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.

The latter half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century witnessed a global wave of constitution writing. Scholarly examination of these new charters found that most embodied liberalism and democracy. Additional study, however, found that textual convergence among these “higher law constitutions” belied important heterogeneity in constitutionalism—that is, in the principles underlying these charters and associated attitudes and behaviors. Scholars adopted several conceptual strategies to accommodate this variation, including attaching adjectives to constitutionalism (for example, “globalizing constitutionalism” and “abusive constitutionalism”). This article analyzes this conceptual innovation, drawing on an original dataset of all mentions of the word “constitutionalism” paired with a qualifying adjective found in the title/abstract of articles or in the title/first substantive page of books/dissertations, written in English, published between 1945 and 2019 and referenced on the Internet. We identified 1,621 “adjective-constitutionalism combinations,” including 564 unique combinations, suggesting both extraordinary empirical variation and little coordination among scholars with regard to conceptualization. Moreover, scholars’ conceptualizations of constitutionalism rarely reference equality, justice, or state responsibility for pursuing those ideals, despite these values being logical extensions of higher law constitutions’ core precepts; indeed, some conceptualizations even reflected illiberal or rights-limiting principles of governance. These findings raise the specter of a disconnect between constitutions and constitutionalism that we hope future studies will examine.

The political science discipline has recently engaged in contentious debate about the value of “research transparency,” particularly for research with human participants. The discipline is also holding vital conversations about research ethics and is rekindling dialogue about different ways of knowing. We offer an integrated account of how the actions that scholars who conduct human participant research take to respect ethical principles (which vary by research substance and settings), and their epistemological commitments (which vary across researchers), influence openness, a broader concept than “transparency.” These principles and commitments shape scholars’ openness practices simultaneously—both independently and in concert—serving as a prism through which multiple features of a research project are refracted, and resulting in a scholar’s inclination and ability to pursue openness in different ways and to different degrees with the audiences of her work. We also show how ethical principles and epistemological commitments can not only constrain and prevent openness, but also animate and require it. We suggest that scholars pursuing openness ethically, and in ways that honor their epistemological commitments, represents good social science, and we offer strategies for doing so. To develop our argument, we focus primarily on two research methods, ethnography and interviews, and on openness toward two audiences, human participants and research communities. Our account illuminates how the heterogeneity of human participant research makes it inappropriate, indeed impossible, to develop blanket rules for pursuing openness. Throughout, we highlight the importance of reflexivity for the ethical conduct of, and for being ethically open about, political science research.