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During the COVID-19 pandemic, school district politics rose to prominence on the nation's political agenda, as school boards grappled with controversial decisions about reopening schools and implementing mask mandates. A growing number of political scientists are using newly available data and innovative research strategies to examine policy responsiveness, elections, segregation and inequality, state takeovers, interest groups, democratic deliberation, and public opinion—all while focusing on the unique context of education politics. We illuminate the distinctive institutional and policy context of US education politics and review new research in the field, including growing evidence of partisan polarization and the continuing significance of race for influencing power and decision making about schools in the United States. The field has made great strides in the last decade; we highlight the emerging themes from that already rapidly growing literature, while pointing out areas for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Democracy Amendments: Constitutional Reforms to Save the United States" by John Davenport is a book that examines the structural faults of the contemporary Constitution and proposes 25 amendments to restore the Republic. Davenport addresses common defects such as the undemocratic Senate, the size of the House, and life tenure for federal court judges, as well as components of America's political experiment that have evolved. While the book makes a valuable contribution to the discussion of constitutional reform, it has some editing errors and questionable linguistic choices. Additionally, Davenport's framing of the undemocratic Senate as "geographical apartheid" is criticized for equating it with the systematic terror inflicted on an entire race. The author also overlooks the possibility of a revolutionary convention to scrap the entirety of the 1787 Constitution and start over. Overall, the book is recommended for those interested in the future of the American polity and constitutional reform. [Extracted from the article]

In the past 20 years, Political Science research has increasingly focused on urban and local politics. We systematically review this literature and find that smaller cities are disproportionally underrepresented, particularly outside the United States. Smaller cities exhibit economic, social, and political patterns that differ from those in large metropolitan areas. Using administrative data and existing research, we show how cities of different sizes vary in their demographic characteristics; citizens' preferences; resources and capacity; intergovernmental relationships; and electoral politics. These patterns indicate the potential to update existing theories in Political Science, including those about gender and political participation, second-order elections, and intergovernmental relationships. We suggest that scholars consider how smaller cities might differ from larger cities and include smaller municipalities in their case study research. We also highlight political issues unique to small cities as new areas of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of racist dehumanization is essential for political scientists who seek to understand the nature, scope, and consequences of white racial prejudice in the United States today. Racist dehumanization consists of a variety of processes that construct, refashion, and maintain race by coding some people as white and therefore fully human and others as other than white and therefore less than fully human. In this review, we focus on the racist dehumanization of Indigenous people and Black people, arguing that processes of dehumanization have long been implicated in both the practice of race-making and concurrent efforts to exploit and dominate racialized groups. We posit that contemporary white racial prejudice can be understood, in part, as the residue of these processes, and we conclude by describing how accounting for racist dehumanization can transform the study of white racial prejudice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although struggles for reparations for slavery and its legacies date back to the earliest period of US politics, they have received relatively little attention from political scientists. Focusing on reparations claims, I argue, can enhance the study of Black social movements and political thought. The recent resurgence of demands for redress for racial injustice, both in the United States and internationally, and contemporary divisions over the politics of memory suggest why reparations are an important indicator of the prospects for multiracial democracy. Because the language of reparations has been used to advance a range of political ends, I conclude by considering some of the dilemmas that remain unresolved in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policy debates in the United States about how to respond to complex issues like climate change and structural racism are often portrayed in polarized terms. Progressives are seen as advocating for transformational responses to major problems, while conservatives are portrayed as denying these problems' existence. However, such depictions obscure the presence of a third bloc that acknowledges these problems' existence but does not support drastic approaches to solving them. Using survey experiments, we examine the relationships between problem belief and solution support in these two issues areas. We find overlap between those who acknowledge the existence of these problems and those who oppose large-scale policy solutions. Furthermore, we observe that the solution proposed may influence attitudes toward the problem. Our results suggest that political scientists and policy activists overestimate the extent of denial of these problems and mistarget persuasive efforts by focusing on problem belief over solution support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most enduring debates in the study of the evolution of criminal justice policy in the United States concerns the role of public opinion. Two viewpoints have thus far