In the Current Issue

Volume 140 - Number 3 - Fall 2025

Articles

The 2024 Presidential and Congressional Elections: Small Wave, Seismic Effects
Gary C. Jacobson analyzes the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. He argues that Donald Trump’s return to the White House resulted primarily from the unwavering support from the majority of ordinary Republicans and from swing voters unhappy with the economy and illegal immigration.

Democracy and Climate Change for Realists: An Integrated Empirical and Normative Assessment
J.S. MALOY assesses empirical and normative theories on democracy, autocracy, and cli-mate change and argues that democracy’s superiority is less compellingly supported than regime-neutrality.

The Spirit and/of Political Science
Jeremy Menchik reflects on the use of the term “spirit” by political scientists. He argues that understanding the use has implications for conceptual clarity and the relationship between religion and political science.

Democracy's Destruction? Changing Perceptions of the Supreme Court, the Presidency, and the Senate after the 2020 Election
James L. Gibson examines the impact of the presidential election of 2020 and its after-math on the legitimacy of American political institutions. He argues that the institutions appears to be mor resilient than many have imagined.

The Uprisings of Gaza: How Geopolitical Crises Have Reshaped Academic Communities from Tahrir to Kyiv
Alexander Cooley reviews The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research since the Arab Uprisings edited by Marc Lynch, Jillian Schwedler, and Sean Yom. He reflects upon the articles in the volume to address central issues occurring at the intersection of regional studies and political science that are affected by geopolitical shocks.

How Parties and Ambitious Politicians Undermined American Democracy—and the Reforms that Might Save It
Carol Nackenoff critically evaluates Democracy Under Fire: Donald Trump and the Breaking of American History by Lawrence Jacobs. She argues that book offers a robust vison of democracy and cautions that some of the reforms proposed by Jacobs seem unlikely to achieve the purposes he envisions.

Can Nations Achieve Both Educational Excellence and Equity?
SAMUEL ABRAMS reviews The Politics of Comprehensive School Reforms: Cleavages and Coalitions by Katharina Sass. He argues that the book lays the foundation for a better understanding of the implications of educational tracking policies and an appreciation of the generation of education policy itself.

Dialogues Across Time: Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Democratization
MIRIAM GOLDEN Isabela Mares’ Protecting the Ballot: How First-Wave Democracies Ended Electoral Corruption as a jumping off point to consider how to construct a dialogue between scholars of contemporary electoral malfeasance and historical political economists.

Politics Rules Everything Around Me? A Review of Pandemic Politics
DOMINIK A STECULA reviews Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID by Shana Kushner Gadarian, Sara Wallace Goodman, and Thomas Pepinsky. He situates the book’s main argument in the broader literature on politicization of science, populism and anti-intellectualism, misinformation, and trust.

Prison Abolitionism and the Liberal Imagination
Jacob Abolafia reviews Tommie Shelby’s The Idea of Prison Abolition. He takes stock of the rationale behind prison abolitionism and examines Shelby’s effort to initiate a dialogue between Angela Davis, the intellectual vanguard of contemporary abolitionists, and liberal political philosophy in the tradition of John Rawls.

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