We describe and analyze patterns in the geographical focus of political science research across more than a century. Using a new database of titles and abstracts from 27,690 publications in eight major political science journals from their inception, we demonstrate that, historically, political scientists concentrated their studies on a limited number of countries situated in North America and Western Europe. While a strong focus on Western countries remains today, we detail how this picture has changed somewhat over recent decades, with political science research becoming increasingly “globalized.” Still, several countries have received almost no attention, and geographical citation patterns differ by subfield. For example, we find indications of a greater focus on the United States and large Western European countries in international relations than in comparative politics publications. We also analyze several correlates of a country being the focus of political science research, including the country’s predominant languages, income, population size, democracy level, and conflict experience, and show systematic variation in the geographical focus of research. This unequal focus, we argue, has important implications regarding the applicability of extant descriptive and causal claims, as well as the development of theories in political science.

It is no secret that political power in the United States and elsewhere has, overall, shifted to “the executive” and away from legislatures. There may be debate about whether this is a product of willful “overreaching” by executives or whether, within the United States, Congress has instead willingly ceded power by engaging in what Justice Cardozo in 1935 called “delegation run riot.” The concern about executive power has perhaps become heightened in the aftermath of the Trump presidency—just as Boris Johnson, with his own defiance of some of the “conventions” that are essential to the British constitutional order, is provoking debate in Great Britain.

There is no doubt that the political economy of contemporary China has received significant attention, both in academic disciplines and in the real world. The role of the state in the economy and the relations between government and business actors have always been central concerns of classic social science works about China. There are, however, several crucial challenges in studying this topic. The complicated landscape of a multilayered, fragmented Chinese state and numerous state-owned, private, foreign, or mixed-type businesses has made it difficult to tease out their interactions and establish a comprehensive theoretical model. The fast-changing nature of state–market relations and their vast subnational and sectoral variation has often prevented scholars from generalizing those lessons beyond the case or issue area. Yet, among all these, the most daunting challenge is: How can studies of a particularly interesting phenomenon in China’s political economy contribute to broader discussions of state–society relations, regime durability, and state-led development without losing respectable country expertise?

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of patrimonial rule not only in the developing world but also, more surprisingly, in the developed West. This resurgence carries potentially dire consequences for responding to a range of pressing problems. Understanding the sources of contemporary patrimonialism is hindered by assimilating the phenomenon into the familiar democracy/autocracy typology or by assuming that it is a function of failed modernization. This article identifies the patrimonial phenomenon and explores the contemporary global diffusion of patrimonial rule from its origins in postcommunist Russia, with a focus on how patrimonialism has manifested itself in policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some signs indicate that reestablishing bureaucratic predictability and expertise may be much harder than demolishing it. In some respects, the task may be more daunting than the salvation of democracy itself.

In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of ethnicity in shaping political behavior, and the organizational weakness of political parties. Whereas these axioms have some empirical basis, the massive changes in political practices, the vast variation in political patterns, and the burgeoning literature on subnational dynamics in India mean that such generalizations are not tenable. In this article, we consider research on India that compels us to rethink the contention that India neatly fits the prevailing wisdom in the comparative politics literature. Our objective is to elucidate how the many nuanced insights about Indian politics can improve our understanding of electoral behavior both across and within other countries, allowing us to question core assumptions in theories of comparative politics.

The greatest threat of democratic breakdown stems from the federal structure of the US Constitution and from false claims of election fraud with the potential for state- or congressional- level reversals of popular vote outcomes. The potential for such a breakdown was revealed by the events of January 6, 2021, with tens of millions of voters still believing in the big lie and the repetition of that lie by legislators and government officials. It is exacerbated by hyperpolarization, minoritarian control caused by partisan gerrymandering for state legislative districts and in the US House, malapportionment in the US Senate, and the highest likelihood of Electoral College reversals of popular vote outcomes in more than a century. Democratic breakdown is also made more likely by recent legislation that makes it easier for legislators in some gerrymandered states to reverse the outcomes of the popular vote in their states.

During the past two decades, there have been growing calls for broadening the discipline of international relations (IR) by giving due recognition to the history, culture, ideas, and agency of non-Western states and societies. Several aspects of this trend are noteworthy. First, it originated from the growing dissatisfaction by non-Western scholars with the Western (US and European) dominance of the IR field, a dominance that obscures and marginalizes the past and recent contributions of other societies. As such, the primary voices challenging this dominance have been non-Western scholars, sometimes in collaboration with a few Western counterparts. These include not just scholars of postcolonialism and race, but also some working in the English School and constructivist and non-Western/post-Western traditions.

As the environmental crisis has intensified, especially regarding climate change and biodiversity loss, we have increasingly recognized that responding adequately requires unprecedented social, economic, technical, and political change. Academic attention across many disciplines has thus turned to questions of what sorts of mechanisms might trigger such changes. We are no longer in a situation where we can satisfy ourselves with simply understanding political processes solely out of curiosity or to test some particular theory of choice: we need to be thinking about how rapid intensive change can be mobilized.