program, in which they are paired with a faculty mentor to conduct research for, prepare, and present an original research project. Additionally, participants attend methods classes, GRE preparatory workshops, subfield presentations from graduate students and faculty in the host department, and social events. We describe key lessons drawn from our experience in piloting this program. We evaluate its success using data about the composition of the host institution’s PhD program and exit surveys conducted with all participants from 2016 to 2018.

The 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment is an opportunity to reflect on the role of women in American politics. The tools of intersectionality allow scholars to pinpoint the progress and pitfalls produced by ongoing modes of sexism and patriarchy as well as racism and classism. It is now well known that major movements for the rights of American women have not always addressed the issues specific to black women (Simien 2006). Indeed, in 1851, Sojourner Truth discussed this issue of not being included in conversations about women’s rights (or civil rights for blacks) in her alleged “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Similarly, the fact that Ida B. Wells and other black women were told to process at the back of the 1913 Women’s March on Washington is another illustration of the historical exclusion of black women by their white counterparts (Boissoneault 2017). Decades later and even after the 1965 Voting Rights Act enforced black women’s enfranchisement, the Combahee River Collective (1977) noted the exclusion of issues that affect black women by both 1970s white feminist movements and male-dominated anti-racist movements.

Book workshops are widely regarded as yielding important benefits for junior scholars; therefore, these intensive feedback sessions have proliferated in recent years. However, closer consideration suggests some important notes of caution. A wealth of additional suggestions does not necessarily improve a post-dissertation manuscript; instead, comments and criticisms advanced by senior experts may induce young authors to back away from or tone down innovative ideas or to address numerous additional factors and conditions, which can make their theory unwieldy and complicated. More important than the potential pitfalls for the first book itself are the heavy opportunity costs created by book workshops, which can jeopardize a junior colleague’s career advancement. After all, the substantial revisions arising from these feedback sessions take time away from article production and the design and initial research for a second major project. In these ways, overinvestment in the first book can hurt a young scholar’s chances at tenure time.

Five years before the famous Seneca Falls Meeting in which a gathering of women demanded suffrage, Levi Suydam already had encountered the problem that sex posed for suffrage. Suydam, a 23-year-old man who supported the Whigs, petitioned to vote in 1843. The opposing party challenged his petition “on the grounds that ‘he was more a female than a male, and that, in his physical organization, he partook of both sexes’” (Reis 2009, 34). Because the Whigs won by one vote, Suydam’s status was central to the election outcome. After several medical exams in which different doctors reached different conclusions about Suydam’s true sex, Suydam was determined to be “more female than male” (Reis 2009, 35). Suydam’s case presents an important corollary to a more famous case of voting “fraud” after Susan B. Anthony voted in the 1872 presidential election. The 1873 trial and conviction of Anthony was straightforward: as a woman, she could not vote. Suydam posed a greater challenge to political order insofar as neither law nor medicine could pin down Suydam’s sex within a framework of binary sex. The Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited the denial of the vote “on account of sex,” might have rendered the uncertainty of sex politically and legally moot. It did not.

The design of field experiments makes them inappropriate for testing many common political theories. These theories propose that certain factors—for example, income or information—affect how individuals make choices. To test these theories, researchers typically investigate the correlation between the relevant factor and individuals’ choices, holding other factors constant. Field experiments, in contrast, allow multiple factors to vary at once: they create real-world disruption and do not control how actors behave in response. Subjects’ choices will be affected by the experimental treatment as well as by other changes that occur as the larger system reacts. It will be difficult to isolate the effect of any one factor, particularly without a good preexisting model of the system and how it is likely to respond. If a field experiment will not tell us what we need to know, the benefit of the study cannot outweigh harm, and it also will be unethical.

Previous studies documented a “gender citation gap” in political science whereby women are less likely to be cited in published research and course syllabi, especially by male scholars. However, no previous study examined citation patterns among students in political science courses to determine if similar patterns are evident in their research. This article analyzes an original database of individual as well as group research assignments from an undergraduate research methods course. Our analysis indicates that male students are significantly less likely than female students to cite research published by women—whether as first authors, any of the authors, or the average percentage of authors per team. However, in a subsequent group research assignment, gender diversity had no discernible effect on group citation patterns. We discuss the implications of these findings for current pedagogical practices and the future state of the discipline.

Most political scientists self-identify as a comparativist, theorist, Americanist, or another label corresponding with the qualifying field exams (QFE) that they passed during their doctoral studies. Passing the QFE indicates that a graduate student or faculty member is broadly familiar with the full range of theories, approaches, and debates within a subfield or research theme. The value of the QFE as a form of certification, however, depends on the extent to which the subfield or theme is cohesive in and of itself as well as whether departmental lists draw on a common pool of publications. This article investigates the value of the QFE by examining the cohesiveness of 16 Canadian politics PhD QFE lists. Our findings suggest that it is problematic to assume that scholars who pass a QFE share a common knowledge base.

