This article examines women’s perceptions of and experiences with institutional norms in political science departments and their institutions. Conceptually, it builds on feminist institutionalism. Specifically, it examines the broad institutional norms, formal and informal, that define political science departments within their larger institutions, as well as potential avenues for change. I argue that a “critical mass” of women in academic departments and the presence of “critical actors” in departmental and university leadership positions sympathetic to the cause and powerful enough to implement change can bring about institutional reforms. To that end, I conducted a survey among 1,273 female PhD students and faculty members in political science departments across the United States. The survey questions revolve around women’s perceptions of institutional gender norms, the way they are judged by them, their ability to have professional success under them, and their (or others’) ability to change them. After discussing the survey results within the context of feminist institutional theory, I offer some conclusions about the positions of women in political science departments in the United States, the implications of this for the profession at-large, and some thoughts on avenues for future research on the issue.

Behavioural public policy is increasingly interested in scaling-up experimental insights to deliver systemic changes. Recent evidence shows some forms of individual behaviour change, such as nudging, are limited in scale. We argue that we can scale-up individual behaviour change by accounting for nuanced social complexities in which human responses to behavioural public policies are situated. We introduce the idea of the ‘social brain’, as a construct to help practitioners and policymakers facilitate a greater social transmission of welfare-improving behaviours. The social brain is a collection of individual human brains, who are connected to other human brains through ‘social cues’, and who are affected by the material and immaterial properties of the physical environment in which they are situated (‘social complex’). Ignoring these cues and the social complex runs the risk of fostering localised behavioural changes, through individual actors, which are neither scalable nor lasting. We identify pathways to facilitate changes in the social brain: either through path dependencies or critical mass shifts in individual behaviours, moderated by the brain's property of social cohesion and multiplicity of situational and dispositional factors. In this way, behavioural changes stimulated in one part of the social brain can reach other parts and evolve dynamically. We recommend designing public policies that engage different parts of the social brain.

Decades of research has debated whether women first need to reach a “critical mass” in the legislature before they can effectively influence legislative outcomes. This study contributes to the debate using supervised tree-based machine learning to study the relationship between increasing variation in women's legislative representation and the allocation of government expenditures in three policy areas: education, healthcare, and defense. We find that women's representation predicts spending in all three areas. We also find evidence of critical mass effects as the relationships between women's representation and government spending are nonlinear. However, beyond critical mass, our research points to a potential critical mass interval or critical limit point in women's representation. We offer guidance on how these results can inform future research using standard parametric models.

The formation of stars constitutes one of the basic problems in astrophysics. Understanding star formation efficiency of molecular clouds (MCs) of a galaxy is necessary for studying the galactic evolution. Present data and theoretical formulations show that the structure and dynamics of the interstellar medium (ISM) are extremely complex. Therefore, there is no simple model that can explain adequately the star formation efficiency of MCs because of its complex nature. The initial mass of the cloud needed for collapse varies based on the environment in which the cloud resides and the strength of its magnetic field, turbulence, as well as the speed of rotation. In this paper, we estimate the star formation efficiency by combining pre-determined models and the critical mass formulated by Kumssa & Tessema (2018).

Ongoing farmland loss has led county planners to ask “is there a critical mass of farmland needed?” to retain a viable agricultural sector. This study examines whether counties lost farmland at a faster rate if the number of agricultural acres fell below a critical threshold. Results from six Mid-Atlantic states over the period 1949 to 1997 indicate that counties with fewer agricultural acres lost farmland at a faster rate. However, after splitting the study period into two time segments (1949–1978 and 1978–1997) and modeling separately, this result was not found for the later time period, suggesting a uniform critical mass level may not exist. Population growth in a county accelerated farmland loss over all time periods.

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) saw forty of its forty-six female candidates elected in the 2009 lower house election; twenty-six were first-time candidates. Recently, both the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the DPJ have supported more women as “change” candidates in response to changing electoral incentives that favor broad appeals. The DPJ's victory, however, has not had a large impact on women in terms of governance or policy. An exploration of child allowance, day care provision, and dual surname legislation under the DPJ reveals that low seniority and the lack of a critical mass have prevented DPJ women from overcoming significant veto points. The electoral incentives of the emerging two-party system have resulted in a larger number of women in office, but the volatility of the system has sustained a weak voice for women in policymaking.