ABSTRACT Several studies have found that only graduates of top-ranked PhD programs have a reasonable chance of landing a tenure-track professorship. However, these findings are based on an examination of the backgrounds of current faculty at PhD-granting institutions, which leaves findings vulnerable to several types of bias. I address these limitations by analyzing the placements of political science PhD candidates during the 2023–2024 academic job-market cycle. In my analysis, departmental rank had virtually no impact on whether candidates found tenure-track assistant professorships, but it did predict the types of positions that candidates found. Other factors had stronger associations with placement outcomes. In particular, publishing solo-authored and coauthored articles, having underrepresented minority or female identity, and studying American politics were all associated with significantly higher placement rates.
ABSTRACT The norm against conquest—a central tenet of the international order—is eroding. This study is among the first to examine public support for this norm, using a real-world case: Israel’s seizure of Syrian territory following the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024. Our survey experiment in Israel reveals that citizens are sensitive to the prohibition on conquest. They demonstrate greater support for an occupation that involves only military control of the forcibly seized territory and weaker support for civilian settlement in or annexation of the foreign territory: policies that amount to conquest. Our finding—a stronger preference for legally acceptable occupation over illegal settlement or annexation—sends a positive signal for the constraining power of norms.
ABSTRACT The Electoral College is an important concept in many undergraduate American politics courses. Although students often understand the basics of the “House-seats-plus-two” rule and the “winner-take-all” system, many struggle to understand election inversions, in which the winner of the popular vote loses the Electoral College vote and therefore loses the presidency. This article presents two models using only foundational arithmetic to explain election inversions, including an example illustrating how a Republican candidate could also win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College vote. A survey of student-learning experiences showed positive results: students found the models accessible and helpful, and they reported greater confidence in the integrity of US presidential elections and in American democracy after working with the materials. These models can be incorporated into a range of American politics courses to help even first-year undergraduate students make sense of the US presidential election system.
ABSTRACT The overturning of Roe v. Wade sent shockwaves through the American political system. Running on women’s reproductive health care rights, Democrats vastly outperformed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections. The 2024 US presidential election provided a test of whether broad public support for reproductive health care access would continue to translate into electoral gains for Democrats. Using a novel set of survey questions, this article examines attitudes toward abortion and the abortion pill (i.e., mifepristone) as well as preferences over whether policy should be decided federally or by individual states (i.e., locus of authority). Our findings provide partial support for the expectation that locus-of-authority preferences shape vote choice. Whereas support for a constitutional protection for abortion remained strongly associated with voting against Trump regardless of locus-of-authority preferences, the pattern for mifepristone access more closely matched our expectations. Among voters who supported mifepristone access, those who were comfortable leaving the issue to the states were significantly more likely to support Donald Trump. His emphasis on state control may have functioned as strategic ambiguity, especially on a less-polarized reproductive health issue such as mifepristone access.
This article explores support for Black Lives Matter through the lens of intergroup conflict and solidarity-concepts at the core of Paula D. McClain's research. We examine the extent to which expressions of "American identity" amplify support for or opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement. The merits of protest are perceived differently across racial groups in the United States, but theories of superordinate identity suggest attitudes could be unified through common expressions of a shared identity. Using 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey data (N=3,711; sum of Black and white respondents), we employ multivariate regression analysis to show that although Black and white respondents express similarly strong levels of a superordinate "American identity," American identity moderates Black and white support for Black Lives Matter inconsistently-and at times in opposing directions. These findings provide additional context for understanding how American identity relates to support for protest activity, suggesting that American identity can assume distinct meanings for different groups of Americans.
The discipline of political science lacks a systematic understanding of how scholars studying Middle East politics prepare for and navigate in-country research, even as fieldwork plays a vital role in contemporary scholarship about the region. Drawing on evidence from an original survey of scholars studying the Middle East and North Africa, we identify a training-practice misalignment wherein 38% of respondents reported having received no formal training before entering the field despite almost all respondents claiming to have conducted fieldwork. Qualitative evidence from open-ended responses reveals the frustration that many scholars experience due to their lack of formal training and subsequent dependence on informal networks and knowledge. Conflict, authoritarianism, state surveillance, and repression in public space-characteristics that increasingly are prevalent in many parts of the world-have long shaped the practice of fieldwork in the Middle East, rendering our findings significant beyond this region alone. The article discusses implications of this misalignment for this subfield and the discipline more broadly, as well as potential pathways forward.
