Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity -particularly diversity of viewpoints -for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority's thinking. (4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology.

In analyzing the spatial diffusion of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, this article introduces the notion of a mesolevel network. A mesolevel network is a social network that differs in three important respects from interpersonal microlevel networks directly linking prior and potential adopters of a practice to one another: (1) it is generated by a different causal process than the microlevel network;(2) it tends to be much sparser than the microlevel network; and (3) the typical edge of a mesolevel network bridges much longer sociometric and geographic distances than the typical edge of a microlevel network. These types of mesolevel networks are important because they can dramatically influence the speed at which a contagious practice will diffuse. The mesolevel network focused upon in this article is the network that emerged out of the travel routes of political agitators affiliated with the Social Democratic Party. Computational modeling shows that the diffusion of the Social Democratic Party is likely to have been considerably influenced by the structure of this network. Empirical analyses of the founding of party organizations during the period 1894-1911 support these theoretical predictions and suggest that this mesolevel network was of considerable importance for the diffusion of the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

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Abstract. In Spring 2003, a survey of 1000 economists was conducted using a randomly generated membership list from the American Economics Association. The survey contained questions about 18 policy issues, voting behavior, and several background variables. The response was 264 (nonblank) surveys. The responses show that most economists are supporters of safety regulations, gun control, redistribution, public schooling, and anti-discrimination laws. They are evenly mixed on personal choice issues, military action, and the minimum wage. Most economists oppose tighter immigration controls, government ownership of enterprise and tariffs. In voting, the Democratic:Republican ratio is 2.5:1. These results are compared to those of previous surveys of economists. We itemize a series of important questions raised by these results.