A pessimistic view of the potential of deliberative mini-publics to effectively contribute to democratic decision making on highly contested issues in deeply divided places asserts that (1) deliberative quality would be low due to the bitterness prompted by discussion of divisive issues, and (2) levels of opinion change would be low given the stubbornly enduring nature of political attitudes in divided places. We empirically examined this pessimistic view using a quasi-experiment involving mini-publics on two separate issues in Northern Ireland: (1) the contentious ethno-national question of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status, and (2) the much less contested and non-ethno-national issue of social care. Contrary to the pessimistic view, we find evidence that from the perspective of the participants themselves, deliberative quality was higher in the mini-public on an ethno-national issue. However, in line with the pessimistic view, levels of self-reported opinion change were significantly lower in the ethno-national mini-public. Overall, the findings highlight the potential for carefully designed deliberative mini-publics to address divisive ethno-national issues: they provide a space for participants to engage with such issues in open and respectful discussion—even if the prospects for attitudinal change are more limited.

Do people’s political beliefs alter the emphasis they place on different symbols when constructing their “personal” national identity (Cohen 1996)? Does the content of their national identity affect how they vote? These are the central questions we address in this article, focusing on England but using the United States as a comparative case to demonstrate common dynamics.

Although my evidence is anecdotal and impressionistic, my sense is that political science teaching, research, and careers are less likely to involve UK politics and the Special Relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.

The 2016 referendum on UK membership in the European Union (EU) led to a realignment of voters along their referendum position (Fieldhouse et al. 2021; Sobolewska and Ford 2020). By December 2019, both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party received approximately 80% of their support from voters who had been on “their” side during the referendum (Fieldhouse et al. 2021). Brexit identities were akin to partisanship, with affective polarization and perceptual screening (Sobolewska and Ford 2020; Sorace and Hobolt 2021). Research also traces the Brexit vote to a growing values divide (Evans and Menon 2017), with ethnocentric attitudes found on opposing sides of the referendum (Sobolewska and Ford 2020). The views of ethnic minority voters, as traditional victims of white ethnocentrism, have been seen largely in this debate as the same as the identity of liberal Remainers. However, despite the assumption that minorities naturally would fall on the side opposing white ethnocentrism, the referendum marked the biggest departure from the traditional ethnic minorities bloc vote since 2005, when a substantial minority of Muslim voters deserted Labour over the Iraq War (Curtice, Fisher, and Steed 2005). The Leave side in the 2016 referendum received approximately one third of the votes of ethnic minorities (Martin, Sobolewska, and Begum 2020), despite Leave also drawing a majority of its support from “UKIP-curious” voters (Evans and Mellon 2019) who had voted for or considered supporting the anti-immigrant radical-right United Kingdom Independence Party.

Rhetoric surrounding the United Kingdom’s 2016 referendum on continued European Union (EU) membership frequently has invoked the “will of the people.” Addressing the House of Commons in March 2019, then–Prime Minster Theresa May stated that “my sense of responsibility and duty has meant that I have kept working to ensure that we deliver on the result and the will of the people” (March 27, 2019).1 May’s successor, Boris Johnson, appealed to the same notion when suggesting in the Daily Telegraph (September 15, 2019) that opposition parties were “united in wanting to cancel the referendum result…and overturn the will of the people.” On the other side of the debate, Caroline Lucas (currently the sole Member of Parliament for the UK’s Green Party) stated that “[e]very recent opinion poll shows that the will of the people has changed since [the referendum]” (December 4, 2018).

The decision by a narrow majority of British voters to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016 was a political earthquake that few had seen coming. It produced new political divisions, not only between the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe but also within the United Kingdom. In particular, the referendum campaign and the outcome generated two new political identities: “Leavers” and “Remainers.” These Brexit identities crosscut partisan identities and voters formed deep emotional attachments to them (Curtice 2018; Evans and Schaffner 2019). Moreover, this Brexit divide led to affective polarization in the form of out-group animosity and discrimination (Hobolt, Leeper, and Tilley 2021). It also shaped perceptions of the economy (Sorace and Hobolt 2021), attitudes toward immigration (Pickup et al. 2021), vote choices (Hobolt and Rodon 2020), and losers’ consent (Schaffner 2021; Tilley and Hobolt 2023a). Brexit identities have been shown to be salient and politically consequential. Yet, we know much less about whether these new identities are rooted in policy norms that go beyond preferences about the desirability of leaving the EU. In this article, we thus explore the nature of Brexit identities and how they relate to policy norms.

