International and Comparative Political Economy

Research exploring how politics has economic consequences, and how economics has political consequences, is pertinent for every subfield in political science just as it is pressing for understanding politics across the globe today. The articles in this section span the study of international relations and comparative politics to shine a spotlight on the different conditions, processes, and mechanisms that shape the relations between markets and states, with implications for important political phenomena as diverse as global financial governance, state-investor relations, domestic social and labor policy, populism, and armed conflict. These works make theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions, including illustrating the analytical payoffs of methods of process-tracing, of data such as discourse and legal documents, and of centering economic sectors as an underappreciated unit of analysis.

“Muscle Matters: An Integrationist Turn in Transatlantic Finance” asks why the United States and the European Union, after initially adopting incompatible and inward-facing financial regulations in response to the 2008 financial crisis, eventually shifted to more integrationist regulatory approaches that fostered cross-jurisdictional interoperability for financial companies. Elliot Posner and Lucia Quaglia argue that this integrationist turn in the governance of global finance was not an outcome of business lobbying or preexisting international institutions, as dominant approaches to international political economy might expect. Rather, the authors highlight what they call “mutual accommodation”: a temporal process in which a regulatory giant makes concessions after interacting and failing to get other regulatory giants to adopt its own homegrown approach. Qualitative methods of congruence analysis and process tracing of 11 financial subsectors from 2014 to 2020 track how Washington and Brussels developed roughly equal capacities in “border-policing,” or their ability to regulate and supervise foreign entities and transactions and to enforce the requirements needed to access domestic markets. In consequence, they mostly resolved disputes through harmonization (increasing similarity and compatibility) or deference (accepting the regulation of other jurisdictions). These findings suggest that understanding global political and regulatory outcomes requires attention to the distribution of market power among major actors and the interactive and adaptive processes that arise from their mutual constraints. They encourage further research that investigates how complexity and time shape global governance outcomes and provide an example of how qualitative research can contribute to these debates.

Alison L. Johnston and Juliet Johnson theorize a different mechanism leading economic policymakers to respond to market pressures. “Bent into Submission? Domestic Investors and Populist Governments” turns to the increasingly prevalent case of populist governments and asks: when such governments face pressure against their economic policies, and particularly those involving sovereign finance, to what types of investors do they respond? The authors argue that, contrary to conventional theories emphasizing the primary role of global finance in imposing market discipline, it is domestic capital that can be the most politically consequential constraint on populist rule. Using a most-different case study design contrasting the Five Star Movement/Lega in Italy (2018–2019) and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary (2020–2023), the authors trace government policy decisions, bond auction data, investor behavior, and responses to market pressure. They find that domestic investors are “buyers of last resort” for sovereign debt; when these investors withdrew or declined to purchase government bonds, they served as key actors prompting populist governments to reverse high-profile economic policies. Linking the literature on international political economy, comparative politics of populism, and sovereign finance, this research highlights how populist leaders balance electoral promises with financial dependence on domestic elites. It encourages further research on the oft-overlooked influence of domestic investors in an era of globalized capital, as well as more empirical work that goes beyond economic nationalists’ ideology and rhetoric to trace the pathways through which markets discipline their policies, in practice.

Benjamin Braun, Donato Di Carlo, Sebastian Diessner, and Maximilian Düsterhöft provide a third view of the mechanisms translating market pressures into economic policy outcomes. “Structure, Agency, and Structural Reform: The Case of the European Central Bank” uses a case study of the euro area to demonstrate that central banks play an underappreciated role in this process. Overcoming the obstacles presented by the confidentiality of European Central Bank (ECB) governing council deliberations, the authors deploy a mixed-methods research strategy drawing on a wide range of sources, and especially a reconstruction of communicative discourse based on the complete corpus of two decades of public speeches by executive board members. This empirical analysis shows that, from its inception in 1999–2014, the ECB tested its power by consistently advocating for—and at times helping to enforce—structural reforms to liberalize social and labor market policies. The ECB ended its advocacy when increasing political backlash coincided with a structural regime shift from an inflationary to a deflationary environment. Shedding light on the dynamic relationship between technocratic agency and monetary structure, this research offers insight into central banks’ ability to translate and enforce monetary regime pressures while also revealing how the structures that impose constraints on actors in the short term can be reshaped by those same actors over the long term. These patterns encourage further research on how central banks navigate dilemmas between governability and legitimacy, offering insight both on this key monetary and a financial institution and on larger questions related to the dynamic, evolving relationship between structure and agency.

