We explore the US states’ evolving policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by examining governors’ decisions to begin easing five types of social distancing policies after the initial case surge in March–April 2020. Applying event history models to original data on state COVID-19 policies, we test the relative influence of health, economic, and political considerations on their decisions. We find no evidence that differences in state economic conditions influenced when governors began easing. Governors of states with larger recent declines in COVID-19 deaths per capita and improving trends in new confirmed cases and test positivity were quicker to ease. However, politics played as powerful a role as epidemiological conditions, driven primarily by governors’ party affiliation. Republican governors made the policy U-turn from imposing social distancing measures toward easing those measures a week earlier than Democratic governors, all else equal. Most troubling of all, we find that states with larger Black populations eased their social distancing policies more quickly, despite Black Americans’ higher exposure to infection from SARS-CoV-2 and subsequent death from COVID-19.

Can fieldwork still be done in today’s most violent warzones? We contend that long-held methodological principles about power and impartiality do not hold in today’s conflict-ridden environments. Research of this kind can still be pursued, but only if the scholar’s place is reconceived as one of limited power and unavoidable partiality. We argue that those still able to do fieldwork in sites of increasing danger do so by virtue of building their own ‘tribes,’ forming and joining different social micro-systems to collect data and, in some cases, survive. Field research must, therefore, be recognized as its own form of foreign intervention. In considering the future of political science research in the most challenging war-torn settings, we examine the risks and opportunities that accompany ‘tribal politics’ of this kind and underline the importance of reflecting on our own positionality in the process of knowledge production.

China's contemporary political economy is among the most exciting and demanding frontiers of research in comparative politics. The country's sheer size and internal diversity offer a natural laboratory for examining topics at multiple levels and units of analysis, and in varied regional environments. China's salience in the international media and business community also presents scholars with the added opportunity (and even responsibility) for clarifying popular misconceptions through original empirical research. An abundance of research possibilities is accompanied by a ready audience of nonacademic consumers.

Positing behavior as interest driven insufficiently explains why reform is difficult. This article draws on experiences with school reform to argue that ideas in the form of purposes play a part. Purposes, however, are erratic sources of motivation, sometimes generating intense commitments but often functioning in a mercurial manner. They operate in conjunction with the character and strength of supports. Purposes that are compatible in principle may nevertheless compete for time, resources, and especially attention. Because human beings are creatures of bounded rationality, any given purpose is susceptible to attention shift. Interpersonal and interorganizational networks can serve as counterweights by bolstering identity with the reform goal, providing cognitive reinforcement for it, and enhancing the credibility of a reform goal as achievable. In an assessment of the role of ideas, it is important to remember that they come in a variety of scopes and levels of abstractness. As forces in the politics of reform, ideas have a part shaped by context. The role of ideas in the local setting is quite different from their role in media-infused battles at the national level. Local arenas are frequently nonpartisan, with actors focused on immediate concerns, daily demands, and scarce resources. Because concrete actions may be more important than ideological posture, mass persuasion may be of less concern than enlistment of scattered cadres of task-specific activists.Clarence Stone is Research Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at George Washington and Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland ([email protected]). Marion Orr is Frederick Lippitt Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and Urban Studies, Brown University ([email protected]). Donn Worgs is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of Metropolitan Studies, Towson University (dworgs@ towson.edu). The authors wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for extraordinarily helpful comments.

Why did some Bolivian departments have more success containing COVID-19 than others? We argue that low government legitimacy hampers coordinated responses to national crises, particularly where political polarization is severe and the crisis response becomes politicized. Low legitimacy can intensify the challenges of poverty and poor infrastructure. An original dataset of daily observations on subnational coronavirus policy and cell phone mobility data, paired with administrative data on cases and deaths, suggests that political divisions influenced governors’ policy implementation and citizens’ compliance. In departments that opposed the president, policies were more likely to deviate from the stricter national policy while mobility and protest activity were high. In departments aligned with the president, local policy followed national policy and citizens complied with policy and quarantine restrictions for a longer period of time.

