The discipline of political science faces significant disparities in the representation and participation of underrepresented groups in graduate education, including first-generation college students, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. Underrepresentation has a wide variety of limiting effects, including a narrower range of questions being explored within the field. This article proposes a template for teaching and mentoring undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to enhance their opportunities in graduate programs. Specifically, it examines the Mobilization and Political Economy (MPE) Summer Program, an in-residence graduate pipeline program designed to equip participants to study and conduct research on political mobilization, social movements, and political economy. The MPE Summer Program aims to develop and sustain broad-scale collaborative infrastructures that prefigure reciprocal and equitable pathways to increase participation in the social sciences across the United States.

Classroom discussions of current events and controversial topics can devolve into unproductive and highly charged debates. This article describes an in-class exercise used to foster respect during difficult conversations by encouraging students to design rules for discussions and guidelines to create a safe space for dialogue. This activity relies on three underlying principles: trust, empowerment, and empathy. These principles can be integrated into a broader pedagogical approach that emphasizes a democratic classroom and active learning. Student feedback shows that the intervention can be useful for promoting respectful and engaging discussions during moments of tension and polarization. However, an emphasis on civility also may undermine the diversity of opinions and require respecting students’ silences.

Political science educators have a responsibility to design their programs in a way that incorporates content that involves and engages underserved populations. In recent polls, a significant majority of Generation Z identified as LGBTQ+, representing a percentage that is larger than those who identify as African American or Hispanic (Jones 2024; Public Religion Research Institute 2024). Implementing changes in mainline political science courses (e.g., introduction to American national government, the presidency, and comparative politics) will allow the discipline to better serve LGBTQ+ students. Ample examples involving LGBTQ+-themed content provide instruction in a wide battery of political science courses. Pivoting into a more supportive pedagogy may be a successful strategy for addressing the oncoming “population cliff” (i.e., a projected decline in college enrollment) that will impact the number of students beginning college in the future. Whereas the process will require substantial investment in energy to initiate, an updated approach to teaching political science courses will reap dividends in terms of student interest, engagement with course material, and LGBTQ+ representation in the profession.

Legislation that seeks to restrict the ability of transgender people to fully participate in society has proliferated across state legislatures in the last four years. In legislative sessions throughout the United States, legislators have argued in favor of denying transgender people access to public facilities, sports, health care, and even their own guardians. What can these debates tell us not only about the backlash against transgender people but the queer community and women more broadly? Using an analysis of the debate on anti-transgender legislation in two state legislatures, we argue that legislators attempt to gain support for anti-transgender legislation using paternal, protectionist frames and by coopting the language of feminism. We argue that the gender essentialism and heteronormativity at the center of these debates indicates an attempt on behalf of conservative movements and legislators to pursue an idealized, heteropatriarchal society with a strict gender binary.

Although linked fate has been recognized as a driving force in the politics of various identity groups, should this theoretical framework be applied to queer politics? I ask, what are the outcomes and dynamics of linked fate among members of the queer community? How does linked fate shape queer political participation? Is the concept an adequate indicator of politicized queer identity? Drawing on data from the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, I uncover widespread linked fate among queer Americans, with significant variation along the lines of intersectional identity. Linked fate can motivate participation, but more powerfully shapes participation beyond the ballot box. I close by calling for a queer-specific metric of linked fate that accounts for several dimensions of queer political identity. As the queer community grows increasingly salient in US party politics, this study identifies avenues for future research into this diverse population.

This article provides a global ranking of research productivity of political science departments. We collected data on 115,427 articles and 12,696 books—written in both English and other languages—from 5,586 faculty members in 178 departments in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. Departments are ranked in terms of citations to articles published by faculty members, impact factors of journals in which they published, and number of top publications in which they published. Results are presented for overall and more recent research productivity.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars have debated whether digital fieldwork can effectively substitute for on-site field research. The prevailing view is that digital fieldwork is a last resort when in-person access is limited. Reflecting on my recent field research in Vietnam and Malaysia, I advocate for integrating digital and on-site fieldwork as complementary components of the research process. This approach is particularly valuable for scholars who are unable to spend extended periods in the field. The integrative approach helps researchers (a) prepare effectively for on-site fieldwork, (b) adapt the data collection process flexibly while in the field, and (c) continue data collection and maintain working relationships with local networks after leaving the field. Through this reflection, I encourage researchers to normalize the integration of both methodologies to leverage the strengths of each approach.

