This article offers the first test with valid measures and rigorous multivariate methods of the hypothesis that significant early-career research achievements of academics predict late-career achievements of the same type. Considerable research investigated the correlates of late-career research success; however, this promising hypothesis that originated in psychological and educational research on adolescents has not been tested systematically for academic careers. In a sample of three annual temporal cohorts of political science faculty members, our study finds notable evidence in support of this hypothesis. Our findings also provide a foundation for future research on how innate abilities, the character of doctoral programs, and the advantages of different types of academic positions shape long-term career productivity.

As online platforms seek to improve content-moderation strategies, large language models (LLMs) may be a potential tool. This study examines opportunities and limitations of LLM-powered moderation through a unique lens: student projects for a Stanford University course titled Trust and Safety. In this course, students developed Discord bots using LLMs to moderate specific types of harmful content. Interviews with 16 of the students suggest that these models demonstrate high accuracy, often exceeding students’ expectations. Notably, in cases of disagreement between the student and the model, closer analysis frequently validated the model’s judgments. However, students also observed limitations: LLMs proved unhelpfully sensitive to prompt phrasing and exhibited many contextual interpretation challenges common to human moderators and traditional machine-learning classifiers.

Congress is portrayed as compliant with President Donald J. Trump’s agenda because he is intimidating its members. This neglects an alternative explanation that focuses on the increased congruence of presidential and congressional electoral bases. Trump is the beneficiary of a geographical realignment that took decades and has created a high degree of overlap of the two bases. This analysis tracks that process from 1952 to 2024. It has produced a situation in which policy concerns overlap and encourage congressional compliance.

Public administration (PA) research published in economics journals (PA in Econ) can be summarized by five stylized facts using bibliometric analysis and expert survey data. First, PA in Econ represents a large volume of research, comparable to all quantitatively oriented PA research published in PA journals. Second, PA in Econ exists in a parallel universe, with almost no citations to the field of PA. Third, PA in Econ features a much more diverse set of empirical settings, including more non-Western cases. Fourth, PA in Econ employs more rigorous designs for causal inference. Fifth, PA in Econ is evaluated as equally relevant by PA scholars. We conclude by arguing that the most aspirational way forward for the field of PA is to live up to its identity as an interdisciplinary field and aim to integrate PA research across disciplines.

This article examines Latine immigrants’ perceptions of group status relative to White and Black individuals, highlighting how these perceptions shape their understanding of the US racial hierarchy. Focusing on the role of social interactions, the analysis explores equitable interactions (e.g., with a neighbor, coworker, or friend) and nonequitable interactions (e.g., with a supervisor) and their association with perceived status relative to each group. It also considers how experiences of discrimination and anti-Latino treatment influence these perceptions. Findings indicate that respondents view Whites as more advantaged, whereas perceptions of Black Americans’ status remain ambivalent. Equitable interactions improve Latines’ perceived status relative to Whites but do not consistently improve their sense of status relative to Black individuals. Conversely, discrimination substantially diminishes perceived status relative to Whites and, to a lesser extent, relative to Black individuals. Although results suggest modest opportunities for coalition building with Black Americans, the findings indicate these alliances may be limited. Similarly, discrimination is a major barrier to Latine–White relations, leaving Latine immigrants feeling marginalized relative to both groups.

Recent years have witnessed an increase in white Americans’ support for the Great Replacement Theory (GRT), the xenophobic conspiracy theory that posits that political elites are embracing permissive immigration policies to bring in “obedient” voters who will vote for them and who will eventually replace native white citizens. This conspiracy theory has been publicly endorsed by several conservative political figures and prominently featured in conservative media outlets, most notably Fox News. This article uses the American Multiracial Panel Study to investigate whether exposure to Fox News is associated with support for the GRT. We find clear and consistent evidence that whites who receive their political news from Fox News are significantly more likely to support core tenets of the GRT than those who do not. We consider our results as evidence of the continued influence of elite rhetoric on public opinion and the unique impact of Fox News on the nature and origins of white public opinion about immigration and the nation’s demographic future.