Browsing the book exhibit room at any major political science conference these days, one notices what seems to be a bonanza of new edited volumes that examine political psychology as a discipline within political science or provide a variety of research essays aimed at introducing the reader to the subfield. Although psychology has always been an important component of political analysis, the prevalence of these books suggests a growing, or renewed, interest among political scientists in using insights from social and cognitive psychology to understand political phenomena—an interest that spurs these scholarly attempts to demarcate the conceptual and methodological structure of political psychology as a subfield. As Wendy Rahn, John Sullivan, and Thomas Rudolph have noted, this interest has emerged over the years partly in response to the rise of rational choice theory in political science. Regardless of the specific topic at hand, political psychology research often challenges the assumptions of rational choice models and adds nuance to the insights of rational choice theory. It offers rigorous empirical demonstrations of how systematic and predictable psychological processes affect whether traditional assumptions of rationality do or do not hold and, conversely, how the structure of political institutions affects psychological processes. These empirical critiques and modifications of rational choice theory make political psychology a compelling line of inquiry to scholars from a variety of methodological and substantive backgrounds.Deborah J. Schildkraut thanks Jennifer Hochschild, the staff at Perspectives on Politics, and three anonymous reviewers for their generous assistance.

In the years following the attacks of 9/11, the CIA adopted a program involving the capture, extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists in the war on terror. As the details of this program have become public, a heated debate has ensued, focusing narrowly on whether or not this program “worked” by disrupting terror plots and saving American lives. By embracing such a narrow view of the program’s efficacy, this debate has failed to take into account the broader consequences of the CIA program. We move beyond current debates by evaluating the impact of the CIA program on the human rights practices of other states. We show that collaboration in the CIA program is associated with a worsening in the human rights practices of authoritarian countries. This finding illustrates how states learn from and influence one another through covert security cooperation and the importance of democratic institutions in mitigating the adverse consequences of the CIA program. This finding also underscores why a broad perspective is critical when assessing the consequences of counterterrorism policies.

Flint’s drinking water crisis has brought renewed⸺and needed⸺attention to the importance of safe drinking water in the United States. The Flint water crisis was the result of a confluence of factors operating at multiple scales in time and space. My aim is to draw out more explicitly the role of policy, and specifically rationalized policy, in incentivizing and allowing the mistakes and decisions that most proximately led to the Flint water crisis. I build on and extend existing analyses of the Flint water crisis, drawing on thirteen semi-structured interviews and publicly available reports, testimony, newspaper articles, and secondary data. My analysis brings to the fore the particular vulnerability to the marginalizing effects of rationalized policy and its implementation of poor and minority communities in the United States, and it reveals the stickiness and entrenchment of these rationalized policies. The response to the Flint water crisis, both in Michigan and nationally, has centered on renewed commitment to risk-based standards and rulemaking for safe drinking water protections, and maintains interventionist approaches to municipal financial distress. I discuss important alternatives that are emerging and indicate areas for future research on the politics of safe drinking water.

Commentary on contemporary American national politics is almost universally critical. Gridlock reigns: Politics is polarized, government is dysfunctional, and public policy is stalemated. Elected officials barely avoid one cliff only to find themselves on the brink of another. Credit downgrades, debt crises, national bankruptcy, climate catastrophe, and other forms of Armageddon loom. The system is broken.

The United States, and the world, is in the grips of a coronavirus pandemic, and in the United States, we are facing a crisis of faith in the fairness of our political institutions, particularly the ability of Black Americans to live without the fear of dying at the hands of the police for going about their daily lives. Race has been and continues to be intertwined with American government and politics, in general, and how the United States approaches crises, in particular. Racial minority groups have been scapegoats for the failings of American policy makers to deal with numerous crises historically and at present. Race and racism are also at the foundation of the origins of American political science. The racism at the roots of our discipline’s founding have created a blindness to the significance and importance of the field of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) to the study of politics, democracy, and how American society reacts during a crisis. Our discipline is also at an inflection point that requires us to acknowledge its racist origins, confront its continued influence on the present, and finally to move forward in recognizing the importance of REP to the health and future of the discipline.

The political science discipline has recently engaged in contentious debate about the value of “research transparency,” particularly for research with human participants. The discipline is also holding vital conversations about research ethics and is rekindling dialogue about different ways of knowing. We offer an integrated account of how the actions that scholars who conduct human participant research take to respect ethical principles (which vary by research substance and settings), and their epistemological commitments (which vary across researchers), influence openness, a broader concept than “transparency.” These principles and commitments shape scholars’ openness practices simultaneously—both independently and in concert—serving as a prism through which multiple features of a research project are refracted, and resulting in a scholar’s inclination and ability to pursue openness in different ways and to different degrees with the audiences of her work. We also show how ethical principles and epistemological commitments can not only constrain and prevent openness, but also animate and require it. We suggest that scholars pursuing openness ethically, and in ways that honor their epistemological commitments, represents good social science, and we offer strategies for doing so. To develop our argument, we focus primarily on two research methods, ethnography and interviews, and on openness toward two audiences, human participants and research communities. Our account illuminates how the heterogeneity of human participant research makes it inappropriate, indeed impossible, to develop blanket rules for pursuing openness. Throughout, we highlight the importance of reflexivity for the ethical conduct of, and for being ethically open about, political science research.