Survey researchers increasingly recognize the need to update their gender questions to recognize the existence of transgender and nonbinary people. In this research note, we evaluate changes to the Canadian Election Study (CES) gender questions from 2019 to 2021. Our analyses suggest researchers should add “nonbinary” as a close-ended option and an open-ended response option to gender identity questions. They also suggest that researchers should not include “transgender” in a separate, mutually exclusive response option alongside men and women in gender identity questions but instead identify transgender men and women through a follow-up question. These recommendations can help guide the design of future surveys.

The ubiquity of office is rivaled only by its scholarly neglect. The stable realities and the debates and ethics attached to institutions of office are poorly reflected in political science and public administration. Offices serve as ministerial trusts (directed toward service, not to be owned, inherited or seized), they are structured by accountability institutions and ethics, and they are ineluctably relational – they exist in correspondence to other offices, those governed (who make claims upon offices), and notions of just and right. Examining public administrative offices from republican Rome through the medieval Catholic episcopacy to early modern England, I argue that institutions and ethics of office took shape that indelibly shaped American and Western public administration as we know it today. Fertile research agendas include the existence and evolution of public offices, the mechanics of their constraints upon behavior, oaths and commitment, their simultaneous embedment of obligation and authority, and rewards (fee, emolument, rent, benefice, salary).

When we open a random political science journal, we have a roughly two-to-one chance that the article is written by a man. Beyond this general finding, we know little about the gender gaps within political science knowledge production: Are women more represented in lower- or higher-ranked journals? Do they publish more single-authored or multiauthored papers? Do they publish more content in some fields than in others? This article answers these questions by analyzing an original dataset based on the International Political Science Abstracts (a peer-reviewed academic journal) from 2022 consisting of more than 7,000 articles and more than 13,000 authors in political science from around the world. We find no difference in the percentage of female authors between higher- and lower-ranked journals. We find a slightly higher propensity among women to publish in teams. Regarding subfields of study, women are particularly underrepresented in political theory, in which they publish only 21.6% of all published articles—which is an approximate 12-percentage-point deviation from the overall average.

Are LGBTQ legislators effective lawmakers? We build on theories that link voter discrimination to legislative effectiveness by arguing that voters’ biases against LGBTQ candidates narrow the candidate pool, leading to the election of only the most experienced and qualified LGBTQ candidates. As a result of this electoral selection effect, we expect that LGBTQ legislators will be more effective lawmakers than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. To test this, we combine data on state legislators’ LGBTQ identification with their State Legislative Effectiveness Scores (SLES). Our findings reveal that LGBTQ legislators are meaningfully more effective than non-LGBTQ legislators. To link our findings to voter discrimination, we leverage over-time variation in discrimination toward LGBTQ individuals. Across four tests, we consistently find that LGBTQ lawmakers elected in high-discrimination environments are more effective than those elected from less discriminatory environments.

How are LGBTQ+ issues represented within labor organizing and how are they linked to broader debates about inequality? We answered these questions by examining press releases, internal resolutions, and online resources from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and the Pride at Work (PAW) constituency group. We find that they significantly differ in their approaches to symbolic and substantive representation and agenda setting. Across all three outcomes, PAW and the AFL-CIO vary in LGBTQ+ issue representation. The AFL-CIO engages in more symbolic representation but also devotes resources to collective action that can improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people. PAW places greater emphasis on the interconnectedness of LGBTQ+ and labor issues to mobilize LGBTQ+ people. Our findings highlight the marginal position of LGBTQ+ labor activism in the labor and LGBTQ+ movements, and they demonstrate the challenges associated with linking LGBTQ+ issues to broader debates about inequality in American politics.

