The role that China is perceived to present for the global economy—much less global security—has changed remarkably since China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001. During the height of neoliberalism and third-wave democracies, China appeared more open to foreign capital than the developmental states of East Asia, which had restricted foreign direct investment (FDI) in favor of domestic industrialization during a comparable stage of economic development. Through the first 15 years of China’s WTO membership, many in academia and the policy world depicted a modernizing China undergoing market transition, in parallel to Eastern European countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Civic education is essential to the health of any democracy. When COVID-19 emerged in the spring of 2020, almost all civic education efforts went online. This increased interest in the effectiveness of online civic education. Does it lead to similar outcomes as in-person education? I used student evaluations from a youth civic engagement conference co-run by Latinx and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) non-profit organizations to compare learning outcomes on multiple dimensions of civic education, from an in-person conference in 2019 and an online conference in 2020. I find that although students improved over the course of both conferences, the 2019 in-person conference yielded slightly greater improvement in civic knowledge confidence than the online conference. Other dimensions-verifiable knowledge, self-efficacy, and community consciousness-increased after participation in the conference in both years; however, the increases were similar between the online and in-person formats.
During the past century, protest has become a shared experience around the world, as citizens across the continents have taken to the streets to demand political, social, and economic changes. In Asia—from China to India, Thailand to Myanmar—people have organized mass demonstrations to express their dissatisfaction with colonial and state governments and their policies. Often, people shared news and supported protests in neighboring countries, using it as an opportunity to mobilize and coordinate their efforts for protest and leading to a growing sense of regional solidarity. Solidarity is possible despite differences in culture, history, and language because the citizens in the region share universal values.
To confront the climate crisis, we need political change involving a dramatic shift in domestic and transnational norms. Norm models should be recognized as one of the theoretical tools within the panoply of approaches to examine and address climate change. The most promising norm campaigns underway are those that target fossil fuel companies and government policies that support them (e.g., subsidies).
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.
A robust literature on climate change and security developed in the 2010s. Much of the literature attempts to chart how climate change could contribute directly or indirectly to conflict and instability through impacts on agriculture, migration, and disasters (Busby 2018; Koubi 2019; Theisen 2017). 1 The methodological challenge is that climate change is an emergent problem, wherein the security consequences largely have yet to occur. However, the field’s methods and expertise are primarily explanatory of past patterns. For scholars who want to make claims about future security risks, Gledistch (1998, 394) warned of potentially slipping into prophecy. If scholars want to write about climate change and retain academic rigor, what are they to do? This article reviews the challenges for scholars in this space and identifies potential research strategies that might be pursued going forward.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, ad hoc direct relief payments were used extensively as a means of economic stimulation and individual compensation. Current studies are focusing on the economic impact of these policies, but they seldom consider how these payments affect individual beliefs and attitudes. This study used a survey with quasi-experimental elements to examine how these payments affected tertiary students in Hong Kong by focusing primarily on a cohort including both eligible and noneligible students. Whereas satisfaction with the economy and government and support for democracy were not affected, nonrecipients assigned greater importance to meritocratic factors in improving life outcomes. The findings of this study shed light on how governments inadvertently may be affecting the outlook of young adults with transfers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Climate change is fundamentally a political problem; it is not merely a technical or economic challenge but rather an arena for sharp conflicts over the distribution of gains and losses and the associated ethical challenges. However, as Keohane (2015), Javeline (2014), and Green and Hale (2017) noted in PS: Political Science & Politics and Perspectives on Politics , research on climate change has not been traditionally central to mainstream political science. Field journals including Global Environmental Politics and Environmental Politics have made important contributions in this regard, and leading university presses have published important books on climate issues. However, the neglect of climate politics by mainstream journals is surprising—although we note the recent Perspective on Politics symposium on Green Political Science—because political scientists have devoted considerable attention to studying environmental politics at the community (Ostrom 1990), national (Kelemen and Vogel 2010), and international (Young 1994) levels. Indeed, there is robust literature on the management of common pool resources, national styles of environmental regulation, and environmental social movements, as well as global environmental regimes. Yet, the topic of climate change—an important subject in the study of environmental politics—too often has been neglected by mainstream political science.
Engaging with higher education institutions from the People’s Republic of China (China or the PRC) raises difficult tensions for universities in liberal democratic contexts. Universities in China are overseen by a political party that routinely silences dissent and does not respect principles of academic freedom in the social sciences and humanities. For decades in the post–Mao era, this tension remained relatively muted outside of the PRC, but it has gained newfound significance as China’s power and assertiveness have grown globally.
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.
