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.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, ad hoc direct relief payments were used extensively as a means of economic stimulation and individual compensation. Current studies are focusing on the economic impact of these policies, but they seldom consider how these payments affect individual beliefs and attitudes. This study used a survey with quasi-experimental elements to examine how these payments affected tertiary students in Hong Kong by focusing primarily on a cohort including both eligible and noneligible students. Whereas satisfaction with the economy and government and support for democracy were not affected, nonrecipients assigned greater importance to meritocratic factors in improving life outcomes. The findings of this study shed light on how governments inadvertently may be affecting the outlook of young adults with transfers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

What are the local political, economic, and social conditions of the communities that sent insurrectionists to the US Capitol in support of Donald Trump? Using a new dataset of the home counties of individuals charged for the Capitol insurrection, we tested two prominent theories of electoral populism and support for populist leaders like Donald Trump—demographic change and manufacturing decline—and whether they also explain violent populism. We also examined the effects of local political conditions. We find that white population decline is a stronger predictor of violent populism and that counties that voted for Trump were less likely to fight for Trump. The effect of white population decline is even greater in counties whose US House Representative rejected the 2020 election results. These findings suggest scholars should resist assuming violent populism is merely an extension of electoral populism, and solutions to one will not necessarily remedy the other.

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.

What effects do contentious elections have on partisan appraisals of democracy? We consider the case of the November 2020 US election, a highly polarized partisan contest but also an objectively free and fair election by credible accounting. We conducted a panel study embedded within two nationally representative surveys before and after the election. Results indicate a familiar but underexamined partisan gap, in which satisfaction with democracy decreases among Republicans and increases among Democrats relative to nonpartisans. We find that the gap is fully mediated by partisan shifts in satisfaction with elections and the news media that cover them. Our results underscore how eroding institutional confidence can undermine democratic legitimacy in hitherto consolidated democracies. To overcome partisan divisions following contentious elections, we highlight the need to bolster confidence in democratic institutions to reduce partisan fears and uncertainties—both rational and irrational—that electoral losses may trigger.

Former President Trump’s persistent influence over Republican politics divides those who argue that he mobilizes otherwise apathetic voters against those contending he mobilizes Democrats at down-ballot Republicans’ expense. Scholars and pundits alike question whether policy still matters in the face of increasingly strong personas like the former president’s. Using a survey experiment, we find suggestive evidence that Trump’s endorsement in a general election reduces the likelihood of voting for a hypothetical Republican candidate. We also test the effect of policy stances and find evidence that Republican respondents value policy stances over an endorsement, but Democrats show no signs of prioritizing one more than the other. However, when shown a hypothetical candidate with unorthodox policy stances, the mere mention of a Trump endorsement leads members of both parties to demonstrate significant changes in the likelihood of voting for that candidate. Ultimately, we show that elite signals can attenuate support derived from policies.

Assessing the state of democracy and freedom is an important but difficult task. The stakes are high, not only for researchers interested in uncovering the drivers of democratic consolidation or decline but also for policy makers, civil society organizations, journalists, activists, and citizens who work daily to promote and protect human rights at home and abroad. In light of the significance of the task, it is not surprising that the issue of how to measure democracy most accurately continues to be hotly debated.

Climate change is fundamentally a political problem; it is not merely a technical or economic challenge but rather an arena for sharp conflicts over the distribution of gains and losses and the associated ethical challenges. However, as Keohane (2015), Javeline (2014), and Green and Hale (2017) noted in PS: Political Science & Politics and Perspectives on Politics, research on climate change has not been traditionally central to mainstream political science. Field journals including Global Environmental Politics and Environmental Politics have made important contributions in this regard, and leading university presses have published important books on climate issues. However, the neglect of climate politics by mainstream journals is surprising—although we note the recent Perspective on Politics symposium on Green Political Science—because political scientists have devoted considerable attention to studying environmental politics at the community (Ostrom 1990), national (Kelemen and Vogel 2010), and international (Young 1994) levels. Indeed, there is robust literature on the management of common pool resources, national styles of environmental regulation, and environmental social movements, as well as global environmental regimes. Yet, the topic of climate change—an important subject in the study of environmental politics—too often has been neglected by mainstream political science.

