In this article, we assess the availability of reproduction archives in political science. By “reproduction archive,” we mean the data and code supporting quantitative research articles that allows others to reproduce the computations described in the published article. We collect a random sample of quantitative research articles published in political science from 1995 to 2022. We find that—even in 2022—most quantitative research articles do not point to a reproduction archive. However, practices are improving. In 2014, when the DA-RT symposium was published in PS: Political Science and Politics, about 12% of quantitative research articles point to the data and code. Eight years later, in 2022, that has increased to 31%. This underscores a massive shift in norms, requirements, and infrastructure. Still, only a minority of articles share the supporting data and code. In 2014, Lupia and Alter wrote, “Today, information on the data production and analytic decisions that underlie many published works in political science is unavailable.” They could write the same today; much work remains to be done.

Taiwan’s achievement in passing a marriage-equality law in 2019 and the democratic backlash against LGBTQ+ rights deserve scholarly attention in Asia and beyond. Specifically, Taiwan’s road to marriage equality led to these empirical puzzles: What explains the conservative shift in Taiwan’s public perceptions toward LGBTQ+ rights? How would the backlash against LGBTQ+ rights impact Taiwan’s democracy? What does Taiwan’s experience inform us about norm localization and LGBTQ+ politics in Asia and beyond?

The strategic framing of the Christian right—that is, the symbolic use of family and its localization of conservative values using Confucian norms—enabled them to couch their religious beliefs and facilitate collective action among different groups. This study offers a culture-based explanation of how the Christian right successfully established a single-issue coalition against LGBTQ+ rights. The article is organized as follows. First, it engages current literature on discourse analysis, norms contestation, and contentious politics. Second, the study proposes a two-part framework for understanding how the Christian right effectively constructs their conservative claims to gain public support. A comparative analysis of the discourse from the conservative and progressive sides sheds light on how their narratives shaped the marriage-equality debate. Third, it addresses how this countermovement impacts Taiwan’s democracy and human rights.

Artificial intelligence in higher education has expanded worldwide with the growth of AI technologies. The emergent applications of artificial intelligence in higher education (AIEd) in course preparation, delivery, and administration as well as in learning assistants and prediction for the sake of learners are widely considered important innovations that can change education worldwide. The Armenian case was examined via a survey that was conducted at the country’s leading universities to investigate whether and how faculty use AIEd. Although the results indicate that many Armenian teaching faculty use AIEd in narrow capacities and acknowledge the potential usefulness of AIEd in the practical administration of Armenia’s higher education, the use of AIEd is not deep.

Conducting elite interviews presents well-documented challenges, often linked to dynamics that are influenced by researchers’ status. This aspect of positionality is sometimes characterized as “insider” or “outsider” status, but scholars have noted the lack of nuance in this rigid binary. Drawing on experiences during interviews with policy elites—primarily in England—this article describes the author’s “in-betweener” status and reviews four methodological considerations from this perspective, highlighting the challenges and opportunities associated with different points on the insider–outsider spectrum. These observations are meant to stimulate reflexivity among researchers regardless of their status.

Former president Trump has maintained broad support despite falsely contending that he was the victim of electoral fraud, also known as the “big lie.” We consider both the antecedents of this phenomenon and its consequences. We propose that Trump supporters’ already established deep personal alignment—identity fusion—with their leader predisposed them to believe the lie. Accepting it then set the foundation for other identity-protecting beliefs and attitudes. Using a three-wave panel of Trump supporters, we found that the more fused they were before the 2020 election, the stronger their belief in the big lie grew between 2021 and 2024. Accepting the big lie helped solidify fusion with Trump and had consequences for related attitudes. Belief in the big lie predicted downplaying the criminal charges against Trump and supporting his antidemocratic policy agenda. Fueled by and fueling further fusion, belief in the big lie is a primary component of a larger narrative that emboldens Trump and justifies antidemocratic behavior.

Populism is both prolific and resilient. By now, populist forces around the globe have managed to enter the highest echelons of power (Rovira Kaltwasser and Taggart 2016). It is no wonder that the contemporary academic debate has shifted its focus to exploring the consequences of populism in power, particularly its impact on democracy. Although populism and democracy are not synonymous, the representation of “the people” is a central claim to both. Most populism scholars agree that “all forms of populism without exception involve some kind of exaltation of and appeal to ‘the people’” (Canovan 1981, 94). However, depending on which democratic ideas are emphasized over others—as well as which political practices and structures are favored to institutionalize these ideas (Dahl 1991; Held 2006; Lijphart 2012)—the basic tenet of the “rule by the people” may have many different meanings.

