Has the pandemic exacerbated gender inequality in academia? We provide real- time evidence by analyzing 1.8 million tweets from approximately 3,000 political scientists, leveraging their use of social media for career advancement. Using automated text analysis and difference-in-differences estimation, we find that although faculty members of both genders were affected by the pandemic, the shift to remote work caused women to tweet less often than their male colleagues about professional accomplishments. We argue that these effects are driven by the increased familial obligations placed on women, as demonstrated by the increase in family-related tweets and the more pronounced effects among junior academics. Our evidence demonstrating the gendered shift in professional visibility during the pandemic provides the opportunity for proactive efforts to address disparities that otherwise may take years to manifest.

In many political science journals, fewer than half of the invitations sent to potential reviewers are accepted. These low acceptance rates increase workloads for editors and lengthen the review process for authors. This article reports analyses of reviewer invitation acceptance at the Canadian Journal of Political Science between 2017 and 2020. We first describe predictors of invitation acceptance using a coded dataset of almost 1,500 invitations. We find that reviewers who are personally familiar to editors, located in the same country as the journal, and more junior scholars were more likely to accept invitations. We then report the results of an experiment that tested the effect of three letters on invitation acceptance. We find that a short personal note from the editor to accompany the auto-generated system message may increase reviewer acceptance rates but highlighting the journal’s prestige or reviewer recognition does not. We conclude by discussing the practical implications of our findings for editorial-team design and the editorial process.

Academic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describe five contributors that swell noun phrases: piled modifiers, needless words, nebulous nouns, missing prepositions, and buried verbs. We document more than a thousand examples and demonstrate how to revise each one with principles of style. We also draw on research in cognitive science to explain why these constructions confuse, mislead, and distract readers.

Political science research aims for greater transparency. Authors are increasingly expected to share their data and methodology so that readers and reviewers can follow their line of argument and replicate their findings. However, citations of books, articles, and other secondary sources in the discipline are still predominantly general, referring to entire works rather than specific parts of them. This article addresses the problem of the overuse of general citations as a disciplinary norm in political science. An analysis of articles published in five top-tier journals in 2019 reveals that only around 10% of the citations in these articles provide detailed source information (e.g., page numbers and location information) and identifies some of the causes for this scarcity. The article calls for more transparent citation norms in the discipline, suggests preliminary steps toward this goal, and proposes solutions for the challenges posed by the increasing use of digital sources.

A fair peer-review process is essential for the integrity of a discipline’s scholarly standards. However, underrepresentation of scholarly groups casts doubt on fairness, which currently is raising concerns about a gender bias in the peer-review process of premier scholarly journals such as the American Political Science Review (APSR). This study examines gender differences in APSR reviewing during the period 2007–2020. Our explorative analysis suggests that male reviewers privilege male authors and female reviewers privilege female authors, whereas manuscripts reviewed by both male and female reviewers indicate less gender bias. Using within-manuscript variation to address confounding effects, we then show that manuscripts reviewed by both male and female reviewers receive a more positive evaluation by female reviewers in terms of recommendation and sentiment, but they experience a marginally longer duration. Because these effects are not specific for type of authorship, we recommend that invitations to review should reflect mixed compositions of peers, which also may avoid overburdening an underrepresented group with review workload.

This article assesses whether a gender gap in political science, identified in the international literature, also is present in the context of Italian political science. The literature has mostly centered on the comparison of female publication rates in international journals with the academic workforce in the United States, but this raises an issue of data comparability. As an alternative strategy to avoid comparability biases, this study focuses on the analysis of a single national case: Italy. The article evaluates to what extent the “glass-ceiling” effect persists for political scientists who intend to publish their contributions. By analyzing data on articles published between 2015 and 2020 by the three major Italian political science journals, this contribution shows that (1) the proportion of published articles written by female authors is lower than that of male authors; (2) the hypothesis that the lower female proportion depends on a lower female presence in the field of political science is refuted; (3) there is little collaboration between men and women; (4) there is a correlation between the presence of female editors in scientific journals and the proportion of female-authored articles; and (5) gender differences are reflected in women’s academic career progression.

In recent years, scholars, journals, and professional organizations in political science have been working to improve research transparency. Although better transparency is a laudable goal, the implementation of standards for reproducibility still leaves much to be desired. This article identifies two practices that political science should adopt to improve research transparency: (1) journals must provide detailed replication guidance and run provided material; and (2) authors must begin their work with replication in mind. We focus on problems that occur when scholars provide research materials to journals for replication, and we outline best practices regarding documentation and code structure for researchers to use.

This article summarizes research on the profession of community college faculty generally and data gathered from a survey of political science faculty teaching at community colleges nationwide conducted in 2018. The purpose of the article is to educate the discipline about what life is like for faculty at two-year schools and specifically how political science faculty at these schools perceive their role.

