When we uncovered a large gender gap in political ambition in the early 2000s, our research highlighted how far the United States was from gender parity in politics. Given marked increases in women’s numeric representation throughout the past two decades, many might expect the gender gap in political ambition to have begun to close. Results from our new study of potential candidates, however, reveal that the magnitude of the gender gap is just as large 20 years later, and two primary explanations persist as well. We posit that even though candidate recruitment has propelled more women into electoral politics, patterns of traditional gender socialization persist. These dynamics, coupled with negative perceptions of how female candidates are treated, continue to depress women’s interest in elective office. As long as running for office is a more remote endeavor for women than men, women’s full political inclusion will remain a distant goal.

Undergraduate research assistants (URAs) perform important roles in many political scientists’ research projects. They serve as coauthors, survey respondents, and data collectors. Despite these roles, there is relatively little discussion about how best to train and manage URAs who are working on a common task: content coding. Drawing on insights from psychology, text analysis, and business management, as well as my own experience in managing a team of nine URAs, this article argues that supervisors should train URAs by pushing them to engage with their own mistakes. Via a series of simulation exercises, I also argue that supervisors—especially supervisors of small teams—should be concerned about the effects of errant post-training coding on data quality. Therefore, I contend that supervisors should utilize computational tools to monitor URA reliability in real time. I provide researchers with a new R package, ura, and a web-based application to implement these suggestions.

Drawing on interviews with Latina congressional members and candidates, this article examines the impacts of escalating political violence on their professional lives and political careers, as well as the implications for the growing body of women of color who are engaging in public service at the national level.

Political scientists involved in the study of religion have expressed concerns that religious themes have yet to be fully integrated into the mainstream of the discipline. According to a study of articles published in leading political science journals during the first decade of the twenty-first century, papers engaging with religion were relatively few in number and highly concentrated in only a few thematic and disciplinary areas. This article presents an updated analysis of the extent to which political science has engaged with the topic of religion by examining journal outputs for the period 2011–2020. The study finds no significant change in the patterns identified by the earlier research. Despite an overall increase in the quantity of political science articles on the subject of religion, the overall proportion has been relatively static, and the thematic and disciplinary focus of outputs remains narrow.

Expressions of social discontent that trigger deep political reform appear to be a sign of the times. Emerging political actors challenge delegitimized political elites with promises of a closer relationship with electorates, new rules to fight corruption, and more open access to the benefits of economic growth. Often, however, reforms in recent decades have weakened instead of strengthened democracy, leaving political systems less fair and more exclusive than before. The Chilean constitution-making process of 2021–2022 reasonably raised hopes for a different outcome.

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.

As the political and social challenges facing the world multiply, the discipline of political science requires better tools and creative approaches advanced by a more diverse set of researchers. Yet the discipline has struggled to recruit and admit to graduate programs, and retain as faculty, women and underrepresented minorities. Many individual faculty, departments, and universities have developed innovative programs and sought to create structural changes to address these gaps. This article presents the approach taken by the Department of Government at Georgetown University: launching a week-long Political Science Predoctoral Summer Institute in 2022. We describe the Institute’s contours and structure, provide preliminary data on outcomes, and conclude by offering three ideas for expanding and advancing these types of initiatives across the discipline.

Normatively, democratic constitutions should express how citizens want to govern themselves collectively. Little is known, however, about how citizens’ constitutional preferences can be elicited and aggregated in practice. An intuitively appealing approach is to allow various forms of popular participation during a constitution-making process, including a popular vote to accept or reject the draft constitution (Fishkin 2011). Based on the Chilean experience with democratic constitution making, this article identifies unanticipated and previously unexplored distortions that can lead to incongruence between the preferences of voters and representatives regarding the extent and direction of constitutional change.

In 2019, Chile was struck by an uprising that shook its political structure to the core. Mobilization was so overwhelming that political elites decided—against what they had defended vigorously during past decades—to allow for a comprehensive reform of the Constitution enacted in 1980. Because constitutions allocate decision rights and define their political system as they do so, the process reopened the debate regarding the country’s imbalanced presidential design. This article contributes to the debate on checks and balances in the Chilean political system by examining a specific procedure that promotes imbalance: the urgency prerogative.

In recent years, many emerging actors (e.g., new social movements and parties) associate democratic problems with representative institutions. Accordingly, as a solution, they propose to introduce direct citizen participation in constitution and law making. However, three fallacies undermine the potential benefits of citizen participation: (1) attributing a moral and/or epistemic superiority to “the people”; (2) assuming that superiority, expecting to replace representation with direct participation; and (3) supposing that the legitimacy deficit will be resolved automatically by introducing inclusive direct participation. This article argues against these three ideas by providing a framework to understand participatory constitution making and briefly examining the cases of Chile and Iceland.

Chile’s 2021–22 Constitutional Convention was the first in the world to feature mechanisms that guaranteed gender parity among constituents (Arce and Suárez-Cao 2021). This was not an easy win. Feminist activists and women politicians pushed for gender parity in 2020-21 in a country that had adopted gender quotas relatively late (Figueroa 2021; Reyes-Housholder, Suárez-Cao, and Le Foulon 2023; Suárez-Cao 2023; personal interview #1, April 21, 2023). Reserving seats for Indigenous groups and using other mechanisms to allow space for independent constituents further broadened the convention’s ostensible inclusiveness. After the September 2022 rejection of the 2021–22 Constitutional Convention’s draft, political parties immediately started over by crafting an elite-controlled process. Lawmakers—this time with surprising speed—again coalesced around the idea that an equal number of men and women should write the new draft.

Many analysts have tried to discern the reasons behind the Chilean Constitutional Convention’s draft failure in the 2022 plebiscite. A significant explanation is the draft’s inclusion of indigenous rights and its plurinationality principle (Bargsted and González 2022). Despite Chile being unique in Latin America in its lack of constitutional recognition for its indigenous population (Acevedo 2021), most voters in indigenous areas appeared to have opposed the draft (Pairican 2022).1

On November 15, 2019, following almost a month of massive daily demonstrations across Chile, most political parties agreed to initiate an unprecedented constituent process. This process introduced institutional innovations for the Constitutional Convention elections, including gender parity, reserving 17 seats for indigenous individuals, and allowing nonparty candidates to run as independent candidates (Heiss 2021; Suárez-Cao 2021).

A distinctive feature of 21st-century constitution making is the role assigned to citizens through various forms of direct participation, as well as special efforts to include groups underrepresented and marginalized in ordinary politics. The legitimacy of these processes increasingly requires a role for actors and groups previously excluded from crucial institutional decisions (Elster 1998; Fishkin 2011; Reuchamps and Welp 2023; Rubio-Marín 2020; Welp and Soto 2020). However, vested interests have proven challenging to overcome amid a global crisis of representation. The failed Chilean process of 2021–2022 provides valuable lessons about the triumphs and pitfalls of embracing an open approach to constitution making.