Mixed Methods

This article asks how the United States applies economic statecraft—positive "carrots" versus negative "sticks"—in response to Latin American countries’ engagement with China and offers a conditional mechanism for when each mode is more likely. The authors argue that U.S. policy in the region tends to emphasize economic engagement instead of coercion, especially with countries that are politically and economically aligned with Washington. They test this claim using a mixed-methods design that combines a focused case study of U.S.–Panama ties with a statistical analysis of how engagement with China relates to U.S. foreign assistance allocations in Latin America.

This study asks how communication shapes the uptake of expert-produced information by decision-makers in spatial (land-use) planning. The authors contribute a mixed-method investigation of Italian regional lawmakers and local decision-makers, examining whether and how accessible language, formats and channels affect understanding and legislative behavior when documents are technical and highly specialized.

* Research Focus and Argument:* This article explains how opposition elites can win space in authoritarian elections by using symbolic ideological appeals—campaign messages that portray candidates as allies of broader ideological movements. The theory of "endogenous opposition" argues that these symbolic appeals allow opposition politicians, especially from minority groups, to attract cross-group voters and then act as genuine opponents of the ruling family once in the legislature.

This article asks how a century of scholarship in the journal Public Administration has evolved in topics, methods and geography, and offers a systematic, data-driven portrait of the field using bibliometrics and natural language processing. The authors map thematic change across five eras of the journal, identify 63 linguistic clusters of research, and characterize shifts in disciplinary influence, geographical settings and methodological orientations without making causal claims beyond the descriptive evidence.

Context:** Negative campaign ads are common in elections and often shape voter perceptions. This study examines how party attacks influence gender stereotypes.

This research examines how a small UK NGO’s annual ranking—the Aid Transparency Index (ATI), produced by Publish What You Fund—affects development aid donors' transparency: the quality and kinds of information donors publicly disclose. The central question is how and when a global performance indicator (GPI) produced by a nonstate actor can shape powerful actors in world politics.

This paper argues that spatial analysis tools can enhance mixed-methods research by informing case selection. It introduces two specific methods—spatial autocorrelation in outcomes and residual autocorrelation—to integrate quantitative findings with qualitative insights.

Mixed-methods designs that nest small-N analysis (SNA) within large-N analysis (LNA) are increasingly popular. However, the LNA typically assumes independently distributed units and therefore cannot account for spatial dependence. When spatial dependence is present, it becomes a threat to inference rather than a subject of empirical or theoretical investigation—an important shortcoming given recent political science attention to diffusion and broader interconnectedness.