The No Labels Party emerged with claims that it could interrupt the traditional two-party system in the United States. The political science literature on third parties would seem to challenge this assertion, highlighting the difficulty of altering the party ecosystem. In this article we use behavioral and attitudinal data to better understand the life cycle of the No Labels Party in North Carolina. We find that, although it became the second-largest third party (after the Libertarian Party), it struggled to gain and maintain party membership. The plurality of party switchers to the No Labels Party come from the ranks of Unaffiliated, not from the two major parties. Further, attitudinal data reveal that North Carolinians were largely uninformed and agnostic about No Labels. In the end, the No Labels Party’s demise was easily predicted. Despite a rise in independent/unaffiliated party registrants and identifiers, the two-party system is here to stay.

A specific challenge of qualitative methods teaching is including skills for both data generation and data analysis, with recent audits of political science curricula revealing that the latter is particularly neglected at the undergraduate level. There are few published discussions on the importance of teaching analytical mechanics or guidance provided on how best to find and use data for teaching. This article explains how we integrated an exercise that enabled our class of more than 100 undergraduate students to generate their own original data and then to practice deductive coding and analysis. In addition to discussing our teaching experiences, we draw on interviews with our students to reflect on the successes and challenges of our approach and to offer suggestions to other instructors who want to replicate our strategy in a large undergraduate setting.

Political parties play important roles in contemporary and historical contexts. With the digital turn in the humanities, historians and, increasingly, political scientists are turning to party archives for doing comparative analysis. Party archives provide unique insights on the role of party structures, actors, motivations, and discourses in real time. Yet despite their institutional and scholarly importance, comparative analysis is difficult given the heterogeneous landscape of party archives. This article aims to facilitate comparative analysis. We show that the establishment of different types of party archives follows distinct motivations before we link common obstacles (location, content, searchability, and usage) arising in comparative archival work to them. These obstacles’ severity is often connected to the type of archive, where personal and scholarly archives mark the extremes. The findings can help scholars gain deeper, broader, and, above all, comparable insights about political parties.

Epistemological positioning is foundational to any analysis, yet pluralist epistemologies are taught unevenly in political science methods courses. This article draws attention to this crucial foundation and suggests that a basic grounding in positivist and interpretivist research paradigms would give students conceptual tools to adjudicate between competing claims and contradictory evidence in the empirical world—even as it would highlight comparative advantages of different approaches to knowledge production. Using an optical illusion as a heuristic guide, the article proposes a practical classroom exercise to illustrate the central differences between positivist and interpretivist approaches to political science and to elucidate how these differences play out in research design and inquiry.

Interviewing is a widely used method in political science. Nevertheless, the emphasis on teaching quantitative methods means that proper training for interviewing is lacking at the undergraduate level. In this article we provide tools for instructors to better prepare students to conduct interviews as a research method. Anchoring our discussion on developing good and ethically sound interview questions, we introduce a rubric to assess question development and explore best practices in developing interview questions in three courses in educational institutions with distinct characteristics.

This article introduces a symposium on teaching qualitative research methods to undergraduate students. Qualitative methods have an important role in both the discipline and the professional development of students but do not occupy a commensurate space in research pedagogy. This is due in part to the lack of resources for effectively teaching qualitative methods—a lack this symposium seeks to address. We identify four common themes in the four symposium contributions: (1) the importance of including the ethical and epistemological foundations of qualitative work; (2) the possibilities of teaching qualitative methods across the entire research cycle; (3) the importance of carefully structuring and designing active and experiential learning in research pedagogy; and (4) the unique opportunities of moving beyond the classroom in teaching qualitative research.

Instructors must balance advancing student knowledge and fostering civic abilities as dual objectives of political science education. Combining these objectives has informed various approaches in course design that often follow the idea of learning by doing, with a strong emphasis on the doing. This article presents a pedagogical frame—“community-based learning as research methods learning”—that focuses on the learning side of learning by doing and centers research instruction. It suggests that community-based learning must come before community-based research and that research methods learning must come before carrying out research tasks. The article invites those who aim to address the dual objectives of political science education in their course design to do so with a methods-learning mindset rather than solely with a research-output trajectory.