Is political science research that explores gender and LGBTQIA+ politics still underrepresented in the discipline’s top journals? This article examines publication trends in gender research and LGBTQIA+ research in five top political science journals, between 2017 and 2023 (inclusive). I find that gender research and LGBTQIA+ research together account for 5% to 7% of published research in the selected top journals; however, most of this research is on gender politics rather than LGBTQIA+ politics. Overall, gender research and LGBTQIA+ research largely appears in top journals when it conforms to disciplinary norms about methods and author gender. The majority of published gender and LGBTQIA+ research is quantitative. Men author gender research at rates almost three times their membership in the American Political Science Association’s Women, Gender, and Politics research section and also are overrepresented as authors of LGBTQIA+ research. This study suggests that editorial teams’ signaling influences which manuscripts land at which journals.

When the impact of populism on liberal democracy is examined, the focus often is on populists in power. After all, when in office, populists have the possibility to change legislation, thereby negatively affecting individual freedoms and rights, and to transform the political system, often toward democratic decline and illiberalism (Pappas 2019; Ruth-Lovell and Grahn 2023).1 Far less attention has been devoted to populist parties in opposition, even though this is the position in which populists find themselves most frequently.2 Prominent examples of Western European populist parties with a decades-long position in opposition include the Rassemblement National in France and the Vlaams Belang in Belgium on the right and Die Linke in Germany and the Socialistische Partij in the Netherlands on the left. Outside of Western Europe, populist parties often have less longevity and more frequently assume office. However, many of these parties spend years in opposition before taking on government responsibility and/or have returned to the opposition benches afterwards (e.g., Partido Justicialista in Argentina and Prawo i Sprawiedliwość in Poland).

The connection between populism and democracy is widely researched. Most of the literature focuses on populist actors (e.g., parties, leaders, and governments) as it examines the intricacies of this relationship. Some of the resulting takeaways have become embedded firmly in scholarship and are currently considered accepted knowledge across the discipline. Scholars have only recently started focusing on the individual-level relationship between populism and democracy. As a result, our knowledge remains limited and is often based on the assumption that what holds for populist actors also will hold for populist citizens. The first part of this article briefly reviews the state of the art on the individual-level relationship between populism and democracy. Drawing from this review, we identify several theoretical and empirical gaps and limitations in the literature that future research should address. We conclude that contemporary scholarship has made important contributions, but more nuanced and targeted research is necessary to comprehensively understand the intricacies between populism and democracy on the individual level.

How can political science scholars use visualization and mapping tools to refine the development of research on complex theoretical concepts? Literature mapping, a powerful method commonly used in the natural sciences to visualize scientific landscapes, is not yet widely used in political science. This study illustrates the capabilities of this method by analyzing visual maps of academic research on the term “organizing” in the context of political action. We describe our multistep methodological approach for generating the maps and demonstrate how they can be analyzed to produce insights about themes, potential gaps, canonical literature, and levels of dialogue across research areas. We conclude by outlining future research possibilities generated by this study’s literature mapping approach.

What should we do about populism? In recent years, this question has become more urgent as populist leaders and parties have taken center stage in many countries across the globe. No longer a “minor” political phenomenon, populism has forced scholars to grapple with how to address its potential “threat” to “liberal democracy while also harnessing its “corrective” properties (Rovira Kaltwasser 2012). In this debate, the two questions of who “we” are—that is, who should respond—and how to do it often have taken different forms.

Although much research confirms a gender gap in political science and its subfields internationally, only recently have scholars analyzed country-specific conditions for women within the field. Our study contributes to this national-level examination of gender diversity and inclusion by examining the extent to which a gender gap within the subfield of security studies, identified in the international literature, also is present in Canada. Research on gender representation and gendered experiences mostly centers on the academic workforce in the United States. However, in this article, we share the results of a multi-method investigation into the state of gender diversity in Canadian security studies—a national context in which the university sector has signaled a strong commitment to diversity and the government has actively promoted gender equality in official policy. By analyzing data collected from an online survey of security studies scholars in Canada and a document analysis of Canadian security-related journals and selected security studies syllabi, this contribution provides evidence that women are underrepresented in Canadian security studies and experience the subfield in less positive ways. We discuss the implications of these findings for the security studies subfield and suggest paths for future research and key recommendations.