These works illustrate the important ways that monetary and financial integration, investors, and institutions all shape economic policy decision-making and outcomes. “Adjudicating While Fighting: Political Implications of the Ukraine-Russia Bilateral Investment Treaty” further examines questions of state and interstate political economy under a particular set of conditions: war. Rachel L. Wellhausen and Clint Peinhard show how the Ukrainian government encouraged Ukrainian investors to file disputes under the Ukraine-Russia Bilateral Investment Treaty as a part of its “lawfare” strategy utilizing international legal means to fight Russia after its 2014 seizure of the Crimean Peninsula. The result was the first use of Investor-State Dispute Settlement arbitrations between state parties actively engaged in armed conflict, or what the authors call “adjudicating while fighting.” Using primary legal documents and other sources to conduct a detailed analysis of the dozens of arbitrations that came to be known as the “Crimea cases,” the authors show that Ukrainian investors and state-owned enterprises tended to win arbitral awards and thereby extract legal and financial pressure on Russia. However, Ukraine also became a respondent to claims by Russian investors, leading it to withdraw from the treaty in 2023. This reflection essay demonstrates how investment treaties can become a site of geopolitical conflict and empower private investors and state-owned enterprises to act as wartime actors. Contributing to scholarly debates at the intersection of international political economy and security studies, it provides a springboard for future research on how investment treaty obligations operate during wartime and with what consequences for relations among states, investors, and international legal institutions.

Roselyn Hsueh closes this section’s multidimensional exploration of international and comparative political economy with a methodological intervention. “Bringing the Sector Back In and the New Political Economy: The Contextualized Comparative Sector Approach” shifts the focus from economic actors and institutions to spheres of economic activity and makes the case that scholars should treat economic sectors—and not only states, firms, or individuals—as units of analysis in the study of international and comparative political economy. The author argues that sectors possess unique structural, institutional, and sociopolitical characteristics that shape political economic outcomes in ways that traditional national-level or micro-level analyses often overlook. The author introduces the contextualized comparative sector approach (CCSA) to demonstrate how comparison of sectors both within and across countries can bring to light causal mechanisms missed by overly macro-level (state-centered) or micro-level (firm-centered or individual preference) approaches. Drawing on secondary literature with illustrations from prior sectoral research, including the author’s own comparative work on textiles and telecommunications in China, India, and Russia, the article offers a framework for understanding how sectors are embedded in multilevel structural, institutional, and ideational contexts that shape governance, identity, and power. This conceptual and agenda-setting reflection essay lays the foundation for other researchers to focus on sectors as a locus of work seeking to explain heterogeneity, establish scope conditions, and adjudicate competing theories about globalization, economic development, and state-market relations, among other topics.

Criminal Governance and Criminal Violence

Criminal governance and criminal violence shape daily life and politics across much of the world. The articles in this section help us understand why and how criminal organizations impact society by investigating the strategies that criminal groups use to govern local populations, when and why they deploy violence, the role of civilians as both targets and agents in these struggles, and the consequences of criminal groups’ activities for communities and democratic institutions. They estimate how many people live under criminal rule in Latin America, analyze how criminal organizations claim authority and manage information flows, trace how criminal wars endanger journalists and democratic accountability, and show how groups we later call “rebels” often begin as actors that look, at first, like “mere criminals.”

The reflection piece “Criminal Governance in Latin America: Prevalence and Correlates,” by Andres Uribe, Benjamin Lessing, Noah Schouela, and Elayne Stecher opens this section with an empirical investigation of the prevalence and patterns of criminal governance across Latin America. The authors note that, while the phenomenon is widely seen as a growing and major problem in the region, we lack estimates of its scope. Drawing on the nationally representative 2020 Latinobarómetro survey—which asked respondents whether criminal groups provide order, security, or reduce crime where they live—as well as qualitative studies to validate the survey data, the authors estimate the prevalence of criminal governance in 18 Latin American countries. After discussing the limitations of the data and conducting robustness tests, they find that between 77 and 101 million people currently live under the governance of a criminal organization. They also show that criminal governance is hemispheric in reach, spans both urban and rural areas, and is positively associated with both subjective assessments and objective measures of state presence. This last finding challenges the widespread assumption that criminal actors step into governance roles mainly where the state is weak. Instead, it suggests that, under some conditions, state presence may coexist with, or even incentivize, criminal rule. The study advances our understanding of the regional scale and variation of criminal governance, and it opens new questions about how state action shapes the emergence and endurance of criminal governance regimes. It also calls for more systematic data collection on this phenomenon and highlights its importance for research on development, demography, and politics.

