The “home–field” dichotomy has long been a core assumption of fieldwork in political science. As in other social science disciplines, political scientists rely on these categories to contextualize our research within particular time–space nexuses and to separate our personal lives and private dwellings and institutions from our sources, participants, and broader research environments. Although the spatial, temporal, and emotional divisions between our “homes” and “fields” have always been arbitrary, they are increasingly blurred when we use remote and online methods for research, especially for qualitative studies. This article problematizes the home–field dichotomy within the context of remote and online political science field research. We contend that the overlap of our homes and fields in digital fieldwork poses different challenges for our professional boundaries than offline research, particularly in terms of separating our personal and research lives, mitigating risk, and protecting our mental health. Given the growing use of remote and online methods, we argue that the discipline of political science must account more seriously for the muddling of our homes and fields to support rigorous, transparent, and ethical empirical research.

Fostering diversity in political science careers is important. Undergraduate research experiences, coupled with an emphasis on career diversity, have the potential to increase relevant knowledge about and buoy tendencies toward pursuing a PhD among students from diverse backgrounds. This article describes components of a US National Science Foundation–funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program that highlighted career diversity. We find evidence of positive shifts in awareness of career opportunities for those with doctoral degrees alongside sustained interest in pursuing a PhD. We conclude that an emphasis on career diversity can be a useful component of efforts to shape students’ attitudes and inclinations toward a PhD.

This article introduces the LGBTQ+ Special edition of PS. It traces major developments of queer scholarship in political science beginning with Kenneth Sherrill’s 1973 paper, “Leaders in the Gay Activist Movement: The Problem of Finding Followers,” which was the first paper presented at an APSA annual meeting on a queer topic. As part of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Professor Sherrill’s first paper, this introduction describes the efforts scholars made in their work and in the American Political Science Association to legitimate LGBTQ+ scholarship during the past half decade.

Higher educational cooperation has long been central to China’s foreign relations. This article examines the political ramifications of the exodus of international students from China during the COVID-19 pandemic. China introduced some of the world’s most restrictive entry requirements for international travelers, forcing most international students at Chinese universities to study remotely between the Spring semesters of 2020 and 2022. This affected the 221,700 foreign students who were enrolled in Chinese universities, 81,600 of whom were from African countries (Mulvey 2021; UNESCO 2022). Travel restrictions were barely eased until late in the spring semester of 2022, and the border was finally opened for most students during the fall semester of 2022 (Liu and Peng 2024). Some students missed five semesters of in-person classes, and others gave up on their studies in China altogether. Thousands of students campaigned globally for the right to travel to China, attend classes in person, and get the educational experience they had envisioned.

Ethiopia aspired to become Africa’s “light manufacturing hub” and a “lower middle-income country” by 2025 (National Planning Commission 2016, 143, 169). Successive Ethiopian governments launched long-term plans and pursued industrial policies in line with a declared “developmental state” approach inspired by Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese models (Aberg and Becker 2020; Cheru and Oqubay 2019; Clapham 2018; Fourie 2015; Gebreeyesus 2013; Oqubay 2018). The intention was to build on the country’s comparative advantages of cheap land and labor to develop manufacturing with backward linkages to the domestic economy, focus on labor-intensive light manufacturing, build special economic zones (SEZs) to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and promote exports for global markets to create jobs, enhance skills, expand the private sector, and kickstart wider industrialization.

The burgeoning China–Africa debates often fail to consider questions of African agency and, in particular, the role played by non-state actors (NSAs)—such as civil society organizations (CSOs), the media, and local groups—to give greater voice to African agency in Sino–African relations (SRA). Drawing on qualitative methods (i.e., interviews and content analysis), this study examines the relationship and focuses primarily on the case of Ghana to investigate how these NSAs engage, negotiate, influence, and resist Chinese actors’ involvement in Africa. It answers the question: “To what extent do NSAs (i.e., CSOs, the media, and local groups) exert agency in Sino–Ghana relations?”

