We report the results of a survey of international relations (IR) scholars on the use of an increasingly common policy designed to close recognition gaps in IR: gender balance in citation (GBC) statements. GBC statements remind and encourage authors submitting work to peer-reviewed outlets to consider the gender balance among the works they cite. We find that these policies enjoyed wide support among IR scholars in our sample countries soon after journals began instituting the policies, but women were more supportive than men of the policies. We also report the results of a question-order experiment that allows us to study how raising awareness of gender gaps in the IR discipline affects the proportion of women that scholars list among the most influential IR scholars in the last 20 years. The effects of exposure to the gender treatment vary, however, by respondents' gender and whether respondents teach in the United States. The treatment effects were much larger for women than for men in the United States, but the reverse was true outside the United States.

Conceptualizes Gerrymandering as segregation and adopts spatial segregation measures to detect legislative districts that have the effect of disenfranchising black and Latino populations.

This paper provides a novel and systematic technique for differentiating legislative districts that are “naturally packed” with racial minorities from those that are “unnaturally packed.” Unnaturally packed districts—called segregated districts in this paper—contain greater shares of racial minorities than the share of racial minorities in the geographic regions in which they are located. By contrast, “naturally packed” districts are the ineluctable result of the geographic concentration of large numbers of minorities (often in urban areas) and are thus non-segregated. Differentiating segregated from non-segregated districts requires observing the average share of racial minorities among the nearest N neighbors of a district’s residents (where N is the number of people in a state divided by the number of legislative districts). When the share of minorities in a district exceeds the average share of minorities who are the nearest N neighbors of district residents, the district is segregated. This paper explains how to measure segregation for individual legislative districts, provides a test case by examining Virginia’s State House Districts ruled Unconstitutional in Bethune-Hill v. Virginia Board of Elections, and shows how measuring segregation provides information different from typical ways of detecting gerrymanders.

We study how informing the public about the views of international policy experts shapes public support for international cooperation. Using survey experiments, we test whether variation in levels of support among experts with differing types of domain-specific knowledge can shape public support for a recent and politically salient international treaty: the UNFCCC COP21 Paris Climate Agreement. Our results show that the public is, under certain conditions, deferential to the views of experts, with respondents reporting increasingly higher levels of support for the COP21 agreement as support among experts increased. In addition, we provide suggestive evidence that domain-specific expertise matters: When it comes to support for the COP21 agreement, the public is most sensitive to the views of climate scientists, while exposure to the views of international relations and international economics experts have less dramatic and less consistent effects. Despite these results, we find that it is exposing the public to information about opposition to a proposed treaty among members of relevant epistemic communities that has greatest and most consistent effects. Our findings thus provide new insight into the conditions under which epistemic communities can shape public support for particular policy alternatives.

ABSTRACTMany observers of the international relations (IR) discipline express concern about the decline in policy-relevant research within the academy. Some blame an academic culture and academic institutions that incentivize abstract, quantitative, or theoretical work that speaks to scholarly debates rather than real-world problems. This article asks how IR scholars value both scholarly and policy publications. Using data from the TRIP survey, we found that publications generally considered policy relevant are undervalued in academic tenure decisions. These findings hold regardless of whether faculty have attained tenure or whether they consider their own research to be policy relevant. However, scholars who consult, teach at colleges rather than research universities, or teach in Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs schools rather than political science departments are likely to believe: (1) that policy-relevant research products are currently valued more highly than their colleagues estimate; and (2) on the normative question, that these policy publications should be valued even more highly than they are. Overall, these results suggest an openness to increasing the value of policy-relevant research in tenure decisions as part of an effort to increase the amount of policy-focused work in the discipline.

Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project, we address several questions posed by students of the international relations (IR) discipline, specifically, whether and to what extent: US scholars, institutions, and journals dominate the field; national communities of IR scholars are insular or inward-looking; and/or the discipline is theoretically, methodologically, and epistemologically diverse. We draw from two major data sources: a series of cross-national surveys of IR faculty in thirty-two countries and a database of journal articles published in the twelve leading IR journals from 1980 to 2014. We find obvious signs of US hegemony and insularity. Other national IR communities are relatively open to foreign ideas, if not to hiring scholars trained in other countries. Finally, despite US hegemony in the discipline and pockets of geographic insularity, we see a diverse field characterized by a wide range of theoretical, methodological, and epistemological commitments. We conclude with a discussion on the sources and consequences of diversity in the international relations discipline.

