ELECTORAL POLITICAL SCIENCE: FROM APPEARANCE TO AUTONOMIZATION

The article considers the development of electoral political science as a new direction of Ukrainian political science. It is noted that in connection with the democratization of post-Soviet political regimes, there is an objective need to conduct electoral research, which should explain the peculiarities of voter behavior and the prospects for the use of electoral technologies. The origins of electoral research in American political science (P. Lazarsfeld, B. Berelson, G. Goda, E. Katz) and their perspectives in the context of possible autonomy in Ukrainian political science are shown. The contribution of specific foreign and domestic scientists to the development of electoral political science is highlighted. It is concluded that in Ukraine electoral political science as a scientific discourse emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century almost "from scratch" and is now formed as an autonomous branch of domestic political science.

A Call to APSA Part 2: Bring in Community College Faculty

ABSTRACT This article uses data from a 2018 survey conducted by the American Political Science Association Committee on the Status of Community Colleges in the Profession to make specific policy recommendations for how to better reach out to and incorporate political science faculty teaching at community colleges into the association.

How Gendered Is the Peer-Review Process? A Mixed-Design Analysis of Reviewer Feedback

ABSTRACT A fair peer-review process is essential for the integrity of a discipline’s scholarly standards. However, underrepresentation of scholarly groups casts doubt on fairness, which currently is raising concerns about a gender bias in the peer-review process of premier scholarly journals such as the American Political Science Review (APSR). This study examines gender differences in APSR reviewing during the period 2007–2020. Our explorative analysis suggests that male reviewers privilege male authors and female reviewers privilege female authors, whereas manuscripts reviewed by both male and female reviewers indicate less gender bias. Using within-manuscript variation to address confounding effects, we then show that manuscripts reviewed by both male and female reviewers receive a more positive evaluation by female reviewers in terms of recommendation and sentiment, but they experience a marginally longer duration. Because these effects are not specific for type of authorship, we recommend that invitations to review should reflect mixed compositions of peers, which also may avoid overburdening an underrepresented group with review workload.

Piled Modifiers, Buried Verbs, and Other Turgid Prose in the American Political Science Review

ABSTRACT Academic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describe five contributors that swell noun phrases: piled modifiers, needless words, nebulous nouns, missing prepositions, and buried verbs. We document more than a thousand examples and demonstrate how to revise each one with principles of style. We also draw on research in cognitive science to explain why these constructions confuse, mislead, and distract readers.

Pay to Play? How Reducing APSA Division Fees Increases Graduate Student Participation

ABSTRACT In 2017, the American Political Science Association (APSA) Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession launched an initiative to lower the cost of Division (i.e., organized section) membership for students to promote graduate students’ professional development and to advance Division interests. This article assesses the effect of this intervention on Division membership. Using APSA membership data, we find that almost two thirds of Divisions that charged fees in 2017 reduced or eliminated student fees between 2017 and 2019, nearly halving the average student dues (i.e., from $11.57 in 2017 to $5.84 in 2019). As a result, average student membership increased by more than 300% in Divisions that reduced fees (i.e., from 79.5 in 2017 to 248.7 in 2019), compared to a marginal 30% increase in those that did not reduce fees. These outcomes of the initiative support additional efforts to reduce the costs of APSA participation for graduate students.

Estimating logit models with small samples

In small samples, maximum likelihood (ML) estimates of logit model coefficients have substantial bias away from zero. As a solution, we remind political scientists of Firth's (1993, Biometrika, 80, 27–38) penalized maximum likelihood (PML) estimator. Prior research has described and used PML, especially in the context of separation, but its small sample properties remain under-appreciated. The PML estimator eliminates most of the bias and, perhaps more importantly, greatly reduces the variance of the usual ML estimator. Thus, researchers do not face a bias-variance tradeoff when choosing between the ML and PML estimators—the PML estimator has a smaller bias and a smaller variance. We use Monte Carlo simulations and a re-analysis of George and Epstein (1992, American Political Science Review, 86, 323–337) to show that the PML estimator offers a substantial improvement in small samples (e.g., 50 observations) and noticeable improvement even in larger samples (e.g., 1000 observations).

THE THIRD WAVE: DEMOCRATIZATION IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY, BY SAMUEL P HUNTINGTON. OKLAHOMA: UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS, 1991, 384 PAGES. ISBN: 9788475099606

The discourse on democratization features prominently in the work of Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) entitled ‘The Third Wave’ which was published in 1991. Huntington was one of the most influential political scientists and previously held the position of university professor at the prestigious Harvard Kennedy School in the US. He authored many academic books on comparative politics and was the founder of the Foreign Policy Journal as well as the former president of the American Political Science Association (IPSA). Written in six interesting chapters, Huntington’s Third Wave provides a clear-cut discussion on fundamental questions of when, why and how democratization occurs in different parts of the world. This fascinating book has contributed significantly to the empirical analyses on comparative transition to democracy and autocracy in around thirty global southern states, primarily in Latin America and Asia, and remains relevant for discourses on any future wave of global democratization. Cite as: Syazli Saidin, M. I. (2021). The third wave: Democratization in the late twentieth century. (Book review). Journal of Nusantara Studies, 6(1), 394-400. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol6iss1pp394-400