The Introduction to American Government course, and its textbook, is a nearly universal experience for students in American colleges and universities, but what exactly is being taught in this course? Do the textbooks used in this widely taught course accurately reflect the diversity of populations and experiences in the United States? More specifically, how do textbooks for Introduction to American Government cover historically marginalized groups, if at all? This article builds on previous work by analyzing the representation of individual historically marginalized groups to conduct index search and content analyses on traditionally published and openly licensed (i.e., open educational resources [OER]) textbooks. This study finds that American government textbooks include little coverage of any historically marginalized groups, and that OER textbooks are average in this respect, doing neither better nor worse than their traditionally published counterparts.

In 2010, an analysis of the top 50 political science journals showed that women were reasonably well represented as editors, associate editors, and board members compared to their numbers as senior faculty at PhD-granting institutions. As the presence of women in the profession has increased, have women kept up in these editorial positions? Overall, the data from 2018 suggest that they have. Although women are still significantly underrepresented as editors and associate editors at journals with small editorial staffs, they are well represented at those with medium-sized and large staffs. The proportion of women as board members also has kept pace with the proportion of female senior faculty at PhD-granting institutions, especially at the top five journals in the profession. There is still significant variation among journals but little change in their rankings: journals with the highest proportion of women as editors, associate editors, and board members in 2010 continued to lead the way in 2018.

Although information made public after a data breach can provide insight into difficult research questions, use of these data raises ethical questions not directly addressed by current ethical guidelines. This article develops a framework for identifying and managing risks to human subjects when conducting research involving leaked data. We contend that researchers who seek to use leaked data should identify and address ethical challenges by considering the process through which the data were originally released into the public domain.

Numerous studies document female scholars’ underrepresentation in political science publications and citations, yet few examine graduate syllabi. In this study, we assess the impact of instructors’ individual characteristics (i.e., race, gender, and age) on which readings they assign. We use what is—to our knowledge—the largest dataset of graduate readings to date: the GRaduate Assignments DataSet (GRADS), with 75,601 readings from 840 syllabi in 94 US PhD programs. We report several findings. First, overall, instructors infrequently assign female-authored scholarship relative to the rates at which women publish. Second, instructors who are women, people of color, and those from more gender-equal countries assign significantly more female-authored readings than white male instructors and those from less gender-equal countries. Third, among women—but not men—older instructors assign more female-authored work. We suggest that women’s underrepresentation on syllabi may contribute to “the leaky pipeline,” which describes women’s attrition from academic careers.

Noting the lack of “anti-man” bias research in the 2016 election, Zigerell (2019) argued that a relative lack of conservatives in political science can lead to bias in publications against political science research supporting conservative viewpoints. This article offers an alternative explanation for this lack of research: that this research produces null findings and therefore is subject to the “file-drawer problem,” in which null effects are less likely to be published than positive effects. Using data from the 2016 American National Election Studies, I provide an illustrative example to support this claim and suggest some solutions.

Recent studies identified gendered citation gaps in political science journal articles, with male scholars being less likely to cite work by female scholars in comparison to their female peers. Although journal editors, editorial boards, and political scientists are becoming more aware of implicit biases and adopting strategies to remedy them, we know less about the proper baselines for citations in subfields and research areas of political science. Without information about how many women should be cited in a research field, it is difficult to know whether the distribution is biased. Using the gender distribution of membership in professional political science organizations and article authors in 38 political science journals, we provide scholars with suggested minimum baselines for gender representation in citations. We also show that women represent a larger share of organization members than the authors in sponsoring organizations’ journals.

Claims of misconduct must be accompanied by verifiable proof. In “Diagnosis versus Ideological Diversity,” Phillip W. Gray (2019) professes the need to address bias and dishonesty in research but contradicts his stated goals by making untrue and unsupported allegations of misconduct. He equates a coding error with LaCour and Green’s (2014) suspected data fabrication while disregarding publicly available contradictory evidence. In this evidence-based article, we demonstrate that Gray made a series of false accusations of research dishonesty and ideological bias. His assertions not only are unsupported; the evidence also shows the opposite. PS: Political Science & Politics edited Gray’s article after publication and online distribution—removing or modifying the most explicitly false and harmful statements—and changed his central thesis but without changing the DOI. This resulted in two different articles with the same DOI. Although retraction is uncommon, this degree of post-publication modification appears to meet the threshold. The published corrigendum failed to address Gray’s false allegations, pervasive and unsubstantiated insinuations of misconduct, and errors that persist in the second edition of his article. The constellation of behaviors by the journal and Gray contradicts academic norms and emphasizes the need to establish clear standards of evidence when making accusations of academic misconduct.

Dutch political science curricula integrate the acquisition of knowledge of the discipline and transferable skills. This makes it an interesting case for US political science education, especially in light of Wahlke’s (1991) recommendations for a structured political science curriculum that incorporates skills training in addition to knowledge of the field. Although some of Wahlke’s recommendations were widely adopted, US political science curricula remain relatively loosely structured and often do not explicitly focus on transferable skills.

This article argues that the Dutch example may help US programs revisit how to best achieve learning outcomes that allow students to acquire both knowledge and transferable skills. This is not an argument for “going Dutch” wholesale; instead, the article suggests modest modifications to US political science curricula.