In the past two decades, China has emerged as Africa’s biggest bilateral trading partner, its top five foreign direct investors, a significant contributor for development finance, and a contractor for infrastructure finance (Oqubay and Lin 2019). The study of how African agents have negotiated with or (re)defined institutions or entities in this relationship and how agents negotiate or utilize existing power structures to maintain or redefine existing settings has witnessed a surge in the past 20 years. The increase in literature on “African agency” offers not only a deeper understanding of the different ways that African actors use their various spaces of engagement to their advantage; it also has allowed researchers to more effectively locate, unpack, and outline such agency (Chipaike and Bischoff 2018; Chipaike and Bischoff 2019; Chipaike and Knowledge 2018; Chiyemura 2020; Corkin 2013; Cheru and Obi 2010; Gadzala 2015; Kragelund and Carmody 2016; Mohan and Lampert 2012; Mann 2023; Odoom 2019; Otele 2016). However, much of this literature categorizes African agency into general categories, such as state, nonstate, elite, and local agency. Although general categories prove useful for an initial understanding, they are limited in explaining the different ways that agency is carried out by different African actors within the state apparatus or among nonstate actors, their modalities, and their impact. Various actors within these large categories of state and nonstate actors exercise agency differently with different motivations, and they use different repertoires of action.

We address the anti-trans/queer panic integral to the ascendance of authoritarian politics in America and respond by calling on all political scientists to “queer” political science by undoing the cisheteronormativity of the discipline. We contend that this is not the special obligation of LGBTQ scholars but all political scientists. In this we follow Eve Sedgwick’s orientation away from a “minoritizing” to a “universalizing” epistemological perspective that situates this responsibility relative to resisting democratic decline.

The descriptive representation of stigmatized groups has numerous benefits both to group members and society at large. We study the extent to which LGB members of the US Congress provide increased support for LGBT rights. While LGBT substantive representation has been studied extensively, descriptive representation has been examined extensively at only the local and state levels. The absence of research at the federal level is important because federal policy is essential to expanding gay rights. We overcome issues related to the small number of openly LGBT Members of Congress and the few bills either introduced or receiving votes by examining LGB legislators over 24 years (i.e., 6,425 legislator–Congress pairs) using Human Rights Campaign scores. Using Coarsened Exact Matching, we find a substantively small but statistically significant and consistently positive effect: LGB members of Congress are more supportive of LGBT rights than other members with a similar background and from a similar district. The use of matching may provide a useful approach for scholars who are interested in studying the link between descriptive and substantive representation for other small groups.

As societal conceptions of gender have evolved, so too have survey-based approaches to the measurement of gender. Yet, most research innovations and insights regarding the measurement of gender come from online or phone surveys in the Global North. We focus on face-to-face surveys in the Global South, specifically in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. Through in-person interviews, an online experiment, and survey experiments, we identify and assess an open-ended approach to incorporating respondent-provided gender identity in face-to-face interviews. Our results affirm that the measure is comparatively effective in minimizing discomfort and does not have substantial consequences for data quality across a diverse set of LAC countries. We discuss the potential traveling capacity of our approach and identify paths for further research on best practices in recording interviewee gender in face-to-face surveys in the LAC region and beyond.

This article shows how the sudden introduction of large language models (LLMs) has allowed a sudden, significant increase in the ability of political science professionals to plagiarize their articles by prompting LLMs to write for them. Evidence of this is shown through a brief overview of the limitations of LLMs and by searching for words that are disproportionately used by the most popular LLM, ChatGPT, in peer-reviewed articles. What is found is a rapid spike in the use of words that are unremarkable except for their popularity in ChatGPT’s output as determined by an AI professional. This shows that this method can be used to indicate the likelihood of plagiarism in a given article. It then concludes with the limitations of this keyword detection method and recommendations for limiting LLM plagiarism in the field of political science as a whole.

