In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Ewa Nizalowska, covers the new article by Turkuler Isiksel and Thomas B. Pepinsky, "Voting in Authoritarian Elections." Elections are often taken as a defining feature of democratic regimes. Although voting is not the only form of democratic political engagement, we tend to presume that voting makes the regimes we live under fairer, more stable and peaceful, or simply better governed.

Do girls exposed to women politicians become more politically engaged adults, as many politicians and scholars predict? To our knowledge, no previous research has examined whether exposure to women po...