Many were taken aback by the initial spike in support for Black Lives Matter among white Americans during the summer of 2020. But will these antiracist attitudes translate into antiracist behavior? Accordingly, I ask under what conditions do white Americans engage in antiracist behavior? To answer this question, I build upon the insights of Martin Luther King, Jr., and A. Philip Randolph to theorize contemporary white antiracism. I argue that, under neoliberal capitalism, the conditions they laid out as necessary for the cultivation of productive antiracist politics have been difficult to satisfy. In lieu of that, in many instances, has been the privatization of racial responsibility, which I coin to describe a form of antiracist politics that relies upon white individuals’ sympathetic (and often symbolic) gestures rather than the implementation of more state programs to address structural racial injustices. I discuss what this development might mean for the Black Lives Matter movement—and the Black Freedom Struggle writ large—moving forward.

The Trayvon Martin tragedy, the optimistic spectacle of the election and inauguration of Barack Obama during late 2008 and early 2009, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina seemingly represent three very different events with little in common except the claim made by some that all were in some way related to racial politics in the US. Many would consider such a claim weak, noting each event's unique scale and relationship to the politics of race in the US. Yet I argue that that the events are in fact closely linked in fundamental ways that are important not only to political scientists, but, more importantly, to all who care about the health of democracy within the US. Each event demonstrates the massive racial cleavages within the US. Each event illustrates the nature of evolving racial order in the US. Each event illustrates the weaknesses and problems that confront contemporary black politics. And each event thus illuminates key questions that should motivate theoretical and empirical work on race and politics within political science. In this essay, I highlight the themes and processes that tie together these seemingly disparate events, some marked by hope, others by despair. I start by analyzing each event from the standpoint of the persistent, if evolving, racial divide in American public opinion. And I end by arguing that scholars of race and politics often have to adhere to the most rigorous scholarly standards while also fulfilling their duties as citizens.

The surprising election of Donald Trump to the presidency calls for a comprehensive assessment of what motivated voters to opt for a controversial political novice rather than a provocative but experienced political veteran. Our study provides a novel exploration of the Trump victory through the prism of the defeated candidate—Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC). Losing candidates’ perceptions are usually not subject to academic analyses. Nevertheless, these people often hold substantial sway in their parties and thus understanding their views on the loss is essential, especially as a party regroups after defeat. Using HRC’s memoir What Happened, we devise the Hillary Hypotheses, her rationale for her electoral defeat. Using the 2016 American National Election Study (ANES), we provide the first systematic test of a losing candidate’s rationale for their defeat. We show that more often than not, HRC’s assumptions are supported. However, we find little evidence to support HRC’s most crucial assertion, namely that the e-mail scandal and specifically James Comey’s intervention ten days before Election Day cost her the presidency. Our findings have implications for understanding why Donald Trump won, but more broadly the contribution explores an understudied aspect of elections—a defeated candidate’s impression of their loss.

In Left Turn: How Liberal Bias Distorts The American Mind, Tim Groseclose argues that media effects play a crucial role in American politics. His case rests on three arguments: (1) that journalists tend overwhelmingly to be liberal rather than conservative; (2) that their innate political bias slants their views in empirically measurable ways; and (3) that this bias fundamentally shapes American politics, by bringing US citizens further to the left than they would naturally be. According to Groseclose, in a world where media bias did not exist, American citizens would on average hold views close to those of Ben Stein or Bill O'Reilly. In such a world, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama by a popular vote margin of 56%—42% in the 2008 presidential election.

In making these claims, Groseclose draws on his own research, and on recent media scholarship by both political scientists and economists, making the broader claim that peer-reviewed social science—which seeks to deal with problems such as endogeneity and selection bias—should be the starting point for public arguments about the role of the media. His book, then, is clearly an effort to bring social scientific arguments into mainstream debates. Groseclose makes no secret of his conservative political leanings—but recent books from left-leaning political scientists such as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are equally unapologetic. It is at least plausible that political scientists' typical unwillingness to engage directly in political arguments has weakened the discipline's capacity for public engagement.

