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Laboratory experiments using human participants are a cornerstone of studying human social behavior, but their use is less common in political science. That being said, the use of experiments is on the rise within the discipline, including experiments conducted in controlled laboratory settings. This case study is intended to generate discussion around the unique challenges in laboratory experiments with human participants and confederates. There herein described experiment examined the proclivity of participants to conform to a group's opinion on a contentious and identity-laden topic. By reading about the experiment's design and lessons learned throughout implementation, students will discuss the use of deception in research, challenges with using human participants and confederates, and how threats to internal validity can creep into even carefully designed experiments.

Research on how policies diffuse throughout the American federal system is robust and vast, but there has yet to be a systematic accounting for its results. Using a systematic review and meta-analysis, this study presents the most comprehensive analysis to date of how policy innovation flows state-to-state and the average effects of commonly used variables in the study of policy diffusion (for example, neighbour adoptions, ideological distance between states and legislative professionalism). Additionally, heterogeneity in these effects is examined across regulatory, morality and governance policy types. The study not only estimates these weighted-average effects, but it also illuminates important biases in policy diffusion research. The article concludes by making recommendations for addressing those biases and increasing international collaboration on policy innovation research and results synthesis.

This essay discusses how scholarship on state politics and policy, intergovernmental relations, and federalism provides necessary context for understanding governmental responses to COVID-19. It also highlights how observing those responses can further push the bounds of existing scholarship and theory regarding policy innovation and cooperative and conflictual federalism. It argues that there is a space for mutual learning and sharing between scholars and practitioners.

This study develops and tests a theory of the diffusion life course using a dataset of 566 policies adopted between 1960 and 2016. Previous small‐N studies found differences between leaders and laggards, but broader innovation theory points to five stages of adoption: innovation, early adoption, early majority, late majority, and laggard. This study demonstrates that predictors of policy adoption change throughout the diffusion life course. Neighbor adoptions matter early in the life course but are supplanted by the consistent effect of ideological learning across all stages. The results confirm that less professionalized states tend to adopt later. Finally, state wealth and population size are increasingly important as policies spread. These results have implications for our understanding of when and why states adopt policy innovations. They also illustrate the substantial opportunity for political science and public policy researchers to draw from broader theories.

Food insecurity is a pressing concern for students in higher education. Much of the conversation surrounding this problem, however, focuses on undergraduate students. But some research finds the problem extends to graduate students. This study asks the question of how food insecurity may be affecting graduate students in public administration. A pilot study in a Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration-accredited program reveals that almost one quarter of respondents are food insecure. This includes one in five students who are completing their degrees online. The survey also found an important divergence between the types of programs food-insecure students are willing to use and those to which food-secure students are willing to contribute. Given the effects of food insecurity on academic success and degree completion, this study has important implications for public administration programs.

This research note presents a new database of policy diffusion research results useful for research synthesis. This database is a compilation of the results from every event history analysis model of policy diffusion in the American states published between 1990 and 2018. The result is 507 models with 6,641 variables. The database is publicly available and can be used to answer numerous questions regarding the veracity of policy diffusion research claims. It also provides a systematic understanding of where there are gaps in diffusion research that can be filled by scholars from many subfields. This article briefly discusses the data collection and coding processes, what is available in the database, and how it can be used. It also provides an illustrative meta-analysis of the effect of legislative professionalism on innovation adoption.

States adopt policy innovations within the confines of a dynamic American federal system, but our study of policy diffusion tends to be fairly static. Single‐policy studies incorporate temporal variation, but for only one innovation. Macro‐level analyses examine broad patterns, but often by completely pooling across policy and time. This makes it difficult to identify how diffusion patterns change over time, though Walker's early work explicitly identified such temporal instability. This study specifically examines how neighbor and ideological cues change in importance over time using a dataset of 556 policies adopted from 1960 to 2014. While the findings demonstrate the generality of many key internal, external, and policy‐level determinants of adoption, there is variation in these effects across time. Most important is the relative stability of ideological similarity between adopters and declining influence of contiguous neighbors. Further, political polarization plays a role in conditioning neighbor and ideological cues.

Public administrators are deeply affected by the global crisis in public finances. As public sector revenues remain weak and demand increases for spending and debt reduction, as well as tax reform, the newest cadre of public administration students must learn how to face the challenge of substantial uncertainty in public finances, regardless of whether they serve at the national, regional, or local level. Simulations offer an effective and powerful tool within a safe classroom environment for teaching students about the process and challenges of public budgeting. This article examines two free web-based simulations that can be quickly incorporated into an introductory public administration course. It further addresses differences in using the simulations as role-thinking or role-playing exercises. Observations from students and the instructor provide insight into the advantages and disadvantages of isolated role-thinking versus collaborative role-playing. The procedures included can be adapted for any online budgeting simulation without requiring the instructor to create a great deal of content on their own.