A variety of measures indicate that income inequality has grown significantly in the United States during the last three decades (APSA 2004; Brandolini and Smeeding 2006). In a flurry of recent research, scholars have attributed this trend to the failure of the national government to represent the preferences of ordinary citizens in general and less wealthy citizens in particular (APSA 2004; Bartels 2004; 2006; Gilens 2005), who participate in politics less consistently and contribute fewer resources to political candidates than their wealthier peers (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). The American Political Science Association's (APSA) Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy summarizes this representative failure hypothesis: “disparities in participation ensure that ordinary Americans speak in a whisper while the most advantaged roar” (2004, 2).

On January 8, 2008, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a case related to the discriminatory effects of voter-identification laws in the state of Indiana. Indiana has one of the most stringent voting requirements in the nation, as voters are required to present an up-to-date photo identification issued by the federal or state government in order to cast a ballot. Plaintiffs argued that the Indiana requirements prevent significant and unequal obstacles to the right to vote. The state argued that Indiana had the right to enforce strict requirements to prevent fraud and uphold confidence in the electoral process. Similar laws have also been proposed in many other states, typically related to charges of vote fraud, and often times tied into the divisive debate regarding undocumented immigrants or African American felons. Therefore the recent decision of the Court has tremendous implications to the future of photo-identification laws across the United States.

While the party decides theory explains the outcomes of past nomination battles for president, this year in the Republican presidential contest party insiders failed to anoint a standard bearer. Who decides when the party elites don’t? In 2016, it was America’s authoritarian voters. And their candidate of choice, Donald Trump, is anathema to party leaders. I argue that Trump’s rise is in part the result of authoritarian voters’ response to his unvarnished, us-versus-them rhetoric. The failure of Republican Party insiders to coalesce behind one candidate opened the door for Trump. Authoritarian-driven partisan polarization (Hetherington and Weiler 2009), increasing fear of real and imagined threats, and terrorist incidents abroad and at home provided the fuel for Trump’s campaign. And Trump’s message and manner ignited that fuel, propelling him to the Republican nomination for president.

Most Americans lack any substantial degree of ideological sophistication (Kinder 1998), yet they often manage to express coherent views across a range of issues. The conventional explanation for this is that people rely on judgmental shortcuts (e.g., Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991). These “heuristics” permit individuals with sufficient political sophistication to sort and filter incoming messages to form relatively consistent views that align with preexisting values (Zaller 1992).

Classroom simulations can make a significant contribution to learning outcomes in political science courses, provided that they are firmly linked to course content and learning objectives. This article offers a step-by-step decision framework for instructors seeking to use simulations as a core component of their courses, including selection of an exercise, pre-simulation preparation, instructor role during a simulation, and techniques for debriefing after the exercise. Options such as online and face-to-face, synchronous and asynchronous, distributed and single classroom, and individual and team formats are compared, with a focus on their associated learning outcomes.

The academic community studying terrorism has changed dramatically in the past decade. From a research area that was investigated by a small number of political scientists and sociologists and employed mainly descriptive and qualitative studies that resulted in limited theoretical progress (Schmid and Jongman 1988; Crenshaw 2000), it has in a short time become one of the more vibrant and rapidly developing academic realms in the scholarly world today. Scholars from different branches of the social sciences have engaged in an effort to unravel this phenomenon, introducing new theoretical outlooks, conceptualizations, and methods.

What are the relational dimensions of politics? Does the way that people and organizations are connected to each other matter? Are our opinions affected by the people with whom we talk? Are legislators affected by lobbyists? Is the capacity of social movements to mobilize affected by the structure of societal networks? Powerful evidence in the literature answers each of these questions in the affirmative. However, compared to other paradigmatic foci, political science has invested tiny amounts of capacity in the study of the relevance of networks to political phenomena. Far more attention has been paid to the psychology of how people process information individually as opposed to collectively, and to the role that institutions play in structuring politics as opposed to the relational undergirdings of politics. A review of the flagship journals in political science reveals a dearth of articles on networks. Few, if any, doctoral programs include courses for which the primary focus is network-related ideas, and even the notion of a relational dependence in data is rarely mentioned in discussions of the assumptions embedded in the statistical methods that dominate political science.

Climate change is easily one of the most contentious policy problems facing the United States. A majority of climate scientists agree that the earth has warmed over the last 100 years and that human-made greenhouse gasses are the cause (e.g., Doran and Zimmerman 2009; IPCC 2007; Oreskes 2004, but also see Bray 2010), yet a nontrivial portion of the US population diverges sharply from this dominant scientific position (see, for example, Jenkins-Smith, Herron, and Silva 2010, 41–45; Leiserowitz 2006; Nisbet and Myers 2007). Why? Past research usually points to the public's lack of climate change knowledge (e.g., Kellstedt, Zahran, and Vedlitz 2008), finds that media over report the views of climate change skeptics in a misplaced quest for “balanced” reporting (e.g., Boykoff and Boykoff 2007, but see Swedlow and Wildavsky 1995), or the public simply take cues from opinion leaders whom they trust (e.g., Malka, Krosnick, and Langer 2009). This article moves beyond the predominant concern with climate change knowledge, messaging structures, and cue taking in past research, and shifts the focus to characteristics intrinsic to the individual. The research presented here assesses the extent that the cultural theory (CT) developed by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, and others (see, e.g., Schwarz and Thompson 1990; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990) can help political scientists understand why so many Americans do not align themselves with the majority of scientists and can help policy makers broker compromises on climate change policy.

Since 1996 the World Bank Institute and the Research Department of the World Bank have been developing six governance indicators called the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The six dimensions of governance include control of corruption, measuring perceptions on corruption. Based on the literature review as well as the data itself, this paper concludes that the conceptual and empirical issues on building governance indicators constitute an ongoing project.

