This paper asks whether a teacher’s measured value added (VA) depends on the VA of the teacher in the previous grade and how that dynamic affects decisions that rely on VA. Using administrative records for North Carolina classrooms, the authors estimate how last grade’s mean teacher VA relates to a teacher’s own VA and evaluate how standard VA approaches would perform under a dismissal policy that targets the bottom 5% of teachers.
Education is one of the strongest individual predictors of political participation, but the strength of that relationship varies across countries. Drawing on policy feedback and political socialization theories, the paper argues that education policies in adolescence—specifically policies that de‑stratify secondary schooling by promoting more comprehensive models—create lasting feedback effects that shape adult patterns of participation and can reduce political inequality.
This study asks whether people living under authoritarianism form stable, constrained preferences across multiple policy domains and whether autocratic incentives to suppress preference formation prevent such stability. Using three surveys—two longitudinal—conducted in China, the authors examine intertemporal stability in a range of policy and value areas and report that many preferences show substantial stability over month-long and year-long intervals. The paper preserves caveats about measurement and context and offers recommendations for measuring preference configuration in authoritarian settings.
Primary education is often seen as a pro-poor redistributive policy tied to democratization. However, this study reveals that autocrats also frequently pursued such goals historically.
This article argues that classroom simulations of real-world electoral institutions are a powerful pedagogical tool for political science students.
Nearly 1,000 officer-involved killings occur each year in the United States. This analysis documents large and racially disparate effects of these events on the educational and psychological well-being of Los Angeles public high school students.
Recent advances in generative large language models pose immediate questions for how political science is taught, learned, and assessed. This article investigates those implications by analyzing two novel surveys conducted through the discipline’s major professional body, the American Political Science Association (APSA), and closes with targeted recommendations.
This study investigates bureaucratic discrimination against fathers with typical Danish versus Muslim names when requesting school transfers. We surveyed 1,698 Danish primary schools. Both groups received similar initial response rates but faced stark differences in outcomes.
This study asks whether high school civic education influences voter turnout in adulthood by merging detailed academic transcript information on social studies and civics coursework with a large-scale, longitudinal survey of a nationally representative cohort of adolescents. The authors present a sequence of regression models: initial specifications show apparent associations between civics coursework and later turnout, but the associations shrink after adding individual and family controls and disappear in family fixed-effects models that compare siblings. The analysis concludes that any causal effect of high school civic instruction on adult voting is at best very small, and the study finds no evidence that courses emphasizing service learning, civic skills, or political issues increase turnout.
This paper investigates whether the arrival of railroads affected the state’s ability to implement national school policy in nineteenth-century Sweden by making school inspectors more able to monitor remote schools. Using fine-grained local education data, the authors compare communities reachable by rail to those that were not and assess differences in school permanence and curricular content. The paper argues for a causal interpretation for at least some outcomes, and presents more tentative evidence on curricular change.
Policy-making extends across multiple governance layers. This article challenges traditional comparative studies that overlook subnational influence or assume methodological nationalism.
College attendance boosts political participation overall, but does attending an affluent campus help close a gap between income groups? A large panel survey (201,011 students) investigates this question. Using controls and tests for selection bias, we find that predominantly affluent campuses do not change the level of increase in political engagement across different income levels; they leave the gap unchanged. We examine multiple mechanisms behind any effects.
Low education levels predict anti-immigration sentiment. But is this a cause or just selection bias?
This study examines whether advantaged Americans can gain insight into inequality through programs like Teach For America (TFA). Using a unique quasi-experimental design, it analyzes how two years of engagement with disadvantaged communities affects the beliefs of TFA corps members.
Does higher-quality public service lead voters to reward politicians? This question is investigated using signals of municipal school quality in Brazil, a setting particularly favorable to electoral accountability.
Suicide attackers are often described as educated and economically well-off, a pattern commonly taken as evidence that especially capable individuals volunteer for suicide missions. This paper tests that self-selection explanation using unique personnel data from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Conditional cash transfer programmes are widespread, but the independent role of program conditionalities (attendance and enforcement) on education and health remains debated. This study uses municipal-level data from Brazil’s Bolsa Família programme to test whether monitoring of school attendance—separate from cash-transfer coverage—is associated with better educational outcomes.
Compulsory voting is typically thought to close the turnout gap between rich and poor. Using Brazil—the largest country that enforces compulsory voting—evidence shows the opposite: compulsory voting increases turnout inequality by education (a proxy for socioeconomic status).
Political scientists often convert treatments with multiple intensities (for example, years of schooling) into coarser measures (for example, a binary indicator for completing high school). This common choice can substantially upwardly bias instrumental variable (IV) estimates by subtly violating the exclusion restriction, producing misleading causal inferences.