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.

Climate justice movements and scholars have established that marginalized communities, including people of color, Indigenous Peoples, women, and the Global South, are most vulnerable to climate change. Recently, scholars also have established that the climate crisis places LGBTQ+ communities in precarious positions. Yet, we know little about how LGBTQ+ activists practice climate justice and build political bridges between LGBTQ+ and climate justice movements. By analyzing queer climate activism, I find that bridging the US climate and LGBTQ+ movements share three elements: (1) vulnerability and intersectional analysis, (2) survival and resilience, and (3) play. In bridging the movements, activists “queer” climate justice by spatially shifting on what grounds or issues to fight, prefiguring worlds not yet in existence on a larger scale, and reimagining how to perform climate activism.

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.

Climate change is a global phenomenon affecting millions of people. Low-income people and communities are particularly at risk because of limited capacities to cope with climate-related stresses. Differential access to social and economic resources determines the level of adaptive potential; thus, the variations in social vulnerability to climate change. This article explores how unequal power relations influence the level of vulnerability in rural agrarian Bangladesh. Using data from the coastal region, it specifically discusses ethnicity, religion, gender, and farm size as the sources and manifestations of power relations in Bangladeshi rural society. I argue that the deeply rooted institutions of power in the country shape access to important resources that might increase adaptive capacity and thus resilience in the context of rapid climate change.

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.

Recent research suggests that master’s (MA) education in the United States could be restructured to better meet the expectations of students who seek nonacademic careers. This article considers the state of terminal MA degree programs in political science to assess whether they are preparing students to enter the workforce. We examine programs across various dimensions and supplement this analysis with survey data to gain additional information about the purpose of terminal MA degree programs. The results suggest that their reconceptualization is needed in the discipline of political science.

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.

Prior research finds that women earn fewer citations than men for their publications, and it offers various reasons why this is the case. This study provides new evidence on these citation differences from two datasets on career citations earned by male and female political scientists. Our findings extend and elaborate on those in earlier research. Most notably, we find that older cohorts of women demonstrate substantial progress toward citation equity with their male peers.

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.

In the summer of 2019, two of us began our term as co-editors of Politics & Gender. We were excited to manage the top journal in the study of women, gender, and politics; help to shape our field; and advance outstanding scholarship. Before our first year ended, the global COVID-19 pandemic disrupted normal routines for many professions, including within the academy. Access to offices, professional networks, and fieldwork was halted or severely limited. Both new and experienced teachers quickly transitioned to online teaching. Scholars became ill or cared for sick family members. Faculty with preschool or school-aged children spent many hours on childcare and homeschooling, leaving them with less time for research and writing. Not all impacts were necessarily negative: those without caretaking responsibilities enjoyed more flexibility and often had more time for research and writing as in-person events were canceled and lengthy commutes disappeared.

Normatively, democratic constitutions should express how citizens want to govern themselves collectively. Little is known, however, about how citizens’ constitutional preferences can be elicited and aggregated in practice. An intuitively appealing approach is to allow various forms of popular participation during a constitution-making process, including a popular vote to accept or reject the draft constitution (Fishkin 2011). Based on the Chilean experience with democratic constitution making, this article identifies unanticipated and previously unexplored distortions that can lead to incongruence between the preferences of voters and representatives regarding the extent and direction of constitutional change.

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.

This study reflects on the field research interruptions that occurred around the world with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on my experience of in-person and remote fieldwork with vulnerable populations and sensitive research topics during this time, I introduce a “zig-zagging approach” that can be used as a research adaptivity strategy in times of disruption. I argue that “zig-zagging your way through the field” is a legitimate strategy as long as researchers acknowledge that changing from in-person to remote fieldwork (and vice versa) will alter various aspects of their relationship with the field including;(1) perception of positionality and authenticity; (2) processes of trust building and security challenges; and (3) experience of ethnographic immersion and observation. I offer mitigation strategies to reduce the impact of change and also discuss aspects that cannot be mitigated when working with vulnerable populations or sensitive research topics. I conclude on why going back—and forth (i.e., zig-zagging)—should become a practical solution when all else fails.

On June 1, 2020, a little more than two months after the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 pandemic declaration, our editorial team assumed the leadership of the American Political Science Review (APSR). Although this confluence of events makes it difficult to isolate the pandemic’s effect on new submissions and review processes, this article describes submission and review patterns in the two and a half years before and after the onset of the pandemic and the editorial transition. It describes our preliminary observations regarding what the patterns suggest about the pandemic’s impact on the APSR.1