Whereas there is a substantial body of scholarship assessing the merits of student journals, and an equally sizable amount of how-to-publish advice for students in higher education, there is little empirical research exploring the content of disciplinary student publications. To gain a sense of what political science students are publishing, this study examines articles in three peer-reviewed student journals of politics between 2005 and 2015: The Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Critique, and Politikon. Content analysis reveals the nature of published student work by subfield, methodology, and topic, with findings discussed in the context of research trends in the profession and the debate about advantages and disadvantages of student journal publishing.

How do political scientists use online tools as part of their scholarly work? Are there systematic differences in how they value these tools by field, gender, or other demographics? How important are these tools relative to traditional practices of political scientists? The answers to these questions will shape how our discipline chooses to reward academics who engage with “new media” such as blogs, online seminars (i.e., webinars), Twitter, and Facebook. We find that traditional tools of scholarship are more highly regarded and used more often than any new media, although blogs are considered most important among new media. However, we also find evidence that these webinars are used and valued at rates comparable to traditional tools when they are provided in ways that meet political scientists’ needs. Finally, we observe that women and graduate students are substantially more likely than men and tenure-track academics to report that webinars and online videos are important sources of new ideas and findings.

Google Scholar (GS) is an important tool that faculty, administrators, and external reviewers use to evaluate the scholarly impact of candidates for jobs, tenure, and promotion. This article highlights both the benefits of GS—including the reliability and consistency of its citation counts and its platform for disseminating scholarship and facilitating networking—and its pitfalls. GS has biases because citation is a social and political process that disadvantages certain groups, including women, younger scholars, scholars in smaller research communities, and scholars opting for risky and innovative work. GS counts also reflect practices of strategic citation that exacerbate existing hierarchies and inequalities. As a result, it is imperative that political scientists incorporate other data sources, especially independent scholarly judgment, when making decisions that are crucial for careers. External reviewers have a unique obligation to offer a reasoned, rigorous, and qualitative assessment of a scholar’s contributions and therefore should not use GS.

This article responds to the stimulating comments of Kurt Weyland (2015) about the important but seldom discussed full professor promotion process. He suggested a number of problems, particularly candidates who are too eager to “go up” and institutions with insufficiently rigorous publication standards. Rather than proposing a top-down solution, Weyland urged associate professors to wait until they cleared a high research bar. By contrast, I see few systemic problems with the current promotion process. Although research is important, our academic ecosystem requires the valuing of a wide range of faculty activities and contributions. In addition, asking faculty to jump through even more research hoops may be ‘fiddling while Rome burns.’ It overlooks the crucial issue that we all face: making the case for the value of higher education to taxpayers, parents, lawmakers, students, employers, philanthropists, voters, and society. I am optimistic that we can do so, but it may require a new set of academic priorities—less of the status games that can animate our academic lives and more of a focus on how our work benefits society.

Donald Trump dominated the 2016 Republican primary despite the fact that he was not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. Bernie Sanders came just shy of winning the Democratic nomination despite the fact that he switched his party affiliation from Independent to Democrat only three months before the election. Why did two candidates with no formal ties to the political parties fare so well? One possibility is that primary voters are more ideologically extreme and that ideology drives support for these candidates. However, another possibility is that concerns about government process drives support for insurgent candidates. We test the proposition that distrust was the primary motivator of primary voting for these two insurgent candidates using two datasets: a poll of New Hampshire voters fielded a week before their primary and a national poll taken in June 2016. Results confirm the hypothesis that distrust drove intraparty vote choice in the 2016 presidential primaries.

Good education requires student experiences that deliver lessons about practice as well as theory and that encourage students to work for the public good—especially in the operation of democratic institutions (Dewey 1923; Dewy 1938). We report on an evaluation of the pedagogical value of a research project involving 23 colleges and universities across the country. Faculty trained and supervised students who observed polling places in the 2016 General Election. Our findings indicate that this was a valuable learning experience in both the short and long terms. Students found their experiences to be valuable and reported learning generally and specifically related to course material. Postelection, they also felt more knowledgeable about election science topics, voting behavior, and research methods. Students reported interest in participating in similar research in the future, would recommend other students to do so, and expressed interest in more learning and research about the topics central to their experience. Our results suggest that participants appreciated the importance of elections and their study. Collectively, the participating students are engaged and efficacious—essential qualities of citizens in a democracy.

In recent years, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contraception mandate associated with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been a contentious issue that has created clash-of-rights claims between advocates of reproductive freedom and advocates of religious freedom. Americans differ considerably in their views toward whether religiously affiliated institutions that object to the use of contraceptives should be granted an exemption to the HHS contraception mandate. This article explores the determinants of Americans’ support for or opposition to the religious exemption. We focus particularly on the effects of individuals’ religious orientations, gender, and political attitudes that generate support for competing rights claims. Using data from a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, we (surprisingly) find little evidence of a gender effect. Rather, we find that support for the religious exemption is driven largely by church attendance and moral conservatism, with adherence to specific religious traditions having relatively minor effects. We also find that support for the religious exemption to the HHS contraception mandate is influenced by political variables (i.e., partisanship and ideology, attitudes toward President Obama, and Tea Party support) and demographic attributes (i.e., number of children in a given household, racial/ethnic identity, education, and age). We conclude that the clash of values over the contraception mandate is driven largely by religion and political attitudes.

Students often find lectures on political science methodology difficult to grasp. Based on our success of simulations and games in teaching various political science theories, we created several mini-games to help students gain exposure in engaging ways with aspects of quantitative and qualitative methodology. We use techniques in which students learn through “gimmicks” (Schacht and Stewart 1990; 1992), for which they are the data points that they are studying. We believe that drawing conclusions based on what students do and think empowers them to better understand the sometimes tricky elements of political science methods. Each of the three games described in this article required little to no preparation time. We have used these mini-games in several courses and have received positive feedback from students about their utility. Thus, we are sharing them for more general use.