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.

Since the 1990s, there has been consensus in the literature of a submission and publication gap that favors men. Important research in the intervening years has explored the many reasons for this output gap: imbalanced administrative workloads; bias in top journals against female-dominated subfields and methodological approaches; and lower confidence levels among women, sometimes known as the “Matthew effect.” However, in the intervening period, there has been a notable emphasis on recruiting more women into academia, and the importance of publishing for career development has intensified. Journal case studies have highlighted a growth in output by women academics but show that men are still overrepresented. Using a case study of the International Political Science Review (IPSR), we contribute to the emerging body of work that shows that the gender gap has diminished or even been eliminated. We present data on submissions and acceptances by gender, and we base our comparisons in the gender balance of the departments of submitting authors. The results are clear, for IPSR, the gender gap has closed and women now publish on a par with their men colleagues in their department.

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.

People in political decision-making across the globe tend to be much older than the average voter. As such, parliaments and cabinets are unrepresentative of the larger population. This has consequences: it risks favouring policies geared towards the interests of older cohorts, it might alienate youth from voting and could push parties to appeal (even more) to older voters. In this review, we synthesize the growing literature on youth representation. We do so by: (1) delineating the group of young politicians, (2) discussing why youth ought to be present in politics, (3) empirically depicting the state of youth representation, and (4) illustrating the factors that help or harm youth to enter politics. This synthesis shows the degree to which young people are absent from decision-making bodies across the national, subnational and supra-national levels and attempts to make sense of the reasons why there is such a dearth of youth as candidates and representatives. We conclude by discussing gaps in research and suggesting several avenues for future work.

This article conceptualizes the relative absence of youth in legislatures, a feature we perceive as a democratic deficit with detrimental consequences. It introduces a new operationalization: the Youth Representation Index. Rather than calculating youths’ representation by the percentage of Members of Parliament 35 or 40 years old and younger or legislatures’ median age, we argue that scholars should assess youths’ parliamentary presence relative to their proportion of the voting-age population. We contribute by assessing the magnitude of youths’ underrepresentation across countries, finding that adults 35 years old and younger are generally underrepresented in legislatures by a factor of three and those 40 years old and younger by a factor of two. We illustrate that youths’ presence increases under proportional representation electoral systems and with candidate age requirements set at 18 years. Finally, our results illustrate that countries with a younger population display a stronger discrepancy in youth representation.

This article focuses on two commonly used indicators of turnout, VAP turnout (the number of votes cast as a percentage of the voting-age population) and RV turnout (votes cast as a percentage of the number of registered voters), and discusses possible biases induced by migration flows. Using a global dataset on elections in more than 100 democracies between 1990 and 2012, we tested the potential bias induced by the percentage of resident noncitizens and nationals living abroad on VAP and RV turnout, respectively. Through time-series cross-sectional analysis, we found that the number of resident noncitizens negatively biases VAP turnout, to the extent that a country with 10% noncitizen residents would have turnout underreported by nearly 4 percentage points. In contrast, we found that the number of nationals living abroad does not induce a turnout bias.

Through a panel analysis conducted in Bavaria, which covers two adjacent elections – the federal elections and the European elections in 2013 and 2014 – we examine the attitudinal factors that drive citizens’ propensity to turn out. We find that abstainers have generally low levels of knowledge, interest and sense of civic duty. National-level voters have relatively high interest, knowledge and sense of duty in national politics, but not in European affairs. In contrast, European- and national-level voters have high interest, knowledge and a sense of duty for both national and European politics. This finding contextualizes the characterization of European elections as second-order national elections. While prior research has established that voters make their vote choice based on national-level politics, we demonstrate that European elections are not national elections when it comes to citizens’ decision to vote. Rather, knowledge, interest and a sense of duty about national politics are not sufficient conditions for somebody to vote in the European elections. The person needs to have the same positive attitudes about European affairs as they have about national politics to participate in European elections.

Do researchers share their quantitative data and are the quantitative results that are published in political science journals replicable? We attempt to answer these questions by analyzing all articles published in the 2015 issues of three political behaviorist journals (i.e., Electoral Studies, Party Politics, and Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties)—all of which did not have a binding data-sharing and replication policy as of 2015. We found that authors are still reluctant to share their data; only slightly more than half of the authors in these journals do so. For those who share their data, we mainly confirmed the initial results reported in the respective articles in roughly 70% of the times. Only roughly 5% of the articles yielded significantly different results from those reported in the publication. However, we also found that roughly 25% of the articles organized the data and/or code so poorly that replication was impossible.