The 2019 UK General Election had seismic consequences for British politics. After three years of political turmoil following the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU), the 2019 election marked a victory for the Leave side of the Brexit debate, putting to rest questions of a second referendum and any chance of Parliament blocking the Withdrawal Bill. The United Kingdom left the EU on January 31, 2020. Although there were clear consequences for Britain’s EU membership, there is debate about whether 2019 was a “Brexit election” (Prosser 2020)—even a critical election (Green 2021)—or the continuation of long-term realignments in British politics (Cutts et al. 2020; Jennings and Stoker 2017). By most accounts, Brexit dominated the 2019 election as a political issue, but whether this represents a key moment in a process of realignment of voters in Britain remains to be seen.

In post-Brexit and post-devolution Britain, relationships among the four nations appear fragile. This article aims to discover where British citizens draw the symbolic boundaries that define in-group and out-group members between nations—in particular, England, Scotland, and Wales—and within England. Within England, we also examine class divides and the North–South divide. We operationalize symbolic boundaries through a set of new innovative measures administered in an online survey in 2019. Questions ascertain agreement that the various groups “share my values,” are “people I could get on with,” and are “straightforward and honest.” Results of our descriptive analysis suggest that boundaries are blurred between the British and the Welsh but sharper for the Scottish. We also find sharp but asymmetrical boundaries within England, between the working class and the middle class, and between Northerners and Southerners. Regional differences in perceptions of Southerners map closely onto those of how well Westminster looks after regional interests, which suggests that power imbalances reduce social cohesion.

This article discusses the integration of research methods training into a third-year elective undergraduate course. We suggest that the building blocks of research design can be embedded in courses without compromising their content. This introduces research methods to students who have no prior methods training or gives students with methods training more opportunities to engage in research design. We present evidence that this approach increased students’ self-assessed knowledge of and confidence with research-related skills, especially among those without prior methods training. Additionally, the analysis of research proposals—the final assignment of the course—revealed that most students were able to apply core research design skills. These findings demonstrate that progress in research methods skills is possible across the curriculum.

Politicians invest a lot of energy into managing their image, with the hope that the public views them favorably. In sharing details about themselves, elected officials want to be seen as people, not just as politicians. Are these efforts successful? I explore this question using an experiment inspired by a column in the celebrity entertainment magazine Us Weekly. I find that politicians who share nonpolitical autobiographical details about themselves secure warmer evaluations from the public. Reading this type of personalizing information also can contribute to ratings of elected officials that are less polarized by partisanship. While personalizing information boosts favorability toward politicians across party lines, members of the opposing party are particularly likely to report warmer affect toward the politician about whom they read. This suggests that this type of soft news coverage has the potential to depolarize partisan evaluations of politicians.

Meta-analyses are used to synthesize a body of literature to produce a single summary estimate as well as to explain differences among studies. The field of political science has slowly gained an appreciation for their use in recent years; however, using meta-analyses in dissertations remains rare. This is puzzling, given the tool’s ability to map a topic, to highlight potential gaps for future research to address, and its long-lasting utility for researchers in future projects. We argue that for these and several other reasons, graduate students should consider including a meta-analysis in their dissertation. This article discusses these advantages in detail and offers advice on how to conduct a meta-analysis based on several interviews and applied examples. We also address potential challenges when using this research design in a dissertation.

Student involvement in faculty research is on the rise because it serves at least three sets of interests: (1) students’ desire to build their résumés and develop close relationships with faculty members; (2) faculty members’ hope of getting research support from bright, attentive assistants; and (3) universities’ wish to publicize these opportunities to incoming student and faculty cohorts. At times, faculty members may come to see their undergraduate researchers as a source of inexpensive but high-quality labor, forgetting that they are students who are at the university to learn critical skills. In this article, I make the case for a student-centered approach to the undergraduate research experience (URE), which combines a traditional apprenticeship with a curriculum in the “what,” “why,” and “how” of research and expands the program over multiple semesters, supporting a team of student apprentices. I argue that this approach meets more of students’ goals while also supporting faculty and university interests. I describe the multi-semester URE that I have developed and provide tools to faculty members who want to adapt this program to their home institution.