The next two articles delve into the practices of criminal organizations when they govern or seek to govern local populations. In “Commitments of Silence: Reciprocity Networks and Criminal Organizations in Montevideo,” Inés Fynn argues that criminal groups operating in contexts of high state capacity—where the state is present, viewed as available to citizens, and capable of acting on complaints—must obtain silence from residents who might otherwise denounce them. She calls these tacit arrangements “commitments of silence,” and distinguishes between two forms. Forced commitments of silence are imposed through threats, intimidation, and displacement, compelling residents not to report the group’s activities. Negotiated commitments of silence emerge instead when gangs refrain from predatory behavior, provide everyday assistance, and present themselves as embedded actors rather than external predators, and residents, in turn, withhold denunciation. Fynn argues that the structure of reciprocity networks in the community determines which form of silence prevails. Extended reciprocity networks—those with dense ties connecting many residents—enable them to collectively exert leverage over gangs and push them toward negotiated coexistence. By contrast, where networks are fragmented into narrow clusters, gangs secure silence coercively. The article illustrates these dynamics through process tracing in two communities in Montevideo, Uruguay, a setting of strong state capacity and relatively low police corruption. By identifying and theorizing an essential element in criminal-society relations, the study advances research on criminal governance and civilian agency beyond settings of weak or complicit states.

Philip Luke Johnson takes us from criminal groups’ efforts to secure silence in local communities to their efforts to speak in public. In “Criminal Communication: Public Representations, Repertoires, and Regimes of Criminal Governance,” the author investigates how criminal actors represent themselves when they communicate publicly and argues that these self-portrayals function as strategic tools to establish and sustain governance or to fight criminal wars. The study draws on an original collection of 5,771 “narco-messages” that were displayed in Mexico between 2006 and 2012 and were reported in the media. These are short, written messages posted in public spaces such as schools or streets or left in public places, sometimes at the scene of violence. Analyzing three case studies of messaging campaigns, the author finds that criminal groups craft three different images to represent themselves: as rulers of territory, asserting authority to impose order; as scourges of their enemies, promising to punish or purge rivals through targeted violence; and as guardians of the people, claiming to defend local communities and deliver justice that the state allegedly cannot or will not provide. These images, Johnson argues, are, respectively, deployed to establish a criminal governance regime, to maintain one, or to fight a criminal war. The study contributes to the literature on criminal behavior by identifying public communication as an additional strategy within the repertoire of actions available to these organizations. It also advances research on criminal governance and criminal wars by uncovering how criminal groups broadcast messages to shape public perceptions of their organizations and actions.

Just as criminal groups broadcast messages about themselves, so do they strive to control whether and how journalists publish information about them. In “Silencing the Press in Criminal Wars: Why the War on Drugs Turned Mexico into the World’s Most Dangerous Country for Journalists,” Guillermo Trejo and Natán Skigin investigate the victimization of local journalists in the context of Mexico’s War on Drugs. The authors argue that violence against these journalists surged in regions where the federal government deployed the armed forces to fight drug cartels, and, in doing so, decapitated major groups and triggered violent competition for territorial control, illicit revenue, and criminal governance. Drawing on a novel dataset of 166 journalists killed from 1994 to 2019, along with focus groups with reporters, the article finds that local journalists are most at risk where they report on turf battles, cartel-state collusion, patterns of disappearance, and efforts by criminal organizations to govern. In these settings, both criminal groups and subnational officials have incentives to punish or prevent publication of such coverage by using lethal violence to protect their operations and careers. The study advances our understanding of the role that local and national politics play in shaping criminal violence and shows how militarization can fuel attacks on journalism, press freedom, and democracy.

Political science often treats “criminals” and “rebels” as distinct actors. Janet I. Lewis and Stephen Rangazas close this section by showing that the line between these categories is often blurred when rebellions begin. In “Political Entrepreneurs or Bandits? The ‘Criminal’ Origins of Peripheral Rebellions,” they ask how rebellions start and why armed groups that later become known as rebels first use small-scale, anonymous violence that resembles banditry more than overt anti-state revolt. The article argues that, in rural peripheries with low state monitoring capacity, emerging armed groups—including groups that secretly aspire to challenge the state—initially rely on criminal or bandit-like, low-level violence to gather resources, test state response, and avoid immediate repression. The ambiguity in their behavior shields them; to outsiders, including the state, they look like “mere criminals,” not existential threats. Only later, if they survive and build capacity, do some of these groups shift toward sustained, organized, offensive violence against the state, revealing themselves as rebels. The authors illustrate their argument with new datasets on armed group formation, brief case vignettes, and three historical cases: the Chinese Communist Party, the Việt Minh, and the Cuban 26th of July Movement. The article contributes to the literature on civil war onset and the origins of rebellion, while encouraging further research and theory-building at the intersection of criminal and political violence.