This article examines the dual problems of “women don't ask” and “women don't say no” in the academic profession. First, we consider whether female faculty bargain more or less frequently than male faculty about such resources as salary, research support, clerical support, moving expenses, and spousal accommodation. Analyzing a 2009 APSA survey, we find that women are more likely to ask for resources than men when considering most categories of bargaining issues. This finding goes against conventional wisdom in the literature on gender and bargaining that suggests that women are less likely to bargain than men. Second, we seek to understand if women are reluctant to say no when asked to provide service at the department, college, university, or disciplinary levels. We find that women are asked to provide more service and that they agree to serve more frequently than men. We also find that the service women provide is more typically “token” service, as women are less likely to be asked by their colleagues to serve as department chair, to chair committees, or to lead academic programs. The implications of these results for the leaky pipeline in the academic profession are discussed.

Google search data have several major advantages over traditional survey data. First, the high costs of running frequent surveys mean that most survey questions are only asked occasionally making comparisons over time difficult. By contrast, Google Trends provides information on search trends measured weekly. Second, there are many countries where surveys are only conducted sporadically, whereas Google search data are available anywhere in the world where sufficient numbers of people use its search engine. The Google Trends website allows researchers to download data for almost all countries at no cost and to download time series of any search term's popularity over time (provided enough people have searched for it). For these reasons, Google Trends is an attractive data source for social scientists.

Lecture is, arguably, the oldest known instructional technique used in the university setting. Since it was first employed in Plato's Academy, lecture has become an indispensable part of teaching favored across the college and university curriculum. Recently, this time-honored method of instruction has come under attack for its presumed inability to foster higher order cognitive and attitudinal goals (Cashin 1985; Day 1980; Frederick 1999; Renner 1993). Critics of traditional lecture-based formats call for their replacement with active learning approaches that provide students with an opportunity to meaningfully talk, interact, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, and issues of an academic subject (Meyers and Jones 1993, 6).

The justification for studying faculty research productivity is that it affects individual advancement and reputation within academe, as well as departmental and institutional prestige (Creamer 1998, iii). Publication records are an important factor in faculty performance evaluations, research grant awards, and promotion and salary decisions. The phrase “publish or perish” encapsulates the importance of research productivity to academic careers. In addition, questions are sometimes raised about whether an individual's status as a minority within academia (e.g., being a member of an underrepresented ethnic or racial group or being female in a male-dominated profession) affects his or her ability to publish or likelihood of publishing (Cole and Zuckerman 1984; Bellas and Toutkoushian 1999). Finally, most previous work that tackles the productivity causality puzzle comes from disciplines other than political science. Thus, one of the purposes of this report is to explore whether the existing findings about research productivity in other disciplines apply equally well to research productivity in political science.

The article examines short-term effects of terror on trust and civic engagement in Norway. Prior to the July 22, 2011 attacks, Norway ranked among the nations with the highest levels of trust and civic engagement in the world. How does a nation of trusters react to terror? Based on two web surveys conducted in March/April 2011 and August 2011 short-term effects on trust, fear, and political interest and participation are analyzed. Two competing hypotheses are explored: first, the “end-of-innocence hypothesis,” which assumes that the attacks have disrupted trust and instilled a new culture of fear, and second, the “remobilization hypothesis,” which assumes that the attacks have led to a reinforcement of trust and of civic values. Our results show increased interpersonal and institutional trust as well as a modest increase in civic engagement, especially among youth. Moreover, there is little increase in experienced fear within the population. Our study therefore supports the remobilization-of-trust hypothesis. Contrary to the intended aims of the attacker, the structures of trust and civic engagement seem to have been reinforced in Norwegian society. This study in part corroborates findings concerning short-term effects after September 11, 2001.

In 2008 journalist Bill Bishop achieved the kind of notice that authors dream about. His book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, was mentioned regularly during the presidential campaign; most notably, former president Bill Clinton urged audiences to read the book. Bishop's thesis is that Americans increasingly are choosing to live in neighborhoods populated with people just like themselves. In turn, these residential choices have produced a significant increase in geographic political polarization. Bishop does not contend that people consciously decide to live with fellow Democrats or Republicans; rather political segregation is a byproduct of the correlations between political views and the various demographic and life-style indicators people consider when making residential decisions. Whatever the cause, Bishop contends that the resulting geographic polarization is a troubling and dangerous development.

Previous analysis finds that people respond differently to “financial” (e.g., tax evasion) and “moral” (e.g., sexual misconduct) political scandals. However, experimental and observational studies tend to reach different conclusions about which type of scandal induces a stronger negative reaction from the public. We use an experiment embedded in a national survey to examine the possibility that these divergent findings can, in part, be explained by a failure to consider the effects of abuses of power. Consistent with previous experimental work, we find that people respond more negatively to financial scandals than to moral scandals when they do not involve abuses of power. However, abuses of power substantially affect responses to both types of scandals. We also find that moral and financial scandals affect personal and job evaluations of a politician differently. These findings support our contention that to understand public responses to scandal, it is crucial to consider the relationship between the scandalous behavior and the official's formal responsibilities.

The emphasis in political science on procedural ethics has led to a neglect of how researchers should consider and treat study participants, from design to publication stage. This article corrects this oversight and calls for a sustained discussion of research ethics across the discipline. The article's core argument is twofold: that ethics should matter to everyone, not just those who spend extended time in the field; and that ethics is an ongoing responsibility, not a discrete task to be checked off a “to do” list. Ethics matter in all types of political science research because most political science involves “human subjects.” Producers and consumers of political science research need to contemplate the ambiguous and oftentimes uncomfortable dimensions of research ethics, lest we create a discipline that is “nonethical,” or worse, unethical.