This article investigates the extent to which American Muslims express solidarity with Black-led social movements, focusing on the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. American Muslims occupy a unique position in the US social landscape as a faith-based group that is racialized and frequently experiences surveillance and subjugation when encountering US law enforcement. Using data from two nationally representative online panel surveys of American Muslims conducted in 2020-the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding survey and the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey-this study finds that Muslims report relatively higher levels of support for BLM compared to other religious groups (e.g., Christian and Jewish) and other ethnoracial groups (e.g., Latinos and Asian Americans). These findings provide further insight into American Muslims and their linkage to Black social movements, given the role of Black communities-particularly Black Muslims-in shaping the social foundations and political mobilization of American Islam. This research contributes to ongoing conversations about interminority group relations amid a shifting democracy in the United States.
This study revisits Paula D. McClain and Joseph Stewart Jr.'s (1995) framework of competition and coalition among racial and ethnic minorities to analyze Black American responses to immigration in Chicago. It contends that contemporary perspectives reveal complicated solidarities, which are tensions between racial solidarity and material preservation shaped by globalization, neoliberal urban governance, and evolving political narratives. Using qualitative analysis of municipal documents, public debates, and media coverage, this article demonstrates that institutional neglect and racialized governance shape how Black communities interpret migrant inclusion. The findings extend McClain and Stewart's (1995) framework by centering intra-Black diversity, structural inequality, and urban policy as key dimensions of race and immigrant politics in twenty-first-century America.
This study documents a behavioral dimension of the persistent contradiction between democratic ideals and racial exclusion by examining patterns of everyday spatial avoidance among minoritized groups in shared public spaces. By drawing on systematic observational data from 428 dyadic encounters on Seattle public transit platforms, the analysis identifies patterns of behavioral segregation that may bear on the prospects for multiracial cooperation. Results reveal consistent asymmetrical avoidance: East Asian and Hispanic individuals maintain 18-19 additional feet from Black first-arrivers, a pattern that Black individuals do not reciprocate. In contrast, interaction models show that Black-Black dyads have less interpersonal distance that contrasts with broader aversion by outgroups. By shifting from attitudinal to behavioral measures, this study captures intergroup dynamics that surveys may not detect.
Despite growing attention to gender biases in student evaluations of teaching (SET) in political science, research on effective mitigation strategies remains limited. Given the reliance on SET as a dominant measure of teaching quality in higher education, this study investigates the impact of short-term bias mitigation prompts and prolonged exposure to gender-focused topics on SET. Using a survey experiment conducted in general education social science courses at a mid-sized, Midwestern nonprofit Catholic university, we found that bias mitigation prompts encouraged greater self-reflection, prompting students to critically evaluate their instructors and their own performance. This intervention appeared to reduce the advantages previously afforded to men instructors. However, exposure to gender topics revealed a complex dynamic: whereas gender-related courses are associated with higher SET ratings overall, this positive effect is significantly weakened for women instructors. Women teaching gender-related courses receive lower evaluations than would be expected based on the separate effects of course topic and instructor gender. Our findings underscore the complex interplay among faculty members' gender, gender education, and persistent stereotypes.
This study uses the learning management system (LMS) to track student engagement with a pedagogical intervention in a research methods course. The data were collected over 10 semesters to gauge whether students accessed the supplemental learning materials and whether those materials impacted their learning. I find that although the level of engagement and its effectiveness were mixed and varied by semester, engaging more with the supplemental materials did improve student performance overall. This research emphasizes the importance of measuring whether our interventions even reach their intended targets (i.e., students) and demonstrates the utility of the LMS as a data-collection tool for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research.
