In the month of April, I found myself saying “I agree with Trump” more than anytime ever. On China, Russia, NATO and Syria, President Trump signaled radical changes in policy, nearly the complete opposite of what he said as a candidate. All were changes for the good — that is, new policy positions that advance American security, prosperity and values. The lingering question is whether these recent statements signal a fundamental change in Trump’s thinking about foreign policy or rather short-term reversals that could be reversed again. Is he learning or ad-libbing? It’s too early to tell.

After the vote results came in last November, many Russians close to the Kremlin celebrated. “Our Trump” — or #TrumpNash, as they tweeted — had been elected president of the United States... Of course, many factors combined to produce Trump’s victory, but Putin’s intervention most certainly played a contributing role.

For reasons still mysterious to me, U.S. President Donald Trump continues to praise and defend Russian President Vladimir Putin. Just yesterday, in an interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox, President Trump affirmed his respect for Putin. When O’Reilly challenged Trump by calling the Russian president a “killer,” Trump defended Putin, whom he has never met, by criticizing the United States: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

For decades, American presidents have used their inaugural addresses to celebrate the values of freedom. At his inauguration on Friday, President Donald Trump will take to the podium to declare his aims for his next four years in office. Will he have anything to say about the importance of freedom? 

What do we know about wealth inequality and democracy? Our review shows that the simple conjectures that democracy produces wealth equality and that wealth inequality leads to democratic failure are not supported by the evidence. Why are democracy and high levels of wealth inequality sustainable together? Three key features of democratic politics can make this outcome possible. When societies are divided along cleavages other than wealth, this can inhibit the adoption of wealth-equalizing policies. Likewise, voter preferences for the redistribution of wealth depend on the beliefs they form about the fairness of these measures, and some voters without wealth may feel that redistribution is unfair. Finally, wealth-equalizing policies may be absent if the democratic process is captured by the rich; however, the evidence explaining when, where, and why capture accounts for variation in wealth inequality is less convincing than is often claimed. This phenomenon is a useful avenue for future research.

In both foreign and domestic policy, the presidentelect has taken several positions that are quite different from the party leadership. [...]his commitment to those cultural issues that are so dear to the heart of many Republican stalwarts is, to say the least, open to question. [...]no president in recent memory has had less international experience and fewer clear ideas about foreign policy than Trump. [...]the split between Trump and the Republican establishment has left the president-elect without the usual cadre of experts on whom he could depend.

After a rancorous and ugly presidential campaign, in which vitriol and name-calling replaced discussion and policy, one moment stands out for its dignity: President Obama’s grace and generosity when he welcomed the president-elect to the White House. Above the fray and with a Lincolnian refusal of malice, he modeled a possibility of reconciliation and healing, as if citizens might genuinely respect each other, despite profound differences. That utopia will likely remain elusive, but the president’s bearing provides a lesson in civic virtue. Democracycan be coarse. He showed how it can be better. That legacy will be important.

Striving better to uncover causal effects, political science is amid a revolution in micro-empirical research designs and experimental methods. This methodological development—although quite promising in delivering new findings and discovering the mechanisms that underlie previously known associations—raises new and unnerving ethical issues that have yet to be confronted by our profession. We believe that addressing these issues proactively by generating strong, internal norms of disciplinary regulation is preferable to reactive measures, which often come in the wake of public exposés and can lead to externally imposed regulations or centrally imposed internal policing.

In his last news conference of the year (and maybe last ever as president) last week, President Obama squarely assigned blame to the Russian government for stealing data from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman, with the intent of disrupting our electoral process and helping one candidate, President-elect Donald Trump. Obama also promised to respond but left out details about how and when.

President-elect Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election and will be the next president of the United States. As I have written before in these pages, the rules of the game for choosing our presidents need to be changed, but that discussion concerns future elections, not this past one. A win is a win.