In this article, we summarize the individual demand-level factors explaining the radical right-wing vote in European countries. To do so, we first review 46 quantitative peer-reviewed articles featuring the individual vote choice in favour of a radical right-wing party as the dependent variable. To identify relevant articles, we use Kai Arzheimer’s bibliography on the radical right and employ the following inclusion criterion: the articles must be written in English, they must use the individual vote for a radical right-wing party as the dependent variable, they must use a quantitative methodology and they must include some type of regression analysis. Using this strategy, we conduct a meta-analysis of 329 relevant models and find that over 20 individual variables are tested. Because many variables such as attitudes towards immigration, employment, age, education and gender only show moderate success rates in attempting to explain an individual’s propensity to vote for the radical right, we complement the review of quantitative studies with an analysis of 14 qualitative publications. The review of these qualitative works shows that the processes through which somebody becomes a voter, supporter or activist of the radical right are often more complex than the commonly used surveys can portray them. Frequently, feelings of relative economic deprivation and dissatisfaction with the political regime trigger an awakening that makes individuals seek engagement. However, the processes behind this awakening are complex and can only be partially captured by quantitative studies.

Middle-aged to senior men of the ethnic majority and higher income groups are generally overrepresented in parliaments. While research on group representation has examined issues of gender, economic standing, and, more recently, ethnicity, few studies examine age groups. We argue that the design of political institutions influences the share of young adults in parliaments across nations and hypothesize that the electoral system type, age candidacy requirements, and quotas influence the share of younger deputies in national parliaments. Analyzing an original data set with a global cross-national sample, we find that proportional representation and giving candidates the right to stand in elections as early as possible (i.e. at the age of 18) matter. In contrast, quota provisions for youths are currently too selectively applied to increase the percentage of young deputies in parliament.

This study presents the results of a survey of Canada's francophone political scientists on the language of knowledge dissemination in political science. Although almost all francophone political scientists agreed with the statement that English has become the lingua franca of political science, French continues to be a significant part of the dissemination of knowledge. However, there are important variations in language usage depending on the language in which the dissertation was written, the disciplinary sub-field within the discipline, and academic rank. Language choices are largely motivated by the desire to reach the widest possible audience while garnering recognition from peers.

Various studies have outlined the institutional (e.g. the existence of quota laws and the electoral system type of a country) and non-institutional factors (e.g. the political culture of a country) that account for variation in women’s representation, in general, and, in more detail, the low representation of women in the US Congress. However, no study has, so far, compared the Congressional career paths of men and women in order to understand whether this gender gap in representation stems from a difference in terms of the duration and importance of the careers of male and female policymakers. Using data on all US House elections between 1972 and 2012, we provide such an analysis, evaluating whether or not the political careers of women in the US House of Representatives are different from the political careers of their male counterparts. Our findings indicate that the congressional careers of men and women are alike and, if anything, women may even have a small edge over their male colleagues.

For more than 40 years, studies trying to explain macro-level electoral turnout have been one of the pillars of political behavioural research. From January 2004 to December 2013 alone, more than 130 articles were published in peer-reviewed journals using turnout at the national, regional or local level as the dependent variable. This meta-analysis tries to synthesize the results of these studies. I find there is a strong consensus in the literature that turnout is higher under compulsory voting, if the election is important, and if it is held in a small country. I also find that the influence of most other predictor variables, including the type of electoral system, the number of parties, development, income inequalities and electoral closeness is inconclusive at best. These results hint at the fact that the determinants of turnout might be more complex than the current theory suggests and is rather more context dependent.

Drawing on the literature on the process of cabinet appointments and on ministerial careers and the types of mobility that they involve, this article examines the hypothesis that the rate of ministerial promotion and demotion within a cabinet differs for women and men. To verify this hypothesis, we compiled a database that integrates the several hundred individuals who served as ministers in the Quebec Executive Council between 1976 and 2012. The quantitative analysis consists of descriptive statistics and negative binomial models; it takes into consideration a number of variables, including age, education, and past political mandates. Our results show that the ministerial careers of women and men follow a similar trajectory. Specifically, women and men begin their ministerial careers with minor portfolios, but as their ministerial experience accumulates, ministers of both sexes take on portfolios of increasing importance. In other words, the ministerial careers of women do not lag behind those of men. This observation negates the idea that the ministerial careers of women are less illustrious than those of their male counterparts.

High voter turnout gives legitimacy to the political system and strengthens the stability of a country. Since voter turnout matters, it is important to determine which factors boost electoral participation. While there is a vast literature on turnout focusing on institutional, socio-economic, and contextual indicators, there appears to be a shortage of scholarship on the relationship between religion and turnout. In our study, we evaluate the impact of the Islamic religion on electoral participation. Drawing on a large dataset that incorporates all legislative elections worldwide from 1970 to 2010 and controlling for compulsory voting, the electoral system type, the decisiveness of the election, the competitiveness of the election, the size of the country, the regime type and development, we find that Muslim-majority countries have lower turnout rates than majority non-Muslim countries. We also find electoral participation to be lower in countries where Islamic tenets are more strongly entrenched in politics.