dominated pertinent scholarship, with one claiming that criminal justice policy has been genuinely responsive to changes in public opinion, and the other suggesting that incumbent administrations have simulated responsiveness to public attitudes toward criminal justice which they strategically molded themselves. Drawing in part on political science literature that has as yet been little used within criminology, this article seeks to advance an alternative viewpoint. We argue that, in the context of American criminal justice policy since the 1970s, political responsiveness to public opinion has been neither genuine nor so much simulated as it has been what political scientists describe as "segmented"—that is, geared toward specific subgroups whose views are privileged for electoral reasons. Our analysis singles out for scrutiny the crucial period between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s and the alignment of criminal justice policymaking during those years with preferences held and promoted by lobby groups with strong financial incentives at the expense of disadvantaged minorities. In so doing, we combine foci and insights that have typically been accorded discrete consideration in prior critical scholarship, which allows us to demonstrate the aggregate effect that different lobbying activities can have on criminal justice, whether directly and by design or indirectly and by default. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contact with the carceral state—ranging from police stops to prison time—is a frequent experience in the United States, particularly in communities marginalized on the basis of race and class. In recent years, political scientists have sought to measure the impacts of these encounters on individuals' and communities' political engagement. This review describes the main sources of evidence in this literature and what we learn from them. I present a series of stylized facts about the carceral state and political behavior, highlighting places where we know a great deal (such as the relative underrepresentation of people with criminal convictions among voters) and places where more work is needed (such as nonvoting participation and community spillovers). Then, I discuss policy proposals that seek to mitigate the political impacts of the carceral state, and what is and is not yet known about what they might accomplish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of DADOS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The short-term 'reign' of the United States as leader of the world, policeman of the world, is being seriously challenged not only by pundits all over the world but by even political scientists and analysts in the United States itself. In fact, many are seriously opining that the United States is in decline--that it has lost its sense of direction, has taken itself too seriously, and has led the world for its own profit and well-being while disregarding the realities of other nations and peoples. The article attempts to trace the reasons for this sudden reversal of popularity of the DisUnited States of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates the 2020 presidential election within the context of U.S. history, specifically the longstanding relationship between white supremacist views and what types of U.S. citizens were considered capable of exercising democratic citizenship. I argue that President Trump's use of racialized, nativist tropes must be understood within that context and the ongoing backlash to the advancement of civil rights in the United States. White resistance to racial progress is not new, nor is the violence associated with it. Only by looking at the intersection of white racial resentment and modern sexism can we fully understand the durability of the Trump coalition. The article closes by considering what political scientists should be learning from this moment in order to better explain American political dynamics moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Przegląd Europejski is the property of University of Warsaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The adage "All politics is local" in the United States is largely true. Of the United States' 90,106 governments, 99.9% are local governments. Despite variations in institutional features, descriptive representation, and policy-making power, political scientists have been slow to take advantage of these variations. One obstacle is that comprehensive data on local politics is often extremely difficult to obtain; as a result, data is unavailable or costly, hard to replicate, and rarely updated. We provide an alternative: crowdsourcing this data. We demonstrate and validate crowdsourcing data on local politics using two different data collection projects. We evaluate different measures of consensus across coders and validate the crowd's work against elite and professional datasets. In doing so, we show that crowdsourced data is both highly accurate and easy to use. In doing so, we demonstrate that nonexperts can be used to collect, validate, or update local data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congressional hearings are a venue in which social scientists present their views and analyses before lawmakers in the United States, however quantitative data on their representation has been lacking. We present new, publicly available, data on the rates at which anthropologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists appeared before United States congressional hearings from 1946 through 2016. We show that social scientists were present at some 10,347 hearings and testified 15,506 times. Economists testify before the US Congress far more often than other social scientists, and constitute a larger proportion of the social scientists testifying in industry and government positions. We find that social scientists' testimony is increasingly on behalf of think tanks; political scientists, in particular, have gained much more representation through think tanks. Sociology, and psychology's representation before Congress has declined considerably beginning in the 1980s. Anthropologists were the least