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Most modern Western political theories embrace equal citizenship as a normative ideal. Many scholars, however, focus on "legal citizenship" and conceive of equal citizenship as uniformity of legal rights and duties. Others focus on experiences of "lived citizenship" and conceive of equal citizenship as achieving sufficient economic, political, and social standing for persons to be seen as civic equals. Using the United States as its example, this article offers a unifying framework for mapping the relationship of legal citizenship to lived citizenship. It illustrates the value of this framework by using it show why realistic efforts to achieve equal citizenship must aim for not uniform legal rights and duties but instead equity in the possession of economic resources, political representation, and social recognition among different categories of citizens.

At a time when authoritarian regimes are on the rise around the world, higher education in general and political science in particular are facing declining support and sharper political pressures in many places. Political scientists have long promised that their discipline can add to knowledge about politics and educate citizens. However, doubts have grown about whether our increasingly pluralistic discipline collectively generates useful knowledge and communicates it effectively in teaching and in broader public communications. Political scientists need to do more to place their particular studies within big pictures of how politics and the world work, and to synthesize their results. They must focus more on the politics of identity formation that has generated resurgent nationalisms and deep social divisions. They must strengthen their understanding and their community contributions through civically engaged research. They must also place greater emphasis on improving teaching. In these ways, modern scholars can show there is much good that political science can do.

In Race and the Making of American Political Science, Jessica Blatt argues that the professionalization of the discipline was deeply entwined with ideas about racial difference, and the concomitant attempt by leading scholars to define and defend a system of racial hierarchy in the United States and beyond. Although it focuses on the period from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, the book also raises fundamental questions about the historical legacy of racialist arguments for professional political science, the extent of their continuing resonance, and contemporary implications for both academic and broader civic discourse. We have asked a range of leading political scientists to consider and respond to Professor Blatt's important call for scholarly self-reflexivity.