Working Groups

2019 Working Groups

An Annual Meeting Working Group consists of a small group of meeting attendees who are interested in a common topic and who agree to attend panels and plenary sessions aligned on a similar topic. They convene at the meeting for discussion. The idea is to simulate a working group conference experience amidst APSA panels. To join a working group, prospective participants can email the contacts below. 

Carla Koppell, ck958@georgetown.edu
Sunday, September 1, 8:00 – 9:30 AM
Marriott Wardman Park, Tyler Room

This working group will follow up on the conclusions emerging from the University Leadership Council on Diversity and Inclusion in Foreign Affairs (ULC). The ULC, which involved over 20 deans and directors of public policy and international affairs schools, convened over Academic Year 2018-2019 to discuss strategies and tactics for: increasing diversity in schools’ composition; enhancing a culture of inclusion in graduate schools; and ensuring that curricula reflect a focus on diversity and inclusion issues in teaching and learning. The working group will be used to review conclusion and identify next steps, as well as schools interested in joining efforts to advance the agenda domestically and internationally.

View full schedule here.

Yonatan Morse, yonatan.morse@uconn.edu
Friday, August 30, 4:00 – 5:30 PM
Washington Hilton, Northwest Room

This working group was founded to provide a format for scholarly exchange and collaboration on the subject of he legislature in Africa. In recent years there have been several innovative research efforts that have looked more closely at legislatures in Africa as key subjects of study. This research has demonstrated variation in candidate selection processes, legislative activity, and the legislatures ability to place checks on executive strength. The working group allows scholars from different countries to share their experiences and develop broader comparative perspectives. A major aim of the group is to foster collaboration that could lead to shared data collection, joint research proposals, and edited volumes or special journal editions. In addition, the working group brings together different methodological perspective, often tailored to the unique research environments of specific countries. The working group should appeal to a broad interest of scholars working on Africa, comparative politics, and legislative studies.

View full schedule here.

Yun Han, yhan23@jhu.edu
Friday, August 30, 2:00 – 3:30 PM
Washington Hilton, Northwest Room

From the days of Herodotus, Mahan, and Mackinder, geography has classically been conceived in static terms. Yet rapid advances in transportation, communications, and logistics technology today make “static geography” an outmoded concept. How should the political meaning of spatial relationships be conceptualized in the era of instant social communications, super-sonic transport, and inter-continental missiles? This is the core question that this proposed APSA working group would address. The working group would include a diverse configuration of senior and junior scholars, of varied nationalities, drawn from a wide range of institutions in the US and abroad. It would include researchers based in Germany, Poland, Japan, Mongolia, China, and Korea, as well as the United States. The members propose to explore the changing political meaning of geography in three main empirical contexts: (1) Eurasian geo-economic relationships, probing the way that technical changes in the functional meaning of geography affects Eurasian geo-political and geo-economic relationships; (2) urban affairs, focusing on how technological changes affect the agenda-setting role of global cities on the international scene; and (3) global governance, considering how changing technology affects international agenda-setting processes in the post-Cold War world, particularly in reconfiguring relationships among China, Russia, Europe, the United States, and major IGOs such as the European Union.

View full schedule here.

Julio Juarez, jjuarez@unam.mx
Saturday, August 31, 12:00-1:30 PM
Washington Hilton, Northwest Room

The idea of deliberative elections suggests the material possibility for political actors to confront ideas and define campaign issues across different media platforms. That is the case of traditional political communication tools like political advertising, news coverage, rallies and all sorts of campaigning activities devised for public consumption. There is, however, one particular form of political communication in which all contestants are excepted to participate at the same time, in the same place, live before an audience and produced according to a set of rules previously agreed by all contestants. No other campaign activity concentrates all these factors in one single political communication action like an electoral debate does. The objective of the group is to discuss theoretical and conceptual orientations to the study of electoral debates worldwide in order to address the following questions: to what extent are debates across the world being influenced by other international experiences? How have different democracies, well established and emerging, shaped their own version of electoral debates over the years? What elements have been most influential when defining the rules under which candidates for public office debate each other? Should electoral debates’ production values be better understood as an isolated communication format that evolves according to national political cultures? What role, if any, is professional journalism playing in the way debate moderators interact with politicians seeking office?