Voters and Representatives

Central to democracy are questions related to voters and representatives: who they are; what drives their ideas, preferences, and decision-making; and how their interactions shape governance and policy. The articles in this section explore these questions through a deep dive into the case of the United States. The first pair of articles center American voters, respectively, making the case for qualitative methods of studying voters and illustrating the utility of such methods to craft a new explanation of core support for Donald Trump. The second pair of articles turn to representatives, with one identifying important empirical trends in the U.S. Congress related to representatives’ own backgrounds and the other examining the extent to which their decisions mirror public opinion. Together, this collection motivates novel questions and approaches to generating knowledge about topics at the heart of politics in the United States and beyond.

“Toward a Qualitative Study of the American Voter” begins the section with an examination of how mainstream scholars of American politics research voters in the U.S. context. Anna Berg and Stephanie Ternullo ask how the field of American political behavior evolved to center on a relatively narrow toolkit: on the methodological level, relying mainly on nationally representative surveys in general, and the American National Election Studies in particular; and on the conceptual level, focusing primarily on vote choice, partisanship, and participation, with secondary attention to ideology and racial identity. The authors investigate debates from the historical development of the Michigan and Columbia Schools and find that, while early scholars valued open-ended questions in survey design, qualitative approaches declined after the 1970s. Drawing on the existing literature on the comparative advantages of qualitative and mixed-methods research design, the authors outline an approach to reintegrate in-depth interviewing, ethnographic fieldwork, and other qualitative approaches into the study of American political behavior. They identify four modes of inquiry from the qualitative tradition that can deepen and enrich current research: innovating theoretically by discovering surprising findings, innovating theoretically by improving research design and case selection, developing better understandings of how context shapes meaning making, and tracking dynamic processes of change. The authors provide a launching pad to broaden the field of American voter studies by making the case for how greater pluralism in methods and data sources can enrich our understanding and also crafting a framework to advance future research in this realm.

Biko Koenig and Tali Mendelberg exemplify the benefits of a qualitative approach in their development of a new account of core supporters for Donald Trump based on five months of participant observation in the Pennsylvania Rust Belt region during the 2020 presidential campaign. “The Symbolic Politics of Status in the MAGA Movement” argues that existing explanations of support for Trump—such as those emphasizing partisanship, out-group prejudice, and local economic decline—can be integrated under a broader umbrella of status concerns. Building on work in sociology on status and symbolism, the authors introduce the concept of the symbolic politics of status to capture how political conflict can extend beyond contests over material distribution or moral values and come to encompass fights over whose lifestyles are favored or disfavored. They argue that core Trump supporters ought to be understood not simply as voters carrying out individual electoral behavior, but as people embedded in the social networks of a status-based social movement. The MAGA movement positions Trump as the central node of a complex system of symbols and engages supporters beyond the voting booth in a holistic way, such as through events and gatherings that offer community, camaraderie, and a rich array of social and psychological experiences. The research offers a new perspective on Trump voters and also goes beyond this case to demonstrate how ethnographic methods and a conceptual focus on symbols and status can help us rethink who voters are, how they engage in electoral politics, and what candidates mean to them.

Craig Volden, Jonathan Lai, and Alan E. Wiseman also bring questions of status to the fore as they shift from American voters to highlight a striking trend among representatives. In “On the Decline of Elite-Educated Republicans in Congress,” the authors gather data on lawmakers from 1973 to 2023 and code whether they attended an elite institution of higher education for their undergraduate degree, law school, business school, or some other graduate or professional degree. Analysis of patterns by party reveals that while the percentage of elite-educated Democrats has risen slightly in both chambers of Congress, the percentage of Republicans who attended elite educational institutions declined from 40% to 15% in the House of Representatives and from 55% to 35% in the Senate. A partisan divide has thus emerged among lawmakers, paralleling the “diploma divide” through which college attendance increasingly polarizes voters. This marks a new era in American politics: while the monolithic character of the American governing class was long reinforced by a small set of elite schools, there are now two governing classes that are divided by party and lack common educational bonds. Offering a preliminary exploration of the causes and consequences of this shift, the authors find that elite-educated members of Congress are more liberal in their voting, elite-educated Democrats are more effective in the legislative process, and very few of the partisan warrior “Gingrich Senators” had an elite-educational background. Setting the agenda for future work, this reflection essay encourages continued research on the implications of these trends for representation, polarization, policy making, and democracy at large.