Social scientists with data science skills increasingly are assuming positions as computational social scientists in academic and non-academic organizations. However, because computational social science (CSS) is still relatively new to the social sciences, it can feel like a hidden curriculum for many PhD students. To support social science PhD students, this article is an accessible guide to CSS training based on previous literature and our collective working experiences in academic, public-, and private-sector organizations. We contend that students should supplement their traditional social science training in research design and domain expertise with CSS training by focusing on three core areas: (1) learning data science skills, (2) building a portfolio that uses data science to answer social science questions, and (3) connecting with computational social scientists. We conclude with practical recommendations for departments and professional associations to better support PhD students.
This article introduces a bundle of active learning activities for an introductory undergraduate course in research methods. In particular, the activities aim to help students develop core knowledge and skills that provide a foundation for reading and conducting quantitative and qualitative research. Active learning is a pedagogical practice with well-established benefits such as better student attitudes and improved content comprehension and application. I build on this conventional wisdom by applying a student-centred evaluation method, demonstrating that students perceive active learning as an effective complement to traditional lecturing and assignments for learning core methodological topics in political science.
Although a subset of political scientists has been studying climate change for decades, the mainstream of the discipline lags behind. Journals such as Global Environmental Politics and even Nature and Science have long published political science research on climate, yet major disciplinary journals tend to marginalize climate and environmental politics more broadly (Green and Hale 2017). This trend has been changing slowly (as evidenced by this symposium), but mainstream political science still has much catching up to do.
The well-understood gap between "mainstream" environmental organizations and Americans from minority populations is rooted in two phenomena. First, in the mid-1990s, hostility expressed toward immigrants and immigration by the Sierra Club (among other groups) drove a wedge between environmentalism and Latinos, as 87% of all Latinos are within two generations of the immigration experience. Second, whereas larger environmental groups focused on pollution and other forms of environmental degradation as well as conservation of natural and wild spaces, minority Americans showed less engagement in these issues and were affected more directly by air and water pollution and its consequences-phenomena that more directly affect communities of color. "Environmental justice" movements and organizations emerged to fill the gap left by the somewhat diminished focus of large "mainstream" groups on minority populations.
Increasing tensions between the United States and China, a rise in anti-Asian sentiment, and the risk of government surveillance has dramatically altered the teaching and research contexts for scholars of Chinese politics. In this conversation, Dan Chen (University of Richmond), Rongbin Han (University of Georgia), and John Yasuda (Johns Hopkins University) discuss how questions of identity, politics, and security have affected classroom dynamics and their future research endeavors.
This article discusses the integration of research methods training into a third-year elective undergraduate course. We suggest that the building blocks of research design can be embedded in courses without compromising their content. This introduces research methods to students who have no prior methods training or gives students with methods training more opportunities to engage in research design. We present evidence that this approach increased students' self-assessed knowledge of and confidence with research-related skills, especially among those without prior methods training. Additionally, the analysis of research proposals-the final assignment of the course-revealed that most students were able to apply core research design skills. These findings demonstrate that progress in research methods skills is possible across the curriculum.
Scholars recognize the important role that diasporas play in conflict dynamics, including efforts to build peace in conflict-affected communities. Broader academic research emphasizes a focus on local conditions and actors, as well as site-specific understandings of peace and peacebuilding practices. This focus on specific communities and contexts often draws on qualitative, narrative-driven data, predominantly collected through interviewing. This article identifies some of the core challenges related to data collection encountered during semi-structured interviews in a study of Somali diaspora members in Melbourne, Australia. We emphasize how issues associated with cross-cultural and gendered understandings of concepts related to peacebuilding can affect each stage of a research project, from the preliminary collection of data to the analysis and discussion of research implications. Specifically, we address challenges related to instances of conceptual dissonance that occur when researchers employ cross-cultural and gendered concepts-in this case, peace, peacebuilding, and leadership. The findings will benefit conflict researchers who work with socially distant groups and ethnically divided populations more broadly, along with those who employ interpretivist methodologies that focus on how meaning making might ultimately influence peacebuilding practices and outcomes.
ABSTRACTPolitical 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.
Descriptive research-work aimed at answering "who," "what," "when," "where," and "how" questions-is vital at every stage of social scientific inquiry. The creative and analytic process of description-through concepts, measures, or cases, whether in numeric or narrative form-is crucial for conducting research aimed at understanding politics in action. Yet, our field tends to devalue such work as "merely descriptive" (Gerring 2012), subsidiary to or less valuable than hypothesis-drive causal inference. This article posits four key areas in which description contributes to political science: in conceptualization, in policy relevance, in the management and leveraging of data, and in challenging entrenched biases and diversifying our field.