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Yang-Yang Zhou, yz3@princeton.edu
Friday, August 30, 2:00 – 3:30 PM
Marriott Wardman Park, Tyler Room

At APSA 2018, our team of graduate students was a part of the Hackathon led by the APSA Presidential Task Force on Women’s Advancement. Our goal was to share and discuss what different departments are currently doing to improve graduate student life in the department, both in and outside of the classroom. We conducted a climate survey of more than 400 current and recent graduate students from political science departments across the country. We also brainstormed concrete actions that departments can take to enhance the graduate student experience, with specific consideration towards diversity and inclusion. We created this website to present our results and recommendations: https://apsagradhack.github.io/. The goal of this working group is to further these efforts. Specifically, we plan to conduct a follow up climate survey this summer. During the working group, we will discuss progress, analyze this new data, update the website, and plan to write a research note for publication. This group hopes to reconvene participants from last year, but it is also open to new participants.

View full schedule here.

Jong-Sung You, youjs0721@gachon.ac.kr
Saturday, August 31, 2:00 – 3:30 PM
Marriott Wardman Park, Tyler Room

East Asian developmental states such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan used to be recognized as successful cases of “growth with equity,” but increasing inequality has become a great concern in these countries as in other parts of the world. While the development of welfare state was delayed, these countries have significantly increased social expenditures over the last decades. Comparative research on the East Asian welfare states has largely focused on comparing them with the Western welfare states, and relatively few studies have been devoted to comparing the experiences of these countries. The Working Group aims to facilitate comparative and collaborative research on the politics and political economy of inequality and social policy in these East Asian countries, emphasizing more on comparing between these countries rather than comparing with the advanced welfare states in the West. We will recruit scholars working on the topics related to inequality and social policy in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China (and also Mongolia and North Korea). We will organize a discussion and exchange of research among them, encouraging them to attend selected panels from those organized by Class and Inequality Division, Health Politics and Policy Division, Political Economy Division, Policy Studies Organization Caucus on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy, Association of Korean Political Studies, Association of Chinese Political Studies, Japan Political Studies Group, and Conference Group on Taiwan Studies. The co-convenors of the Working Group include Stephan Haggard(UC San Diego), Frederick Solt (Univ. of Iowa), and Jong-sung You(Gachon University).

View full schedule here.

Mahendra Prasad, mrprasad@berkeley.edu
Saturday, August 31, 10:00 – 11:30 AM
Marriott Wardman Park, Truman Room

The purpose of this working group is to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas across philosophy, political science, and economics. While many political scientists are faculty or students in PPE programs at colleges and universities (e.g. ANU, Arizona, Carnegie Mellon, Claremont McKenna, Duke, George Mason, Iowa, LSE, Michigan, Oxford, Notre Dame, Penn, Pitt, Pomona, Rutgers, Sciences Po, UNC, Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Yale), APSA does not currently have a forum for these scholars to interact with one another. This working group helps fill this gap.

View full schedule here.

Osman Balkan, obalkan1@swarthmore.edu
Tani Sebro, tani.sebro@humboldt.edu
Saturday, August 31, 12:00-1:30 PM
Marriott Wardman Park, Tyler Room

Now in its second year, the Political Ethnography Working Group has four overlapping aims: (1) to build a network of scholars and researchers whose work employs ethnographic, interpretive, and qualitative research methods to analyze and explain political phenomena, (2) to provide a space for the development of collaborative projects (workshops, special journal issues, edited volumes, and grants) with a shared grounding in political ethnography as a research method, (3) to develop pedagogical strategies and best practices for teaching ethnographic methods in political science programs, and lastly, (4) to discuss the logistical challenges and ethical issues surrounding human-subject based research in political science. Political ethnography has been defined as being at once an immersive methodology while also cultivating a sensibility (Schatz 2008). As a working group, we seek to ascertain and cultivate new methodological insights into the growing repertoire of scholarship employing diverse ethnographic methods, including participant observations, structured and semi-structured interviews, collaborative ethnography, critical ethnography and decolonial methodologies that come to bear on the political. Given the widespread applicability of ethnography across established research programs in political science, we hope to build connections across disparate areas of scholarship, including but not limited to the fields of migration and citizenship, race and ethnicity, urban politics, gender and sexuality, public policy, law and courts, religion and politics, and international security. To this end, the political ethnography working group is interested in the “how” of qualitative political science research, to encourage a more reflexive, self aware and therefore more insightful discipline.

View full schedule here.

