What is the future of American political parties as we known them? Do Americans even care about the candidates’ positions? Do campaign visits and television ads really turn the dial in voting. Political scientists Larry Bartels, Lynn Vavreck and Gary Jacobsen — address these and other questions about the current presidential election in this archived webinar.

Perhaps the solution to conflicting spending priorities, write Rod Lamberts and Will J. Grant, is simply to acknowledge that people will always have conflicting priorities, and think about how best to live alongside each other: mythical, homogeneous pub-goer and irrelevant, out-of-touch academic alike.

How can we create reliable and replicable political science data? A recent article in the ‘American Political Science Review’ focuses on text analysis and suggests ways to make these data sound and reproducible.

Shonkily researched assertions are okay if you enjoy the safe patronage of a major news organisation, argues Rob Brooks. But know, he adds, you would never get away with such abject laziness, or such contempt for professional disinterest in a grant proposal to a federal funding body.

The decolonization debate in African universities raises critical issues about the relationship between power, knowledge and learning, argues Ahmed Essop. It also provides an opportunity to rethink the role of universities in social and economic development and in fashioning a common nation.

We can all aspire to aim higher, not merely to be free of problems, but to try and truly flourish as human beings and make the most of our all too brief lives. And psychology should have a role in that, says Tim Lomas.

Recent findings suggest interdisciplinary research is less likely to be funded than discipline-based research proposals, reports Gabriele Bammer, who argues different review processes may well be required to do justice to these different kinds of interdisciplinarity. 

“Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, The Pentagon and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology” offers a historical account of how the US military industrial complex has had a profound influence on the development of US anthropology during the Cold War and into the present day. Reviewer Joseph Anderson sees the book as a dense but readable outline that confronts how ethnographic research in the field has been shaped by wider political-economic force.

What role should social scientists play in society? Louisa Hotson here explores the evolution of the social sciences through four periods in the history of political science in the United States, each with different implications for how social science makes a difference.

Teacher observations are both costly and time intensive, but perhaps it’s time to invest in better teacher evaluation to get better student results. So argues Robert Pianta, who has personally helped develop some measures that might achieve such high hopes, in a an article in the journal PIBBS..

In this archived hour-long seminar, Social Science Space blogger Robert Dingwall discusses the organizational requirements and the useful skills that can be built to support the individual who wants to be a reasearch manager and the ecosystem — in both social science and STEM settings — that can support such striving.

Researchers decided to conduct behavioral testing on competition and the process of peer review. What they learned offers some prescriptions for improving peer review going forward.