By many accounts, the state of reviewing is in dire straits. Editors cannot get people to respond to review requests, much less to say yes and complete the review on time. In previous work (Djupe 2015; Djupe, Smith, and Sokhey 2022) conducted before the COVID-19 pandemic, reviewing was heavily concentrated in a core set of reviewers, reviewing increased with age and rank, and political scientists stood by the value of peer reviewing for themselves, the discipline, and the research. Is any of that still true in the post-pandemic period? This article analyzes a Summer 2024 survey of 637 political scientists in comparison with 2013 data and finds an evident decline in reviewing post-pandemic from those who historically review the most. This pattern likely reflects broader movements, especially toward diversification, in the discipline and in higher education.

Anti-LGBTQ+ narratives are deployed by extremist groups with contrasting ideologies, from Jihadis to right-wing extremists and QAnon to Incels (involuntary celibates). Using these different movements as case studies, this article highlights the convergence of ideologically conflicting extremist organizations around antiqueer sentiment. Given the enhanced vulnerability of LGBTQ+ populations, fueled by politically charged rhetoric, this article makes an appeal for more research to explore and analyze narratives through a scholarly lens and link queer issues to current debates in the study of terrorism and political violence. Research should focus on the experiences of queer populations within conflicts abroad and experiences of domestic extremism in the United States. Without adequate attention given to the experiences of LGBTQ+ victims, it is impossible to develop protocols for trauma-informed care for vulnerable populations.

Political science was once silent about—and for many decades continued to be slow to address—LGBTQ+ politics as a topic worthy of scholarly research. One of the longest-standing gaps in the literature has been the lack of work that was pioneered by Ken Sherrill: research that centers LGBTQ+ people and politics as subjects, rather than objects, of study. Here I make the case for sustained scholarly attention to LGBTQ+ political behavior and discuss how quantitative empirical research in this vein is more feasible than ever before. I then provide an example of what is possible today with analyses of the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), a large representative sample survey (complete case N = 45,240; LGBTQ+ N = 5,213) that includes questions about respondents’ sexual and gender identities. The analyses reveal several discoveries about LGBTQ+ people’s political behavior and lived experiences, including that they are no more politically engaged than the typical American, are in much poorer health than any other group, and belying stereotypes, are not of higher socioeconomic status than other Americans. A spatial representation of groups’ positions on the US political landscape shows that LGBTQ+ people are relatively distant from other groups, indicating that they may struggle to find natural coalition partners because of lack of shared interests.

We collected data on every tenure-track (TT) faculty member in the 122 PhD-granting political science departments in the United States to identify which graduate programs place faculty members in our discipline’s research universities. The top 20% of departments produced 75% of all faculty and the bottom 50% accounted for less than 5% of all TT faculty members at a research university. Forty-nine programs did not have a single graduate placed in a TT position at a PhD-granting department in the past 10 years, and 18 programs did not have a single graduate in a TT position at a PhD-granting department at all. The overwhelming majority of TT faculty members are at a lower or equally ranked department. The results have important implications for prospective graduate students and the future of our discipline.

Social construction theory postulates that policy outcomes depend on whether target groups are imagined by the public as deserving or undeserving. However, recent evidence demonstrates that the constructions in question are contentious rather than uniformly shared. This article applies the conjoint-experimental method to measure the social construction of immigrant (il)legality and to assess its political implications. We demonstrate that it is multidimensional because the absence of legal status is associated with receipt of government benefits, Hispanic origin, police record, poor English fluency, and less education. We also show that whereas the receipt of government benefits is not associated with the absence of legal status among most respondents, individuals who hold this association support stricter immigration-enforcement policies. Our findings corroborate the social construction approach but also indicate that researchers may want to measure multiple dimensions of target-group constructions in addition to deservingness.