How do professors' identities, including gender and perceived race and ethnicity, affect students' course-enrollment preferences? Political science scholars have illustrated clearly the role that identity bias plays in the political arena, but what about the students we teach? Previous research described how gender, race, and ethnicity can impact professors' career development and teaching evaluations. However, there is little research in terms of the impact of bias on students' course selection. This study used a choice-based conjoint experiment of first-year university students and found that an instructor's gender and perceived race and ethnicity have an impact on the courses they select. These results have significant implications for universities evaluation for faculty career success.

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.

How does (perceived) author’s gender affect students’ evaluation of the credibility of research related to public administration? We conducted a two-round survey experiment, testing if students’ assessment of public administration/political science research rigor is influenced by author’s gender, the controversiality of the argument, and the presence of academic research methods before and after long-term research literacy training. The findings reveal that prior to research literacy training, students’ perceptions of research rigor was shaped by the controversial nature of the research and author’s gender. However, after long-term research literacy training, students became more reliant on methodological cues to assess research credibility. This shift suggests that deliberate pedagogical strategies can help students align their evaluations with core values of fairness, analytical rigor, and respect for diversity. Further, as restrictions are being placed on DEI initiatives, these findings illustrate that there are neutral strategies that still achieve important DEI outcomes.

With heated political and public debate over government vaccine mandates, COVID‐19 offers an opportunity to better understand the role of policy justifications on people's perceptions towards a policy. Through this study, we aim to move beyond the partisan and ideological arguments for and against vaccine mandates to illustrate how individuals' worldviews, based on Cultural Theory, can better explain why people have different perceptions towards vaccine mandates. Using the judiciary and judicial reasoning as the setting, and controlling for individuals' preexisting opinion on COVID‐19 vaccines, we hypothesize that people who prefer vaccine mandates will agree with judicial reasoning that appeals towards individualistic and hierarchical statements. Additionally, we hypothesize that those who have confidence in the judiciary will agree with individualistic and hierarchical statements. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results confirm the hypotheses.

With projected water scarcity, educating the public on household water-saving is essential for water sustainability. This study investigates how experiences of water scarcity, perceived severity of water shortages, and perception of water sustainability affect residential water conservation behavior in Oklahoma, and aims to strengthen the residential water conservation studies in the United States—an understudied topic—and provide evidence-based suggestions to enhance residential water sustainability education. Based on two Zero-Inflated Poisson regressions, the results reveal that those who have experienced drought and are worried about the sustainability of water resources in their community take more no-cost steps to reduce their household water waste. Only experiences of drought have a positive impact on the number of cost-incurring steps taken by households. Based on the result, state and local government’s water-saving initiatives can be more effective if they utilize the drought experiences to attract the public’s attention.

This article describes the three-branch dynamics of the legislative veto before and after the 1983 Supreme Court case Immigration and Naturalization Services v. Chadha. This congressional authority had been used as a check against executive branch action since the 1850s and became more prevalent and controversial in the twentieth century. Decades after the Supreme Court invalidated the congressional power to use the legislative veto, Congress has found ways to get around the judicial ruling. Yet the Chadha precedent fundamentally changed power between the branches in many ways. In the years following the Supreme Court decision, the precedent was used to invalidate or alter a number of important pieces of legislation designed to oversee executive branch authority. Congress can still slip legislative veto-like provisions into some bills, but Chadha's effect on presidential war and emergency powers means Congress must somehow muster large supermajorities to get its way.

Citizen engagement in waste management and recycling programs is crucial in achieving environmental sustainability. Existing studies have explored the determinants of waste management and recycling behavior as well as the adoption of selected waste management and recycling programs at both the individual and organizational levels. However, existing research has not explored, from a civic engagement perspective, why individuals who possess selected waste management and recycling tools fail to use them. Through individual level analysis, this study examines the reasons why residents fail to use their green curbside composting carts. Results indicate that subjective time pressure explains why individuals do not use their composting carts. Additionally, age and household size have different effects on the failure to use green curbside composting carts.