Much has been written about efforts to expand women’s social, cultural, and political representation, roles, and opportunities. However, as political scientists, we have done little to document the early history of incorporating women into the discipline. This article illustrates how the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) established the study of politics as an acceptable course of baccalaureate study for women: first, by crafting a model curriculum; second, by advocating for the creation of endowed chairs in political science at women’s colleges; and, third, by publishing in scholarly outlets. The GFWC’s efforts can be viewed as the first steps to the incorporation of women into the discipline—a question that continues to be the subject of much analysis and consternation by professional associations and the academic community.

More than a decade after the observation that an “interpretive turn” was percolating through political science, there are clear indications of growth in the perceived legitimacy of interpretive scholarship. Both accompanying and contributing to interpretivism’s ascent has been the regular staging of Methods Cafés at various conferences in and beyond the discipline. First held at the 2005 meeting of the Western Political Science Association, the Methods Café subsequently landed at the 2006 conference of the American Political Science Association. The Methods Café has become an institutionalized feature of these and other conferences. This reflection looks at the past, present, and future of these events, as well as the key role they have played in making interpretivism visible in the discipline. In particular, I highlight their function as non-hierarchical intellectual spaces that promote teaching, learning, and interpretivist community building. Further, I offer friendly but not uncritical commentary on the successes and limitations of the Methods Café.

Political science, like many disciplines, has a “leaky-pipeline” problem. Women are more likely to leave the profession than men. Those who stay are promoted at lower rates. Recent work has pointed toward a likely culprit: women are less likely to submit work to journals. Why? One answer is that women do not believe their work will be published. This article asks whether women systematically study different topics than men and whether these topics may be less likely to appear in top political science journals. To answer this question, we analyzed the content of dissertation abstracts. We found evidence that some topics are indeed gendered. We also found differences in the representation of “women’s” and “men’s” topics in the pages of the top journals. This suggests that research agendas may indeed be gendered and that variation in research topic might be to blame for the submission gap.

Graduate-program decision makers face a similar challenge: how to design an admissions process that screens out applicants who are unlikely to succeed but does not provide too high an entry barrier for students who can be successful. This study catalogs the use of standardized testing in Master of Public Administration admissions and finds that less than one third of programs require standardized tests for all applicants. Moreover, program prestige, program diversity, and program size do not affect the likelihood that a program requires the Graduate Record Examination. This study also reviews the various standards that universities use to provide test waivers and also discusses other common application materials. The results should be of interest to undergraduate academic advisers and graduate-program directors as well as scholars and practitioners of higher-education administration more generally.

The politics of public policy is a vibrant research area increasingly at the forefront of intellectual innovations in the discipline. We argue that political scientists are best positioned to undertake research on the politics of public policy when they possess expertise in particular policy areas. Policy expertise positions scholars to conduct theoretically innovative work and to ensure that empirical research reflects the reality they aim to analyze. It also confers important practical advantages, such as access to a significant number of academic positions and major sources of research funding not otherwise available to political scientists. Perhaps most importantly, scholars with policy expertise are equipped to defend the value of political science degrees and research in the public sphere.

Gender representation is a pervasive problem in political science. We draw on evidence from the 2017 and 2018 American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting programs to discuss diversity and representation in large political science disciplinary conferences. APSA program divisions differ substantially in their gender representation: although some are representative of their organized-section membership, others are not, and some sections are particularly likely to feature “manels.” We present representation data by organized section, with discussions of what representation looks like and identifying different types of representation goals. We conclude by offering guidelines for increasing gender representation, for both future submitters and program chairs.

Organizations—from academic and professional associations to private corporations and police forces—face challenges promoting diversity and inclusion among their workers and affiliates. Instead of training and regulations, recent research recommends mechanisms that engage managers and leaders in activities that involve behavioral changes. This article describes how we put the managerial engagement approach into practice by organizing a “Diversity and Inclusion Hackathon” at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. With 11 teams focused on a range of topics, the hackathon attracted more than 200 people and produced multiple outputs. It engaged scholars from a range of backgrounds, social identities, institutions, ranks, and beliefs in the generation of new norms, programmatic ideas, and plans for the profession. Although we cannot infer causality, analysis of the APSA Annual Meeting evaluation survey reveals that hackathon participants are significantly more likely to express positive perceptions of the conference.

Using updated data from 2002 and 2017 on the political science discipline, we show how the cohort and gender composition of US PhD-granting departments has changed dramatically over time. Integrating 2002 and 2017 data, we examine overall patterns and gender differences in job mobility, tenure and promotion, and university prestige level among non-emeritus 2002 faculty, controlling for cohort effects. Even with this control, we find strong gender effects in some of these success dimensions. We then introduce another variable, citation counts, and find that women are consistently less cited than men, with important variations in the pattern across different cohorts. A control for citation counts show that some of these gender differences tend to disappear and we consider possible explanations for these findings.