There exists substantial evidence that technological innovation and, more specifically, innovation creating high-tech exports is a crucial driver for economic growth. However, there is less consensus about the factors that cause high-tech exports to thrive. Most studies emphasize the crucial role played by research and development expenditures, foreign direct investments, trade openness, human capital, and patents. In this article, we instead examine the role of a different determinant, which usually is overlooked in the scholarly debate about governance institutions. We use government effectives (GE) and rule of law (ROL) as measures of governance. We employ a panel-data approach encompassing more than 100 countries between 2007 and 2019. The panel estimates show a causal relationship linking GE and the ROL with high-tech exports.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change requires the adoption of costly policies with often uncertain efficacy and distributional consequences. Because these emissions occur across sectors of the economy—electricity, transportation, and agriculture—and the built environment, and they require action at all levels of government—global, national, regional, and local—there is no single “silver-bullet” solution.

Open access (OA) publishing makes scholarship more accessible to readers but also presents additional hurdles for authors. This article examines determinants of OA publishing in well-respected, subscription-based journals. We find that research funding provides the strongest explanation for OA publishing, although various aspects of authorship and an author’s affiliation with a European versus a US institution also matter. We discuss the implications of our findings for publishing in scholarly journals in political science.

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.

Since the 1990s, there has been consensus in the literature of a submission and publication gap that favors men. Important research in the intervening years has explored the many reasons for this output gap: imbalanced administrative workloads; bias in top journals against female-dominated subfields and methodological approaches; and lower confidence levels among women, sometimes known as the “Matthew effect.” However, in the intervening period, there has been a notable emphasis on recruiting more women into academia, and the importance of publishing for career development has intensified. Journal case studies have highlighted a growth in output by women academics but show that men are still overrepresented. Using a case study of the International Political Science Review (IPSR), we contribute to the emerging body of work that shows that the gender gap has diminished or even been eliminated. We present data on submissions and acceptances by gender, and we base our comparisons in the gender balance of the departments of submitting authors. The results are clear, for IPSR, the gender gap has closed and women now publish on a par with their men colleagues in their department.

In their timely article, Andrew Little and Anne Meng make an important point. Despite widespread alarm over democratic backsliding, objective evidence suggests that the scale of the phenomenon is much more limited than many seem to think. Recent power holders around the world have not been entrenching themselves more effectively than in the past. Incumbents continue to lose elections about as often as they used to, and those who win have not been doing so by larger margins. Opposition parties are allowed to compete about as frequently today as 10 or 20 years ago. Moreover, there has been no increase in leaders’ ability to evade term limits.

The well-understood gap between “mainstream” environmental organizations and Americans from minority populations is rooted in two phenomena. First, in the mid-1990s, hostility expressed toward immigrants and immigration by the Sierra Club (among other groups) drove a wedge between environmentalism and Latinos, as 87% of all Latinos are within two generations of the immigration experience. Second, whereas larger environmental groups focused on pollution and other forms of environmental degradation as well as conservation of natural and wild spaces, minority Americans showed less engagement in these issues and were affected more directly by air and water pollution and its consequences—phenomena that more directly affect communities of color. “Environmental justice” movements and organizations emerged to fill the gap left by the somewhat diminished focus of large “mainstream” groups on minority populations.

The rise of climate change on the global political agenda coincided with the growth of partisan polarization in US politics and, in many ways, their trajectories mirror one another. When the climate crisis first began to attract political attention 30 years ago, Republicans and Democrats responded with similar levels of interest and concern. Today, partisan division overwhelms all other aspects of climate-change politics and environmental politics more broadly (Egan, Konisky, and Mullin 2022; Egan and Mullin 2017).

This article develops a blueprint for creating online writing groups (OWGs) to support scholars who are directly and indirectly affected by disaster. Those who are living in regions affected by natural disasters face a severe psychological toll along with physical and logistical challenges. Furthermore, scholars in the diaspora who are watching their colleagues go about daily life while they struggle to meet writing deadlines can also experience detrimental psychological effects, including isolation anxiety. Findings from disaster studies research suggest that communal coping strategies can mitigate the short- and long-term challenges to mental health, including spiraling concerns about productivity that, in turn, inhibit productivity. My research builds on these studies, as well as analyses of virtual platforms used during the COVID-19 pandemic, to identify specific aspects of OWGs that can provide community and structure for scholars in the wake of natural disasters. I draw from my experience of creating and hosting a Zoom writing group for scholars from Turkey and Syria in the aftermath of the February 2023 earthquakes. In addition to participant observation of more than 240 two-hour sessions held over 42 weeks between March and December 2023, I draw from a survey-based assessment and email correspondence with participants to develop a best-practices model that I hope other scholars will replicate.

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.

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.

To confront the climate crisis, we need political change involving a dramatic shift in domestic and transnational norms. Norm models should be recognized as one of the theoretical tools within the panoply of approaches to examine and address climate change. The most promising norm campaigns underway are those that target fossil fuel companies and government policies that support them (e.g., subsidies).