Moving from descriptive to substantive representation, “Collective Representation in Congress” closes this section with a study of the extent to which lawmakers represent popular preferences on important issues. Stephen Ansolabehere and Shiro Kuriwaki examine how representational successes and failures are mediated by electoral and legislative institutions and also vary by issue. Analyzing public opinion data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study on 103 important bills on the congressional agenda from 2006 to 2022, the authors find that Congress made decisions that align with the preferences of the majority of Americans 55% of the time. The House of Representatives’ decisions often aligned with public opinion, but Senate decisions on important bills depended on the divisiveness of the issue and whether control of the two chambers was split by party. Most failures in representation occurred because Congress, and particularly the Senate, failed to pass a popular bill. At the same time, the authors find that the Senate often contributed to successful representation by blocking legislation that the public did not support. The authors conclude that representational failures ought not be blamed on Senate malapportionment but are rather attributable to both majoritarian and countermajoritarian features of American constitutional design. In doing so, the research calls attention an underappreciated aspect of representation in the American case: the Senate, because it is more insulated from party swings in elections and regulated by internal rules that require the support of the minority party to pass most legislation, serves as a counterweight to the majority party in the House by blocking bills when issues are highly polarizing or outright unpopular.

The Politics of Remembering

How is collective memory produced, defended, and carried forward, and by whom? The three articles in this section approach these questions through studies of the maintenance of an official narrative about an authoritarian past, the struggle to define the political meaning of deaths in the present, and the transmission of marginalized voices into the future. Collectively, they deepen our understanding of how communities generate memory and deploy it as a form of political action.

In “Torture to Their Ears, Music to Ours: Memory Regimes and the Ordering of Political Space,” Sashenka Lleshaj investigates how unified official memory regimes are sustained after authoritarian rule and how societies negotiate the symbolic and artistic heritage of the past. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with cultural and political elites, media discourse, and archival research, the article examines a contested public commemoration of a communist-era singer in postcommunist Albania as a case of how official narratives of the past are reproduced and policed in everyday life. Lleshaj argues that unified memory regimes not only impose consensus at the official level but also govern everyday judgment in society. In Albania, the state’s celebration of communist-era cultural icons, framed as nostalgic, national, and apolitical, appears inclusive and reconciliatory. Yet, it simultaneously disciplines challenges to that narrative. When critics invoke the repressive uses of art produced under dictatorship, defenders respond in ways that ultimately protect the dominant consensus. Pluralists—those committed to engage with multiple interpretations of the past—can thus become agents of what Lleshaj calls “traps of consensus”; in the name of civility and balance, they align with official consensus, disavow dissent as too extreme, and dismiss accounts of suffering as particular and personal—treated as localized and therefore non-representative, relevant mainly to those who endured them—while characterizing dominant interpretations as universal and representative of the collective past. The article shows how memory politics travels beyond monuments and textbooks to shape who is heard, who is marginalized, and which pasts are permitted to matter in democratic life, contributing to work on memory politics, postcommunist transitions, and authoritarian legacies.

While Lleshaj studies how states and elites work to stabilize the meaning of the past, Andrew R. Murphy turns to how communities narrate and circulate the meaning of contested deaths in the present. In “The Deaths and Afterlives of George Floyd and Ashli Babbitt: Political Martyrs, Political Movements, and the Politics of Memory,” Murphy develops a new account of political martyrdom as a communal process rather than an individual act. The reflection essay examines two highly charged deaths in the United States: George Floyd, killed by Minneapolis police in May 2020, and Ashli Babbitt, shot by Capitol Police as she attempted to breach the Speaker’s Lobby during the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Murphy argues that these deaths illuminate how communities construct martyrs and mobilize around them, often in direct opposition to others’ claims about injustice and the state. Political martyrdom, in his account, has three elements: death connected to an individual’s identity or political commitments; consecration, in which communities embed the death in collective memory and ascribe transcendent meaning to it; and transmission, in which martyrdom narratives are passed down through media, ritual, and commemorative practices. Crucially, this framework rejects the idea that a martyr must have intended to die for a cause. Instead, it centers the interpretive work of social movements after a death, which narrate the loss, claim its meaning, and use it to legitimize demands. By showing how movements consecrate and transmit these deaths as martyrdom, the article treats collective memory as a terrain of political struggle rather than its aftermath, and encourages further research examining memory as a constitutive part of democratic conflict.