This article uses data from a 2018 survey conducted by the American Political Science Association Committee on the Status of Community Colleges in the Profession to make specific policy recommendations for how to better reach out to and incorporate political science faculty teaching at community colleges into the association.

Most research on diversity within political methodology focuses on gender while overlooking racial and ethnic gaps. Our study investigates how race/ethnicity and gender relate to political science PhD students’ methodological self-efficacy, as well as their general academic self-efficacy. By analyzing a survey of 300 students from the top 50 US-based political science PhD programs, we find that race and ethnicity correlate with quantitative self-efficacy: students identifying as Black/African American and as Middle Eastern/North African express lower confidence in their abilities than white students. These gaps persist after accounting for heterogeneity among PhD programs, professional and socioeconomic status, and preferred methodological approach. However, small bivariate gender gaps disappear in multivariate analysis. Furthermore, gaps in quantitative self-efficacy may explain racial/ethnic disparities in students’ broader academic self-efficacy. We argue that the documented patterns likely lead to continued underrepresentation of marginalized groups in the political methodology student body and professoriate.

Building on the concept of a one-minute paper, I suggest students’ takeaways as a simple technique for inclusive assessment of participation in a classroom. Acknowledging cultural and language barriers, the takeaways technique allows an instructor to grade participation not by observing the frequency of spoken comments but instead by the quality of written comments in students’ one-point takeaway memos completed at the end of each class. In this way, all students have an equal chance to be appraised for their participation, indicated by being attentive in class. This article surveys the scholarship on one-minute papers and participation grading in political science, outlines takeaway procedures, and discusses how to adjust this technique for face-to-face and online learning environments. I suggest that takeaways ensure transparency in grading participation, enable equal opportunities to participate, encourage students’ attentiveness, and create a communication channel for the exchange of immediate feedback between a professor and students.

In US government courses, simulations have been shown to increase students’ engagement and knowledge retention. We present an original simulation that focuses on both the interactions between political institutions that contribute to policy making and the normative ideas underlying politics. By exploring a civil rights or liberties policy area, students learn about the importance of both political institutions and foundational political ideas such as liberty and equality. Students role-play members of Congress, lobbyists for a pro- or anti-natural gas pipeline group, and Supreme Court justices. Although the goal of simulations in many US government courses is to teach students about the ways that institutions shape policy, this is the first (to our knowledge) that also integrates normative reflection on the ideas behind political arguments. Assessment indicates that the simulation was effective in increasing students’ knowledge of and/or interest in American political institutions and eminent domain.

Increased computing capacity and the spread of computational knowledge has generated the expectation that organizations and municipalities use large quantities of data to drive decision making. However, municipalities may lack the resources to meaningfully use their data for decision making. Relatedly, political science and public administration programs face the challenge of training students for success in this environment. We believe one remedy is the adoption of coproduction as a pedagogical strategy. This article presents a case study of a partnership between a university research team and a municipal emergency communications center as a demonstration of how coproduction can be harnessed as a teaching tool. Findings from this project were presented at the Southern Political Science Association Annual Meeting, January 8–11, 2020, in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a global effect on higher education. Overnight, entire degree programs had to be moved online. Whereas this meant that teaching and learning in political science and international relations also went into “emergency e-learning” mode, as a recent teacher spotlight in PS: Political Science & Politics termed it, moving online also offered opportunities. One opportunity is collaborative online international learning (COIL) that enables students from universities in different countries to work on a common project. This article argues that working together collaboratively online not only mitigates the pandemic’s physical restrictions and sustains a global space of learning; it also provides for a particular active and affective learning in an intercultural virtual environment that substantiates classroom experiences even in post-pandemic higher education. To support this argument, this article reflects on the experiences of a British–Japanese COIL project that investigated political responses to COVID-19.

This article introduces how to teach an interactive, one-semester-long statistics and programming class. The setting also can be applied to shorter and longer classes as well as introductory and advanced courses. I propose a project-based seminar that also encompasses elements of an inverted classroom. As a result of this combination, the seminar supports students’ learning progress and also creates engaging virtual classes. To demonstrate how to apply a project-based seminar setting to teaching statistics and programming classes, I use an introductory class to data wrangling and management with the statistical software program R. Students are guided through a typical data science workflow that requires data management and data wrangling and concludes with visualizing and presenting first research results during a simulated mini-conference.

Active learning is an important component of political science instruction in which instructors use innovative active-learning techniques across the subfields. These methods are crucially important in methods courses, which contain some of the most difficult and important topics for the discipline, making it optimal for conveying challenging concepts using active-learning approaches. This article describes an active-learning exercise to engage students with operationalization, research design, data collection, and analysis. Students develop an observational study for a “fast” food delivery service. They operationalize the dependent variable—“fast delivery”—and determine which independent variables will impact delivery speed. Students collect data when the instructor orders food and has it delivered to the classroom. This exercise moves away from abstract concepts found in political science journals and makes research design more concrete, relatable, and engaging.