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Political scientists are wary of engaging with 'the public' on mainstream and social media because they fear those mediums fail to get across the deep and nuanced argument they develop in their own research. This article suggests a way of justifying public engagement that begins not with debates about the ethical and political concerns of doing this in practice (of which there are many), but how we as political scientists justify public media engagement to ourselves on the basis of the ethical and political process of 'doing' political science. As such, this article identifies the disciplinary basis upon which we may justify media-driven public engagement as an integral part of political science as an academic enterprise. Drawing on current epistemological debates in political science, the article characterises moments of political research as impressionistic exercises, which require public engagement. This means making the public aware of the deep and valuable insights of political science, in a way that sketches out how the discipline can shed light on important social and political phenomena, thereby informing our own scholarly thinking, and that of those we engage with.

Race and the Making of American Political Science shows that changing scientific ideas about racial difference were central to the academic study of politics as it emerged in the United States. From the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, scholars of politics defined and continually reoriented their field in response to the political imperatives of the racial order at home and abroad as well to as the vagaries of race science.The Gilded Age scholars who founded the first university departments and journals located sovereignty and legitimacy in a "Teutonic germ" of liberty planted in the new world by Anglo-Saxon settlers and almost extinguished in the conflict over slavery. Within a generation, "Teutonism" would come to seem like philosophical speculation, but well into the twentieth century, major political scientists understood racial difference to be a fundamental shaper of political life. They wove popular and scientific ideas about race into their accounts of political belonging, of progress and change, of proper hierarchy, and of democracy and its warrants. And they attended closely to new developments in race science, viewing them as central to their own core questions. In doing so, they constructed models of human difference and political life that still exert a powerful hold on our political imagination today, in and outside of the academy.By tracing this history, Jessica Blatt effects a bold reinterpretation of the origins of U.S. political science, one that embeds that history in larger processes of the coproduction of racial ideas, racial oppression, and political knowledge.

We are now entering a new era of computing in political science. The first era was marked by punched-card technology. Initially, the most sophisticated analyses possible were frequency counts and tables produced on a counter-sorter, a machine that specialized in chewing up data cards. By the early 1960s, batch processing on large mainframe computers became the predominant mode of data analysis, with turnaround time of up to a week. By the late 1960s, turnaround time was cut down to a matter of a few minutes and OSIRIS and then SPSS (and more recently SAS) were developed as general-purpose data analysis packages for the social sciences. Even today, use of these packages in batch mode remains one of the most efficient means of processing large-scale data analysis.