This study explores the efficacy of Kotter’s eight-step change model in fostering intercultural competence among faculty and staff within a large Midwestern public university. Recognizing the need for intercultural development in higher education, this research applies a structured change framework coupled with the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) assessment tool to guide the change process. The development of intercultural competence among faculty and staff is crucial for creating inclusive learning environments, as they play a pivotal role in modeling intercultural competence and fostering students’ skills necessary to navigate an increasingly diverse and interconnected world. This study employs an instrumental case study design, utilizing interviews, document analysis, and Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) assessments to examine the change process over a three-year period. The findings demonstrate how each step of Kotter’s model was successfully adapted to drive organizational change and enhance intercultural competence among 639 faculty and staff members across 11 departments in the College of Agriculture. This study highlights the importance of creating a shared vision, empowering stakeholders, and anchoring changes in the institution’s culture and emphasizes the pivotal role of structured change management in achieving substantive improvements in intercultural learning environments. The insights and strategies presented can serve as a foundation for other higher education institutions seeking to implement similar initiatives and foster inclusive learning environments.

A natural experiment is a real-world situation that generates as-if random or haphazard assignment to treatment. Geographic or administrative boundaries can be exploited as natural experiments to construct treated and control groups. Previous research has demonstrated that matching can help enhance these designs by reducing imbalances on observed covariates. An important limitation of this empirical approach, however, is that the results are inherently local. While the treated and control groups may be quite similar to each other, they could be substantially different from the target population of interest (e.g., a country). We propose a simple design inspired by the idea of template matching to construct generalizable geographic natural experiments. By matching our treated and control groups to a template (i.e., the target population), we obtain groups that are similar to the target population of interest and to each other, which can increase both the internal and external validity of the study.

This study examines undergraduate research experiences at a minority-serving institution (MSI) in a political science laboratory. Students contributed to projects in a collaborative research lab at the University of California Riverside that involves undergraduate and graduate students in projects related to health and politics. Adopting a participatory approach to research, the study’s research participants also are coauthors who co-created the research protocols; collected the data; transcribed, coded, and analyzed the data; and wrote up the findings. Our analysis of 12 in-depth interviews with current and former undergraduate research assistants (RAs) found that their work in the lab challenged their perceptions of what research is and what it means to do research; shaped their path to pursue graduate studies; developed their social and professional skills; and offered an inclusive and humanizing experience with graduate students and faculty members. Challenges that the RAs mentioned included time management, bureaucratic accounting and payroll procedures, and feelings of self-doubt; the lab’s culture of inclusion and independence mitigated some of these challenges. Our findings align with the scholarly literature that suggests collaborative research opportunities can have beneficial outcomes, particularly for students from groups that are underrepresented in doctoral programs.

Electoral fraud and integrity challenges in transitional democracies have contributed to the institutionalization of election observation as a global norm. Election observation helps reduce the incidence of electoral fraud and manipulation and, by so doing, provides an independent third-party verdict of the level of freeness and fairness of elections in which they were involved. The continuous participation of election observers in the electoral processes of transitional democracies is supposed to increase the capacity of electoral management bodies (EMBs) and consequently increase trust in EMBs. Yet very little is known about the relationship between election observation and the perception of trust for EMBs. This paper examines this relationship using data from the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers in Ghana and the Afrobarometer Survey Round 7 of Ghana. We find that a higher share of observed polling stations in a district correlates negatively with the level of trust for EMBs. This means that an increase in the number of polling stations observed in a district leads to a decrease in the trust levels respondents have for EMBs. This result does not hold in all types of polling stations. For competitive polling stations, levels of trust for EMBs increase as the number of observed polling stations in a district increases.