In this symposium a diverse group of contributors have been invited to engage with Groseclose's arguments in ways that bring together specific empirical and/or theoretical points and arguments aimed at the broader “political science public sphere” that Perspectives on Politics seeks to nurture. Contributors were asked to consider these five questions: (1): How do we best measure media effects? (2): If media bias exists, what are its plausible sources? (3): Can one use work on media effects to determine what people's views would be in the absence of such bias? (4): Do you agree that American politics is insufficiently representative, and if so what do you consider the primary sources of this problem? (5): What kinds of political and/or media institutions or practices might enhance democratic discourse?—Henry Farrell, Associate Editor

The last decade has seen a contentious dialogue between quantitative and qualitative scholars over the nature of political science methodology. Even so, there has often been a consensus that quantitative and qualitative research share a “unified logic of inference;” that the differences between these “traditions are only stylistic and are methodologically and substantively unimportant.” All of the books under review here share these convictions. Yet the most remarkable feature of these works taken as a whole —and the focus of this review essay—is the more capacious view of the scientific enterprise on display. John Gerring's Social Science Methodology, David Collier and Henry Brady's Rethinking Social Inquiry, and Charles Ragin's Fuzzy-Set Social Science all focus on aspects of the scientific process beyond the testing of hypotheses—science being “a systematic, rigorous, evidence-based, generalizing, nonsubjective, and cumulative” way of discovering the truth about the world (Gerring, p. xv). If science is the systematic gathering of knowledge, testing hypotheses—the central concern of statistical inference—is an important part of this. But it is only one part. Before we can turn to testing hypotheses, we must be clear about concepts, theories, and cases. And here both Barbara Geddes's Paradigms and Sand Castles and the Elmans' Bridges and Boundaries complement the other works by attending closely to these issues even when the larger goal remains the testing of theory.George Thomas is assistant professor of political science at Williams College ([email protected]). The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Politics, Mark Blyth, Brian Taylor, and, especially, Craig Thomas for helpful comments.

We investigate how the outbreak of epidemics can affect host governments’ targeting of refugees and violation of their physical integrity rights. We argue that governments target repression against refugees for two reasons. First, refugees are easily scapegoated for the arrival of epidemics at a time when governments are looking to shift the blame for their own poor performance. Second, crises provide circumstances for governments to engage in opportunistic repression to further their goal of coercing existing refugees to depart and deterring new refugees from arriving. Drawing upon a global dataset of countries for the years 1996 to 2015, we demonstrate that epidemic outbreaks do indeed increase the likelihood and scale of government repression targeting refugee populations. These effects are especially pronounced in countries with higher proportions of refugees hosted and in less democratic countries. Identification of this potential for government repression of refugees during epidemics is important in light of the grave scale of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest the international community should be vigilant for signs of governments’ mistreatment of vulnerable refugee populations to shift focus away from their own poor handling of crises such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and opportunistically advance their goal of reducing the numbers of refugees hosted locally.

Many explanations of the 2016 election result, a seemingly anomalous macrolevel phenomenon, have centered on two seemingly anomalous microlevel phenomena: many counties and citizens who had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 flipped and voted for Trump, and low-education whites gave more of their votes to Trump than to Clinton. In this article, I first assess the novelty of these phenomena by placing them in the context of past elections. Compared to past presidential elections, the number of flips in 2016 was not unusually large, even in the Midwestern states. In contrast, the partisan divide by education was the highest ever in 2016. Using a series of counterfactual analyses, I then assess whether these factors were pivotal. If the flipping counties had not flipped, Clinton would have won the electoral college by 3 votes, and if the lowest-educated 20% of counties voted as they did in 2012, she would have won the electoral college by about 30 votes.

Political scientists have contributed to the world of electoral systems as scientists and as engineers. Taking stock of recent scientific research, we show that context modifies the effects of electoral rules on political outcomes in specific and systematic ways. We explore how electoral rules shape the inclusion of women and minorities, the depth and nature of political competition, and patterns of redistribution and regulation, and we consider institutional innovations that could promote political equality. Finally, we describe the diverse ways that political scientists produce an impact on the world by sharing and applying their knowledge of the consequences of electoral rules and global trends in reform.