Much of our understanding of social influence in individual political behavior stems from representative surveys asking respondents to identify characteristics of a small number of people they talk to most frequently. By focusing only on these few close contacts, we have implicitly assumed that less-intimate associates and features of network structure hold little influence over others' attitudes and behavior. We test these assumptions with a survey that attempted to interview all students at a small university during a highly-salient municipal election. By focusing on a small, well-defined community, we are able to explore the relationship between individuals, their close associates, and also less-immediate associates. We are also able to explore features of network structure unobtainable in representative samples. We demonstrate that these less-immediate associates and network features have the potential to exert important influence that conventional survey approaches would miss.

Unrecognized statelets may be forming in the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine under the aegis of Russian protectiona frozen conflict. Georgia's past provides a useful cautionary tale in reference to Ukraine's probable future. The very same conceptual debates that are currently underway in the West with respect to Ukrainecredibility of great-power security guarantees versus chain-ganginghave, over the past twenty years, generated policies that facilitated the rise of political coalitions within Georgia that prefer war with Russia to any other outcome.

In a foreign policy crisis between a strong and weak state, do citizens of the weaker party punish or reward a leader that escalates the crisis? Strong evidence suggests that there were electoral incentives for Georgian escalation in its August 2008 war with Russia. This article combines data from survey experiments, conducted on Georgian voters just weeks prior to the August 2008 war, with open-ended survey response questions from a survey fielded just weeks after the war. Respondents evaluated their leader's crisis behavior in the aftermath of a real war differently than the evidence from pre-war survey experiments would have suggested. The divergence in findings is demonstrated by providing evidence of three empirical phenomena: a "Rally 'Round the Flag" effect, a "Fog of War" effect, and systematic differences in evaluations of leader performance depending on respondents' proximity to actual violence.

This study examines the relationship between political discussion on Facebook and social network location. It uses a survey name generator to map friendship ties between students at a university and to calculate their centralities in that network. Social connectedness in the university network positively predicts more frequent political discussion on Facebook. But in political discussions, better connected individuals do not capitalize equally on the potential influence that stems from their more central network locations. Popular individuals who have more direct connections to other network members discuss politics more often but in politically safer interactions that minimize social risk, preferring more engaged discussion with like-minded others and editing their privacy settings to guard their political disclosures. Gatekeepers who facilitate connections between more pairs of otherwise disconnected network members also discuss politics more frequently, but are more likely to engage in risk-tolerant discussion practices such as posting political updates or attempting political persuasion. These novel findings on social connectedness extend research on offline political discussion into the social media sphere, and suggest that as social network research proliferates, analysts should consider how various types of network location shape political behavior.

Charts and graphs are presented with results from a survey by the publication together with the College of William and Mary on U.S. foreign policy and the study of international relations (IR) in the U.S., including the universities with the best IR programs, the most important foreign policy issues facing the U.S., and the best U.S. secretary of state since the 1960s.

In this article we present several important first steps toward understanding the role of academics in shaping US foreign policy – identifying their policy views on one of the most salient foreign policy issues of this generation, the US War in Iraq; exploring how those views differ from public opinion more generally; and assessing the extent to which scholarly opinion was reflected in the public debate. To determine how IR scholars’ views on the invasion of Iraq differed from those of the public, we compare the answers of IR scholars at US colleges and universities to those of the US public on similar opinion survey questions. To this end, we analyze data from a unique series of surveys of IR scholars conducted by the Teaching, Research, and International Policy project.

Why do powerful countries often attempt to channel coercive military action through international organizations (IOs)? The process of seeking IO approval for military action is often costly and the outcome of such efforts is uncertain. However, many states delay or forgo military action unless or until proposed missions are approved by one or more IOs. One explanation for such behavior focuses on the legitimizing effect of IO approval – if state leaders or citizens are more likely to support the use of force in the event of IO approval, then such support provides evidence for the legitimacy beliefs of relevant actors in the international system. In this paper we seek to explore the conditions under which IO approval will increase the political support for the use of force and we seek to empirically sort out some of the mechanisms that cause support to vary across time, space, issue area, and IO. The legitimacy of different IOs and the legitimacy of the same IOs likely vary across time and space. Hence we design our empirical strategy in an effort to describe and explain this variation.

This article investigates the extent to which citation and publication patterns differ between men and women in the international relations (IR) literature. Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy project on peer-reviewed publications between 1980 and 2007, we show that women are systematically cited less than men after controlling for a large number of variables including year of publication, quality of publication, substantive focus, theoretical perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation. These results are robust to a variety of modeling choices. We then turn to network analysis to investigate the extent to which the gender of an article’s author affects that article’s relative centrality in the network of citations between papers in our sample. Articles authored by women are systematically less central than articles authored by men, all else equal. This is likely because (1) women tend to cite themselves less than men, and (1) men (who make up a disproportionate share of IR scholars) tend to cite men more than women. This is the first study in political science to reveal significant gender differences in citation patterns and is especially meaningful because citation counts are increasingly used as a key measure of research’s quality and impact.