This study explores the application of role-play simulations (RPS) in addressing complex challenges (e.g., the climate crisis) beyond traditional educational settings. Drawing from pilot simulations involving 12 scientific experts and 12 policy makers, the article identifies three key challenges in conducting RPS with elite participants and provides practical strategies for overcoming them. Namely, the article emphasizes the importance of adapting the scenarios to sociopolitical contexts, choosing an ethical recruiting method to ensure inclusivity, and managing group diversity while maintaining a balance between the playfulness and the seriousness of the simulation. Overall, our study underscores the potential of RPS to foster dialogue between scientific and political actors and provides practical guidance for their effective use.

Focus groups have become increasingly popular in political science alongside the growth in field experimental and other causal inference-oriented work in comparative politics. Yet, scholars rarely provide details about recruitment processes and descriptive statistics on focus-group participants. This situation is problematic given the likelihood of self-selection and the fact that scholars often use focus groups to pretest or refine experimental treatments or survey questionnaires. By leveraging a series of focus groups that were recruited from a pool of large-N survey respondents, this article demonstrates a method for assessing which variables drive the decision to participate. I recommend that scholars diagnose self-selection into focus groups whenever possible; that they compare participants to relevant baselines when working with samples of convenience; and that they always provide descriptive statistics and details on how focus-group members were recruited.

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.

Although a subset of political scientists has been studying climate change for decades, the mainstream of the discipline lags behind. Journals such as Global Environmental Politics and even Nature and Science have long published political science research on climate, yet major disciplinary journals tend to marginalize climate and environmental politics more broadly (Green and Hale 2017). This trend has been changing slowly (as evidenced by this symposium), but mainstream political science still has much catching up to do.

A robust literature on climate change and security developed in the 2010s. Much of the literature attempts to chart how climate change could contribute directly or indirectly to conflict and instability through impacts on agriculture, migration, and disasters (Busby 2018; Koubi 2019; Theisen 2017).1 The methodological challenge is that climate change is an emergent problem, wherein the security consequences largely have yet to occur. However, the field’s methods and expertise are primarily explanatory of past patterns. For scholars who want to make claims about future security risks, Gledistch (1998, 394) warned of potentially slipping into prophecy. If scholars want to write about climate change and retain academic rigor, what are they to do? This article reviews the challenges for scholars in this space and identifies potential research strategies that might be pursued going forward.

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.

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.

Descriptive research—work aimed at answering “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how” questions—is vital at every stage of social scientific inquiry. The creative and analytic process of description—through concepts, measures, or cases, whether in numeric or narrative form—is crucial for conducting research aimed at understanding politics in action. Yet, our field tends to devalue such work as “merely descriptive” (Gerring 2012), subsidiary to or less valuable than hypothesis-drive causal inference. This article posits four key areas in which description contributes to political science: in conceptualization, in policy relevance, in the management and leveraging of data, and in challenging entrenched biases and diversifying our field.

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.

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.

Undergraduate research assistants (URAs) perform important roles in many political scientists’ research projects. They serve as coauthors, survey respondents, and data collectors. Despite these roles, there is relatively little discussion about how best to train and manage URAs who are working on a common task: content coding. Drawing on insights from psychology, text analysis, and business management, as well as my own experience in managing a team of nine URAs, this article argues that supervisors should train URAs by pushing them to engage with their own mistakes. Via a series of simulation exercises, I also argue that supervisors—especially supervisors of small teams—should be concerned about the effects of errant post-training coding on data quality. Therefore, I contend that supervisors should utilize computational tools to monitor URA reliability in real time. I provide researchers with a new R package, ura, and a web-based application to implement these suggestions.

When we uncovered a large gender gap in political ambition in the early 2000s, our research highlighted how far the United States was from gender parity in politics. Given marked increases in women’s numeric representation throughout the past two decades, many might expect the gender gap in political ambition to have begun to close. Results from our new study of potential candidates, however, reveal that the magnitude of the gender gap is just as large 20 years later, and two primary explanations persist as well. We posit that even though candidate recruitment has propelled more women into electoral politics, patterns of traditional gender socialization persist. These dynamics, coupled with negative perceptions of how female candidates are treated, continue to depress women’s interest in elective office. As long as running for office is a more remote endeavor for women than men, women’s full political inclusion will remain a distant goal.