represented. These findings show that academics are representing a more diverse set of organizations, but economists continue to be far more represented than other disciplines before the US Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Third-party candidates in the United States routinely see a decline in support in the final weeks of presidential campaigns. While political scientists attribute this partially to Duverger's Law, many communication scholars have tied this collapse to media coverage that frames third-party candidates as fringe outsiders, longshots, and spoilers. This study extends these explanations of third-party failure by describing the rhetorical containment of third-party voters. Based on a case study of the 2016 presidential election and public debate about supporters of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, the essay suggests such voters face a form of marginalization that portrays them as intruders in a two-party race, as immature and uninformed, and responsible for eventual victors, while presenting them a false choice of winning by sacrificing their cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Appalachia—historically a culturally and politically unique region of the United States—has been effectively ignored by contemporary political scientists. Using a unique measure of Appalachian residence, this article analyzes racial attitudes, religion, and Appalachian opposition to the 2008 presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. Methods: I use regression analysis to assess the extent to which Appalachian residents differ in their levels of perceived racial favoritism, identification as born‐again Christians, and frequency of church attendance, as well as whether these variables can mediate the seeming regional effect of Appalachia in a standard vote choice model. Results: I first demonstrate higher levels of perceived racial favoritism and, especially, higher levels of a particular type of religiosity in the region. I then assess whether these measures can mediate Appalachian distinctiveness in presidential vote choice. When perceived racial favoritism, church attendance, and born‐again Christian status are controlled for in regression models, Appalachian regional opposition to the 2008 Obama candidacy disappears statistically. Conclusion: While race and religion both "matter," I find it is religion that seems to matter more in explaining Appalachian distinctiveness, particularly relative to traditional southern distinctiveness. This provides a new vantage point from which to assess southern politics debates about subregional variation and the relative roles of race and religion, as well as sets the foundation for further analyses of Appalachia and American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual misconduct matters not only when it is perpetuated by political actors in political institutions. It matters wherever it happens and whomever it happens to, because it is, at its base, political. Politics is fundamentally about power: who gets what, when, and how. As political scientists it should be at the heart of what we study, but it isn't. Our discipline creates artificial (and somewhat arbitrary) boundaries about which studies of politics count as meaningful research and which do not. We discourage research that explores more expansive notions of how politics is practiced in broader society. As academics we have the luxury of speaking out. I argue here that political scientists ought to embrace an expansive definition of politics to address the real questions of power, its abuse in our society and in our profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the differences in opinion of U.S. political scientists Bernard Brodie and Herman Kahn on the nation's nuclear strategy. During the last 20 years, most of the policy scientists across the world have come to believe that a nation must develop plans and weapons necessary to fight a nuclear war. Brodie has focused mostly on the likely costs of war in his early writings. He dusted off an old concept, "deterrence," to show just how atomic weapons should be used to prevent war. Unlike Brodie, Kahn quantified and applied abstract logic to nuclear war. Kahn rejected Brodie's version of deterrence and called for deterring the Soviet Union by giving the U.S. the capability to fight and win a nuclear war.

Objectives: Despite declining trust in government institutions, political scientists have observed increasing political participation across activities, including grassroots lobbying. We argue that higher levels of trust in the state political system as a whole—diffuse political trust—and in state legislatures—specific political trust—should increase the likelihood that citizens contact their state legislators about policy matters because higher levels of trust tend to correlate with believing that the policy‐making process produces equitable political outcomes. Methods: We use observational data from a nationally representative survey sample taken in 2015. Results: We find mixed results: whereas diffuse political trust predicts participation in grassroots lobbying at the state level, specific political trust does not. Conclusion: This finding implies that more general feelings of political trust exert greater influence on grassroots lobbying behavior than do more institution‐specific indicators of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pundits and the popular press believe that the narratives about the candidates' personalities during the campaign influence the outcome of the election. Political scientists, in contrast, are dismissive of this influence. Instead, Political Scientists view the narrative about candidates as a sideshow and any connection between voters' impressions of the candidates' personalities and their vote as epiphenomenal. Unfortunately, the academic literature never directly measures the key concept of interest: the movement in image of the candidates' personalities during the campaign. Drawing on the connection between language and personality, particularly the Big Five model of personality, this paper demonstrates that the images of