The public health crisis of COVID-19 has compounded preexisting crises of democratic stability and effective governance, spurring debate about the ability of developed democracies to respond effectively to emergencies confronting their citizens. These crises, much discussed in recent political science, are joined by a further crisis which complicates and reinforces them: A migration crisis. Widespread travel and immigration restrictions instigated the largest and fastest decline in global human mobility in modern history, and COVID-19 may fundamentally change immigration over the longer term.

The migration crisis heightens three crucial and preexisting concerns within immigration policy: the role of visa design; the status of undocumented migrants and other migrants without recourse to public funds; and the interaction of immigration and the labor market policy. It could reinforce a rising tide of nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment, protectionist sentiment within labor-market policy debates, and a K-shaped recovery in migration patterns.

Campaigns, parties, interest groups, pollsters, and political scientists rely on voter-registration lists and consumer files to identify people as targets for registration drives, persuasion, and mobilization and to be included in sampling frames for surveys. We introduce a new category of Americans: the politically invisible—that is, people who are unreachable using these voter and marketing lists. Matching a high-quality, random sample of the US population to multiple lists reveals that at least 11% of the adult citizenry is unlisted. An additional 12% is mislisted (i.e., not living at their recorded address). These groups are invisible to list-based campaigns and research, making them difficult or impossible to contact. Two in five Blacks and (citizen) Hispanics are unreachable, but only 18% of whites. The unreachable are poorer than the reachable population, have markedly lower levels of political engagement, and are much less likely to report contact with candidates and campaigns. They are heavily Democratic in party identification and vote intention, favoring Obama versus Romney 73 to 27, with only 16% identifying as Republicans. That the politically invisible are more liberal and from historically marginalized groups shows that the turn to list-based campaigning and research could worsen existing biases in the political system.

In 2017, the American Political Science Association (APSA) Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession launched an initiative to lower the cost of Division (i.e., organized section) membership for students to promote graduate students’ professional development and to advance Division interests. This article assesses the effect of this intervention on Division membership. Using APSA membership data, we find that almost two thirds of Divisions that charged fees in 2017 reduced or eliminated student fees between 2017 and 2019, nearly halving the average student dues (i.e., from $11.57 in 2017 to $5.84 in 2019). As a result, average student membership increased by more than 300% in Divisions that reduced fees (i.e., from 79.5 in 2017 to 248.7 in 2019), compared to a marginal 30% increase in those that did not reduce fees. These outcomes of the initiative support additional efforts to reduce the costs of APSA participation for graduate students.

The snowball sampling method (SSM) is one of the most widely used methods to collect information about hard-to-reach populations and in low-information contexts. This article argues that SSM can be enhanced by the use of Facebook in at least three ways. This social-networking site helps to address some of the inherent limitations of SSM by learning about local contexts and identifying principal political actors, by gathering background information about and establishing contact with them, and by triangulating information they provide and reaching out to additional key informants. Thus, this article shows how Facebook can provide leverage in overcoming the problem of biased samples and offers concrete empirical illustrations from research on local politics in Latin American countries.

Considerable work assesses research productivity in political science. Yet, the latter work has not explicated how research careers can differ across time and individuals and neither has it considered such careers in teaching institutions. This article presents an empirically validated typology for research career paths for political scientists who began their career in a teaching institution. The typology demonstrates that many scholars follow paths different from the most conventional expectations, and research “success” by measures of publications and citations is associated with only some of those paths. Thus, existing research on aggregate publications and citations likely addresses only a subset of the career paths described here. Understanding research activities in our profession requires accounting for various career paths, their motivations, and their place in our research community.

This article explores the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the productivity of male and female academics and whether the ongoing health crisis will exacerbate further the existing gender gap in academia in both the short and long terms. We present early evidence of the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on women’s research productivity using online survey data supplemented by interview data with regional and international female political scientists. The interviews and survey findings reveal gender disparities in perceived research productivity and service workloads during the pandemic. The results also shed initial light on the pandemic’s impact on the research productivity of academics who are parents, especially among women.