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered rapid transformations across the globe. Probably no other event in the past 50 years has changed the working environment more comprehensively. When the pandemic started in February and March of 2020, university campuses all over the globe shut down in less than a week. Most remained closed or had heavily restricted access for almost two years, depending on the country and the city. Overnight online teaching replaced in-person instruction; all professional and student interactions moved to Zoom, Teams, or Skype; academic conferences either did not take place or moved to an online format; and field research became almost impossible. In addition, contact restrictions, lockdowns, curfews, and homeschooling were unprecedented challenges for many people, especially members of the academic community who had small children (Del Boca et al. 2020). It is important to note that even in normal times women bear the greatest burden of childcare, social care for older people, and general household tasks. The COVID-19 pandemic quickly amplified these disparities (Ohlbrecht and Jellen 2021; Yerkes et al. 2022). Discussions emerged in many sectors, including academia, about specific ways that the pandemic was impacting professional lives, especially those of women. Given the acute pressure to publish in most higher-education institutions, it is important to evaluate the effect that the pandemic had on this central aspect of scholarly careers.

Drawing on interviews with Latina congressional members and candidates, this article examines the impacts of escalating political violence on their professional lives and political careers, as well as the implications for the growing body of women of color who are engaging in public service at the national level.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars predicted that this transboundary crisis would cause enormous change and disruption, not only to global health but also to many areas of productivity, including academic life (Donina and Antonowicz 2022; Lewis 2021; Witze 2020). Although the impact has been widespread and devastating to public health, it has not triggered the dramatic changes to the academy that might have been predicted, particularly in the areas of scholarship.

Political scientists involved in the study of religion have expressed concerns that religious themes have yet to be fully integrated into the mainstream of the discipline. According to a study of articles published in leading political science journals during the first decade of the twenty-first century, papers engaging with religion were relatively few in number and highly concentrated in only a few thematic and disciplinary areas. This article presents an updated analysis of the extent to which political science has engaged with the topic of religion by examining journal outputs for the period 2011–2020. The study finds no significant change in the patterns identified by the earlier research. Despite an overall increase in the quantity of political science articles on the subject of religion, the overall proportion has been relatively static, and the thematic and disciplinary focus of outputs remains narrow.

Political Behavior is the official journal of the Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior organized section of the American Political Science Association. It publishes research on the political behavior of citizens, political activists, and political officeholders in the United States and around the world. From the perspective of its Journal Impact Factor, the journal’s reputation and impact have grown steadily in recent years. The first and last listed authors of this article served as co-editors-in-chief of Political Behavior from 2019 through 2022. The middle three listed authors served as editorial assistants during this same period.

Expressions of social discontent that trigger deep political reform appear to be a sign of the times. Emerging political actors challenge delegitimized political elites with promises of a closer relationship with electorates, new rules to fight corruption, and more open access to the benefits of economic growth. Often, however, reforms in recent decades have weakened instead of strengthened democracy, leaving political systems less fair and more exclusive than before. The Chilean constitution-making process of 2021–2022 reasonably raised hopes for a different outcome.

Meta-analyses are used to synthesize a body of literature to produce a single summary estimate as well as to explain differences among studies. The field of political science has slowly gained an appreciation for their use in recent years; however, using meta-analyses in dissertations remains rare. This is puzzling, given the tool’s ability to map a topic, to highlight potential gaps for future research to address, and its long-lasting utility for researchers in future projects. We argue that for these and several other reasons, graduate students should consider including a meta-analysis in their dissertation. This article discusses these advantages in detail and offers advice on how to conduct a meta-analysis based on several interviews and applied examples. We also address potential challenges when using this research design in a dissertation.

As the political and social challenges facing the world multiply, the discipline of political science requires better tools and creative approaches advanced by a more diverse set of researchers. Yet the discipline has struggled to recruit and admit to graduate programs, and retain as faculty, women and underrepresented minorities. Many individual faculty, departments, and universities have developed innovative programs and sought to create structural changes to address these gaps. This article presents the approach taken by the Department of Government at Georgetown University: launching a week-long Political Science Predoctoral Summer Institute in 2022. We describe the Institute’s contours and structure, provide preliminary data on outcomes, and conclude by offering three ideas for expanding and advancing these types of initiatives across the discipline.