Finally, Leigh K. Jenco moves from how communities construct memory in the present to transmission as a form of political action aimed at the future. In “Precarious Voices: The Political Act of Transmission in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs Compendium (c. 1610),” Jenco asks what forms of political action are available to people whose voices are systematically excluded in moments of crisis. The article examines Mountain Songs, a seventeenth-century collection of urban folksongs compiled by Feng Menglong in Suzhou, which records the sung poems of laborers, sex workers, and other nonelite city dwellers, often in female voices and local vernacular and treating themes such as desire, labor, poverty, and judgment of hierarchy. Jenco theorizes transmission—the recording, preservation, and circulation of these voices for the moral cultivation of future readers—as a form of political action that operates outside formal institutions. Rather than presenting these songs as quaint folklore, Feng places them alongside works like the Classic of Odes, a canonical Confucian poetry anthology used for moral instruction, asserting that working-class and marginal speakers belong within the same moral community traditionally claimed by elite men. Transmission, in this account, is forward-looking. Its goal is not only to simply represent disenfranchised identities in the present but also to secure precarious voices as part of an archive for future ethical and political reflection, even when those voices are silenced now. Expanding our understanding of political agency from below, this research reframes transmission as political, not because it advances claims through the state, but because it preserves threatened ways of seeing the world as resources for future critique and change.

Political Impacts of Political Science

Does political science influence real-world politics? How can political scientists bring their knowledge and understanding into the public sphere and translate their findings into productive conversations and informed policies? The two articles in this closing section use different methods to tackle different aspects of the linkage between political science and political impact. Together, they derive important lessons about both how scholars affect politics and how they can study the kinds of effects they do or do not have.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez discusses how policy makers use social science research in “How Political Science Shaped Federal Policy in the Biden-Harris Administration: Learning from Efforts to Democratize the Administrative State.” The author draws upon his experience serving as a senior political appointee in the Biden-Harris administration and working on efforts to increase public engagement in the development and review of federal regulations. He explains that these policy makers found value in many types of political science scholarship, including quantitative and qualitative work, theoretical and empirical contributions, institutional and behavioral studies, and both causal and descriptive findings. The research that was most relevant to the policy makers with which Hertel-Fernandez worked, however, required deep knowledge of policy design and focused on policy as a dependent or independent variable. Offering a case study to illustrate the kind of research that was especially helpful for policy makers—but was missing during his own time in government—the author presents results from an original survey of applicants to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The author finds that SNAP applicants faced specific barriers to greater participation in administrative policy-making by sharing their lived experiences with government and, on this basis, explains how future research can aid policy-makers to reduce such burdens to public involvement. This reflection essay shows not only how government learns from political science but also how political scientists can learn from experience in government and derive concrete lessons to make that learning as useful as possible for the policy-making process.

Political science impacts politics not only by providing relevant findings to policy makers but also by shaping media discourse and the information that media delivers to the public at large. Exploring the latter, “International Relations Scholars, the Media, and the Dilemma of Consensus” asks when, how, and how often foreign policy journalists seek out international relations scholars and scholarship in the course of their reporting. Irene Entringer García Blanes, Shauna N. Gillooly, Susan Peterson, Ryan Powers, and Michael J. Tierney surveyed 1,000 foreign policy journalists and found that journalists frequently seek out IR experts at multiple stages of their work, favor social scientists over experts from other disciplines, and thereby serve as an important “conveyor belt” disseminating political science knowledge. The authors also carry out a survey experiment to explore how journalists engage with varying degrees of agreement among experts. They find that journalists tend to create a “false balance” by underrepresenting the extent of consensus among scholars and oversampling dissenting views even when scholars overwhelmingly favor a particular policy or interpretation of events. This bias is alarming, as it points to an important limitation on scholars’ collective ability to shape public opinion, policy debates, and the views of policymakers via the media. At a time when many political scientists seek to communicate their expertise through media channels, this article encourages them also to employ their methodological toolkits to study the relationship between the academy and the media and identify, with more precision, how expert knowledge is utilized when it enters the public sphere.