This article theorizes hetero-modernity as generating the heterosexualization of modernity, enacting a colonial sexual order that attempts a queer-death project through the dialectics of (re)integration and elimination. It is, in essence, the colonization of sexual existence. The emergence of the hetero-modern world pursues queer death via multiple sites of violence—political, economic, and ontological—culminating in the systemic dehumanizing of queer subjects. This sexual domination produces and sustains manifold forms of anti-queer violence. As such, the article not only proffers the queering of modernity as a critique of sexuality but also provides an intersectional analysis with raced, classed, and gendered implications. By situating Black studies and queer studies in dialogic exchange, it contends that queering modernity necessitates queering universal emancipation for sexual liberation.

In the past five years, 13 counties in Eastern Oregon have voted in nonbinding referendums to separate from the liberal state of Oregon to join the conservative state of Idaho. Drawing on theories of secessionism and irredentism, this article examines the drivers of the so-called Greater Idaho movement by administering a survey in these separatist counties. Our findings indicate that economic discontent and a strong regional identity are more important than fears or partisanship in determining support for moving the interstate border. Our study suggests that more inclusive governance may help to overcome ideological polarization in this case and offers insights into how political divisions may be managed to prevent separatist violence in the United States more generally. We conclude that political minorities need to believe that they have a voice in the system so that they do not mobilize for exit.

The discipline of political science faces significant disparities in the representation and participation of underrepresented groups in graduate education, including first-generation college students, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. Underrepresentation has a wide variety of limiting effects, including a narrower range of questions being explored within the field. This article proposes a template for teaching and mentoring undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds to enhance their opportunities in graduate programs. Specifically, it examines the Mobilization and Political Economy (MPE) Summer Program, an in-residence graduate pipeline program designed to equip participants to study and conduct research on political mobilization, social movements, and political economy. The MPE Summer Program aims to develop and sustain broad-scale collaborative infrastructures that prefigure reciprocal and equitable pathways to increase participation in the social sciences across the United States.

Classroom discussions of current events and controversial topics can devolve into unproductive and highly charged debates. This article describes an in-class exercise used to foster respect during difficult conversations by encouraging students to design rules for discussions and guidelines to create a safe space for dialogue. This activity relies on three underlying principles: trust, empowerment, and empathy. These principles can be integrated into a broader pedagogical approach that emphasizes a democratic classroom and active learning. Student feedback shows that the intervention can be useful for promoting respectful and engaging discussions during moments of tension and polarization. However, an emphasis on civility also may undermine the diversity of opinions and require respecting students’ silences.

Although linked fate has been recognized as a driving force in the politics of various identity groups, should this theoretical framework be applied to queer politics? I ask, what are the outcomes and dynamics of linked fate among members of the queer community? How does linked fate shape queer political participation? Is the concept an adequate indicator of politicized queer identity? Drawing on data from the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey, I uncover widespread linked fate among queer Americans, with significant variation along the lines of intersectional identity. Linked fate can motivate participation, but more powerfully shapes participation beyond the ballot box. I close by calling for a queer-specific metric of linked fate that accounts for several dimensions of queer political identity. As the queer community grows increasingly salient in US party politics, this study identifies avenues for future research into this diverse population.

This article provides a global ranking of research productivity of political science departments. We collected data on 115,427 articles and 12,696 books—written in both English and other languages—from 5,586 faculty members in 178 departments in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. Departments are ranked in terms of citations to articles published by faculty members, impact factors of journals in which they published, and number of top publications in which they published. Results are presented for overall and more recent research productivity.

Survey researchers increasingly recognize the need to update their gender questions to recognize the existence of transgender and nonbinary people. In this research note, we evaluate changes to the Canadian Election Study (CES) gender questions from 2019 to 2021. Our analyses suggest researchers should add “nonbinary” as a close-ended option and an open-ended response option to gender identity questions. They also suggest that researchers should not include “transgender” in a separate, mutually exclusive response option alongside men and women in gender identity questions but instead identify transgender men and women through a follow-up question. These recommendations can help guide the design of future surveys.