the candidates’ personalities in the 2008 election shape the standing of the candidates among the electorate. The results suggest that the image projected of the candidates in the campaigns played an influential role in the outcome of the election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay raises several issues triggered by Norah Mackendrick's (2017) piece “Out of the Labs and into the Streets,” which appeared in “The Forum.” Using that essay as a springboard, I reflect on the complicated relationship between science and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, a team of U.S. political scientists and computer specialists designed an automated, computerized information system that could ostensibly forecast conflict earlier and more accurately than human analysts. Named the Crisis Early Warning and Monitoring System (EWAMS), it sought to bring international relations scholarship and U.S. national security policy—traditionally qualitative and interpretive domains—under the jurisdiction of a man–machine system. Drawing together the histories of social science, computing, and foreign policy, this essay argues that deep epistemic insecurities led social scientists to apply information technology to the production of policy knowledge. Computers, they hoped, could overcome the innate cognitive limitations that imperiled human decision making. By showing how social scientists’ computational zeal overshadowed their commitment to human agency, this essay also demonstrates that the history of science has an important role to play in contemporary debates about the implications of big data projects for knowledge and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. Oftentimes, political scientists wish to measure how attitudes or behaviors have changed from one generation to the next. One obstacle to this analysis is that certain attitudinal and behavioral variables (e.g., political participation or policy preferences) correlate with the age of the respondent. In seeking to model both age- and cohort-based changes in attitudes, researchers are left having to impose constraints within the generalized linear model framework to solve problems of underidentification. Methods. This article uses a method that has been developed to work around this exact problem: the intrinsic estimator. Results. By using this approach to traditional ageperiod- cohort (APC) models, the IE is one solution to underidentified models of political change. Conclusions. This article summarizes the identification problem in APC methodology and then illustrates the advantages of the IE to the traditionally used constrained generalized linear modeling (CGLIM) approach with specific applications to trends in American political attitudes regarding spending on space exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, American political science has rarely engaged popular culture as a central topic of study, despite the domain’s outsized influence in American community life. This article argues that this marginalization is, in part, the by-product of long-standing disciplinary debates over the inadequate political development of the American public. To develop this argument, the article first surveys the work of early political scientists, such as John Burgess and Woodrow Wilson, to show that their reformist ambitions largely precluded discussion of mundane activities of social life such as popular culture. It then turns to Harold Lasswell, who produced some of the first investigations of popular culture in American political science. Ironically, however, his work – and the work of those who adapted similar ways of speaking about popular culture after him – only reinforced skepticisms concerning the American public. It has thus helped keep the topic on the margins of disciplinary discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obituary for Cedric Robinson, a political scientist and professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is presented.

An essay is presented on American political scientist Richard Fenno. Topics discussed in the essay include U.S. Congress, American politics and books by Fenno including "The Power of the Purse: Appropriations Politics in Congress", "Congressmen in Committees" and "Home Style: House Members in Their Districts". Other topics which includes policy making, appropriations committees and congressional behavior are also discussed. In addition, topics which includes U.S. Senate, political campaigning and governing in Fenno's books are also discussed.

This Symposium brings together the academic and publishing industry in two key countries (the UK and the US) to analyse and assess the implications of Open Access (OA) journal publishing in the social and political sciences, as well as its different formats and developments to date. With articles by three academics (all involved in academic associations) and three publishers, the Symposium represents an exchange of views that help each of the two sectors understand better the perspectives of the other. More generally, the Symposium aims to raise the visibility of OA among the academic community whose general awareness and knowledge of OA - compared with publishers - has been rather limited to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deep sea, defined as those parts of the ocean below 200 meters, is increasingly the site of intensive resource exploitation for fish, minerals, and other uses, yet little thought has been given to effective governance by either scholars or policy-makers. This article provides an overview of existing deep-sea governance arrangements, as well as a description of the barriers to developing a more effective institutional framework, with particular focus on the unique status of the deep sea as part of the common heritage of mankind, the logistical challenges inherent in monitoring resource exploitation in the deep sea, and the lack of available scientific data. We call for greater engagement by political scientists and environmental studies scholars in addressing these challenges and protecting one of Earth's last true frontiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]