This article reviews the results of a discipline-wide survey concerning lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered in the discipline. We find that both research and teaching on LGBT topics have made some headway into the discipline, and that political scientists largely accept that LGBT issues can be fundamentally political and are worth studying and teaching for that reason. Nonetheless, troubling questions about discrimination both against those who conduct research concerning LBGT issues and LGBT individuals themselves remain.

This article highlights a number of different pedagogical practices that can be used with study abroad programs, both classroom methods and out-of-class techniques. In this particular class—which focused on Estonia's Singing Revolution and included a 10-day trip abroad to Estonia—social media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr were frequently used to create collaboration among students. In addition, Estonian music and pop culture were studied, giving students a unique insight into a culture very foreign from their own. Although Estonia was the focus of this particular class, the results of these methods are generalizable to help others who lead study abroad programs and develop creative ways to foster interaction. This article also demonstrates why social media platforms are helpful to political scientists and the political science discipline more generally.

Although much of the United States undoubtedly was aware of the impeachment hearings and trial for President Donald Trump in 2019–2020, the extent to which information about those events influenced the public remains unknown. Building on scholarship about public opinion and democratic governance, we attempted to fill this knowledge gap through a unique survey. We asked half of our sample to answer three factual questions pertaining to Trump’s first impeachment trial. We ran a quasi-experiment on the other half, trying to influence their view of the trial by informing them of the same three facts that we asked the first group. The quasi-experiment demonstrates that support for acquittal was largely static and that partisanship strongly influences whether the public accepts the veracity and importance of political information. Consequently, civic knowledge today appears to have a limited—perhaps even nonexistent—effect on public attitudes about American politics.

Both service learning and simulations have been shown to positively impact student outcomes, but they are not often used together. This article examines how to effectively combine these active learning styles to reap the benefits of both. After examining a case in which the two were combined and the impact this approach had on student evaluations and learning outcomes, I discuss how such projects can be successfully executed in a variety of other classes.

It is quite an honor to be selected for this John Gaus Award Lecture by a committee of my peers. I want to thank my husband, Bill Berry—my partner for 48 years and sometimes coauthor—and certainly my children, Katie Berry and David Berry, who have diverted my attention from policy studies for 35 years now and made life much more enjoyable by their personalities. I especially want to thank my many coauthors who have kept research and writing an engaging endeavor while we have developed friendships that will last a lifetime.

Teaching undergraduate students, mentoring graduate students, and generating publishable research are distinct tasks for many political scientists. This article highlights lessons for merging these activities through experiences from an initiative that sparked a series of collaborative-research projects focused on opinions about crime and punishment in the United States. This article describes three collaborative projects conducted between 2015 and 2017 to demonstrate how to merge undergraduate teaching, graduate training, and producing research. By participating in these projects, students learned about social-scientific research through hands-on experiences designing experiments, collecting and analyzing original data, and reporting empirical findings to a public audience. This approach is an effective way to engage students and generate research that can advance professional goals.

Foreign policy and security studies typically are considered male-dominated domains in the discipline of international relations (IR), yet many women work in these policy domains, particularly in the United States. The “invisible women” working in foreign policy often come from fields such as IR, in which gender stereotypes may influence their understanding of the careers available to them. This research project seeks to understand student assumptions about gender roles in IR and the effects of those assumptions. Survey data collected from students in IR courses in 2011 and 2012 reveal that stereotyping of IR subfields is common but that individual students’ academic and career interests often diverge from those stereotypes. This finding is relevant not simply because it may explain the presence of women in foreign-policy careers but also because it provides useful pedagogical information for instructors in the IR field.

Although ethnographic methods have yielded important insights into the inner workings of many political institutions, their use in the study of institutions engaged in national security policy making and practice has been more limited. Common features of security institutions raise methodological and ethical concerns for participant observers: they are hard to access, handle classified information, and their proximity to the use of violence creates challenges for researchers who adopt critical perspectives toward the framing and practice of national security. This article reflects on how critical ethnographers might respond to these challenges, drawing on experiences from a 14-month ethnographically influenced study of UK government departments involved in national security policy making. I argue that even though questions of informed consent and avoiding harm are complicated by the core functions of security institutions and their cultures of busyness and secrecy, navigating these tensions can itself generate useful ethnographic insights into institutional cultures.

Information and communication technology (ICT) programs like Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote have become the norm for large university lecture classes, but their record in terms of student engagement and active learning is mixed at best. Here, the author presents the merits of a “populist” lecture style that takes full advantage of the variety of features available from the latest generation of ICT programs. Based on visual variety, audio and visual sound bites, and the incorporation of humor and pop-cultural references, this populist approach not only facilitates greater student attention and engagement with the class materials, but also offers unmatched opportunities for extending student learning beyond the confines of the large lecture hall.

In this article, I describe my work with Michigan State Universityundergraduates to produce the Michigan Policy Network, a web-basedpublic service and research program that reports news andinformation about the political process surrounding Michigan statepolicy issues. The program empowers undergraduates to overseewebsite sections devoted to policy issue areas, each of whichfeatures background information, research, and current updates ongovernment action, as well as regular blog posts, that aim to makethe information accessible to a public audience. I explain how toinexpensively set up such a program and reflect on the strengths andweaknesses of the approach. I evaluate the four different methodsthat I have used to integrate the policy network with traditionalteaching: (1) working with students as an extracurricular activity,(2) organizing a summer program for government interns acting asresearchers, (3) integrating network assignments with traditionalhomework in topical classes, and (4) teaching a separate class forfreshman honors students. My experience suggests that students aremotivated to complete work intended for a public audience and arewell-equipped to translate government information for publicreaders. Working on the policy network improves student employmentprospects and helps build connections between state government andthe university. I recommend that similar programs be developedelsewhere.

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.

In 1970, Victoria Schuck reported in PS on femaleparticipation at our annual meetings from 1959 to 1969. Ever since1972 I have written on the gender participation balance at ourannual meetings, at first as a letter, later as a regularlyappearing note in this publication. This fall is the thirty-seventhtime I reported to the association membership about the tally.(Since I retired at the end of the 2007–08 academic year, I hopesomeone else will continue the number crunching.)