Representation of women in the field of legislative politics is remarkably small and the absence of women has wide-ranging ramifications. In Fall 2019, we surveyed 361 women that we identified as studying legislative politics within political science to understand why women’s representation in legislative studies is so low and what we can do about it. We found that many women study legislatures, but they do not always identify as scholars of legislative studies, often do not join the Legislative Studies Section, and tend to prioritize other journals over Legislative Studies Quarterly, the official journal of the section. In this article, we discuss several solutions to the problem of women’s underrepresentation in legislative studies, including the new Women in Legislative Studies initiative.

Data Laboratories (Data Labs)—by which we mean a collaborative, group-based research program that can be conducted inside and/or outside of the classroom and is designed to generate observational datasets—have numerous advantages for undergraduate learning and scholarly research. Undergraduate researchers in Data Labs learn about the actual process of collecting and constructing research-quality data—a skillset that is relevant for both academic and workplace opportunities but otherwise under-covered in most undergraduate political science degrees. This article discusses our experiences in founding and running Data Labs, general guidelines for effective lab structure, positive impacts on undergraduate learning and research output, and challenges to consider.

Political scientists rely on complex software to conduct research, and much of the software they use is written and distributed for free by other researchers. This article contends that creating and maintaining these public goods is costly for individual software developers but that it is not adequately incentivized by the academic community. We demonstrate that statistical software is used widely but rarely cited in political science, and we highlight a partial solution to this problem: software bibliographies. To facilitate their creation, we introduce softbib, an R package that scans analysis scripts, detects the software used in those scripts, and automatically creates bibliographies. We hope that recognizing the contribution of software developers to science will encourage more scholars to create public goods, which could yield important downstream benefits.

This study examines undergraduate research experiences at a minority-serving institution (MSI) in a political science laboratory. Students contributed to projects in a collaborative research lab at the University of California Riverside that involves undergraduate and graduate students in projects related to health and politics. Adopting a participatory approach to research, the study’s research participants also are coauthors who co-created the research protocols; collected the data; transcribed, coded, and analyzed the data; and wrote up the findings. Our analysis of 12 in-depth interviews with current and former undergraduate research assistants (RAs) found that their work in the lab challenged their perceptions of what research is and what it means to do research; shaped their path to pursue graduate studies; developed their social and professional skills; and offered an inclusive and humanizing experience with graduate students and faculty members. Challenges that the RAs mentioned included time management, bureaucratic accounting and payroll procedures, and feelings of self-doubt; the lab’s culture of inclusion and independence mitigated some of these challenges. Our findings align with the scholarly literature that suggests collaborative research opportunities can have beneficial outcomes, particularly for students from groups that are underrepresented in doctoral programs.

This case study reviews a social movement course that centered on a 10-week simulation of a contemporary contentious event in Washington, DC, involving six movement organizations and four police agencies. To our knowledge, it is the first classroom simulation of a Trump-era police–protester contentious episode or of any political science simulation that places an episode of insurrection in the contemporary United States. Three goals animated this project: (1) promote learning concerning extra-institutional political conflict in the American case; (2) combine scholarship and role playing to explore the dynamic interaction of movement, countermovement, and enforcement organizations; and (3) teach the complex relationship between social science theory and political practice in an engaging way. Students used theoretical frameworks drawn from the literature to assess and develop protest capacity and repertoires for their assigned organization and chose strategic goals and tactical means to attempt to generate political leverage. Student organizations made concurrent “moves” and instructors iteratively developed the contentious episode. This article discusses the results of students’ evaluations of the simulation. In addition to extensive online appendices, it provides a detailed explanation and design for instructors who are considering a similar approach.

Committees from the American Political Science Association (APSA) on the status of graduate students in political science conducted digital surveys in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Distributed using listservs from APSA, the surveys asked about a range of realities facing graduate students including employment opportunities, industry or academic support, and overall well-being. Analysis of the data pre-, during-, and post-pandemic revealed high anxiety in 2018 as part of students’ experience looking for jobs. By 2020 and 2022, anxiety worsened, such that the well-being of graduate students in political science should be addressed. We recommend a change in the structure of graduate academic programs to include stronger institutional support and an emphasis on alternative paths for work that does not entail teaching at an academic institution.