As the number of digitized archives increases, so does attention to archival research as a useful qualitative method. This article presents a pilot project in an undergraduate political science methods course at the University of Toronto Mississauga designed to familiarize and engage students with digital archival research in an entertaining way. In collaboration with the campus library, students were invited to imagine themselves as rookie detectives and investigate a “cold case” of a potential Unidentified Flying Object encounter in Canada during the Cold War. They explored a digital archive curated explicitly for this purpose and made available in the course’s online learning-management system, with related documents and photographs accessible from the Library and Archives Canada; visited the library that presented archival research; and answered questions relevant to the case. Results from a subsequent participants’ self-assessing survey indicate that this assignment was beneficial in enhancing student comprehension of archival research. This suggests that such innovative pedagogical activities can render topics like methods more appealing and learning about them more enjoyable.

This article explores how the 2024 Trump campaign persistently invoked the so-called “great replacement” narrative to promote a politics of racial fear. As the article details, this messaging relied upon the mutability of the replacement narrative – highlighting a supposed plot by the Democratic Party to “import voters” from Latin America in order to corrupt the democratic process. This strategy yielded a variety of civic costs. By foregrounding the language of democracy, the campaign laundered xenophobic fears for widespread consumption. More broadly, the article details how this episode illustrates a core strategy of far right media politics: to capture and repurpose the civic language of liberal democracies to serve illiberal aims.

Election integrity is paramount to democratic health. The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a multistate collaboration that facilitates essential election administration functions, whereby members share administrative data to ensure clean voter registration lists and to encourage individuals who are eligible but unregistered (EBUs) to register to vote. Despite ERIC’s primary focus on maintaining the accuracy of voter rolls, in 2022, some conservatives accused it of being a tool for partisan electioneering, prompting nine Republican-led states to leave ERIC. To assess the validity of a central criticism made against ERIC, we leverage field experiments conducted by member states during the 2016 elections in Pennsylvania and Nevada (i.e., two important swing states). We find no empirical evidence to support the claim that outreach to EBUs yielded a partisan advantage: ERIC’s registration efforts had little differential effect on party registration or turnout. This article discusses the importance of efforts to maintain accurate voter rolls and to encourage greater participation for promoting confidence in our democratic system.

This article explores how abortion was framed on Twitter as an issue during the 2022 midterm elections directly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. By leveraging a dataset of all tweets sent by US House of Representatives candidates for two months prior to the midterm elections, this study examines how both gender and partisanship impacted the discussion of abortion and shows that partisanship drove the rhetoric surrounding this issue during those elections. Whereas women candidates in general were significantly more likely to discuss abortion than their male counterparts, Democratic women led the way and were more likely to use “women-invoked rhetoric” to frame the issue.

Much is known about the factors that shape partisan campaign activism in the United States and other democracies. In contrast to this voluminous literature, political scientists have given relatively little attention to an emerging phenomenon in contemporary party politics: the mobilization via “emigrant party branches” of partisans living outside of the territorial borders of their native country. We address this gap in the literature through an analysis of Democrats Abroad—the official overseas arm of the US Democratic Party—during the 2024 election cycle. Drawing from an original two-wave panel survey of party members, we demonstrate that some of the forces that prompt campaign activism in the domestic United States hold for partisans overseas. At the same time, factors pertaining to the migration experience and settlement in another country also affect engagement in American campaigns. Most notably, we find that overseas Democrats who become integrated into the party system of their residential country are more likely to participate in American elections from the distance. This finding contributes a fresh perspective to models of political transnationalism and “campaign spillover” in electoral research—that is, the impact that partisan engagement in one context has on subsequent involvement in separate domains.

This article explores the relationship between academic freedom and the field of political science, focusing on scholars’ duty to engage in societal issues related to their area of expertise, rather than merely protecting their intellectual pursuits from outside influence. By drawing on and expanding the Confucian principles, it examines how this viewpoint informs the responsibilities of scholars and educators working within the discipline.

It is overdue for political science to consider the names of nation-states, the discipline’s primary unit of analysis and the world’s largest, richest, and most powerful actors. I begin this analysis by examining the descriptors used in formal country names, including empire, kingdom, Islamic, republic, democratic, socialist, and people’s. I analyze country names as independent variables, hypothesizing that they have value as signals of political characteristics. To test my hypotheses, I turn to the Varieties of Democracy dataset. I use fixed-effects panel regressions to examine whether countries’ descriptors correlate with the characteristics they name. I find that except for the democratic descriptor, all other descriptors are surprisingly accurate. This is the first step toward developing an understanding of names in political science as well as adding a new tool for comparative politics.