Pero Maldini, pero.maldini@unidu.hr
Friday, August 30, 10:00-11:30 AM
Marriott Wardman Park, Tyler Room

This working group aims to encourage discussion on the impact of contemporary illiberal populism on the functioning and viability of liberal democracy with a particular emphasis on sociocultural prerequisites of the democratic order. The analysis focuses primarily on the comparison of European old and new democracies, their ability to resist illiberal populist pressures, in dependence to the inherent sociocultural prerequisites, especially the dominant patterns of political culture.
Discussion seeks to analyze relationship between an embeddedness of democratic values and experience with democracy, and democratic regimes’ ability to resist anti-liberal pressures. Due to lack of developed civic culture – which functions as a legitimacy reserve – post-transition democracies are considerably more sensitive to socioeconomic and political crises that can seriously destabilize them, or even guide political processes towards undemocratic arrangements. At the same time, the authoritarian historical-political legacy, in a time of crisis and anomie, functions as a sociocultural basis and endogenous factor that favors authoritarian and antidemocratic aberrations (e.g. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, as well as Greece and Spain). These societies are more susceptible to populist political mobilization due to the uncompleted process of democratic re-socialization – as a sociocultural prerequisite for building democratic legitimacy, despite the democratic institutional and normative framework. This has largely enabled populist governments/policies and consequently led to serious democratic deficits.
The working group enables participating scholars to share their experiences and develop broader comparative perspectives. It aims to generate new frameworks and connections that can guide future research and more collaboration.

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John Ishiyama, john.ishiyama@unt.edu
Friday, August 30, 5:30-6:30 PM
Marriott Wardman Park, Tyler Room

This working group will focus on the issue of  restructuring of the undergraduate political science major, both in terms of curriculum and content. Participants will be asked to attend a selection of panels and discuss  and discuss what implications the presentations have for rethinking how the major should be structured. The working group is a continuation of the work that began with the May-June 2019 Conference “Rethinking the Undergraduate Political Science Major” held in Denton, TX.

View the full schedule here.

Kristen Harkness, kh81@st-andrews.ac.uk
Saturday, August 31, 5:30 – 6:30 PM
Washington Hilton, Northwest Room

Security force loyalty is paramount to regime stability and survival. In the quest for loyalty, states recruit a variety of forces from regular armies to police and intelligence units, and from elite paramilitary units to pro-government militias and youth brigades. They also organize and manipulate these forces to ensure loyalty during times of crisis and to prevent the guardians from seizing power themselves. This working group seeks to understand how various types of regimes, from staunch autocracies to entrenched democracies, design, organize, and deploy their security forces. Moreover, once constituted, how do these forces behave? Are they more or less prone to coups and mutinies? Do they defend the regime when confronted with mass protests, terrorism, or insurgencies—or do they stand aside and let the government fall?

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Candice Ortbals, candice.ortbals@pepperdine.edu
Saturday, August 31, 10:00 – 11:30 AM
Washington Hilton, Northwest Room

In the United States and around the world, women’s representation in elected office lags behind that of men. Having fewer women in office has a negative effect on the political engagement of women and girls, and research has established that women are less likely to consider running for office. The college years have been identified as the point at which men’s and women’s political ambition noticeably diverges. Women may not be as politically ambitious as men, but they become politically ambitious when others encourage them to engage. How can political scientists play a critical role in creating and fostering ambition in women college students? This short course engages professors and graduate students who are interested in teaching women students with an eye toward political ambition. The group will discuss strategies for the political engagement of college age women.

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Dilara Uskup, duskup@ucla.edu
Saturday, August 31, 5:30 – 6:30 PM
Washington Hilton, Jay Room

In wake of the numerous intelligence reports citing Russian intrusion into the 2016 US election, this working group seeks to explore and develop institutional mechanisms to address growing threats to America’s democracy. To that end, this working group is tasked with responding directly with best (publication) practices, tangible actions, directions for future research, and to seriously interrogate the substantive significance of research findings from the 2016 and 2018 US election. The hope is to replicate this working group at the regional level conferences and the national conference to not only have a broader conversation about the state of American politics but to motivate collective action(s) from each association’s (and corresponding journal’s) executive leadership.

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Sanjeevini Lokhande, sanjeevini.lokhande@temple.edu
Friday, August 30, 4:00-5:30 PM
Washington Hilton, Van Ness Room

In India in recent times, ascendant nationalism has accompanied assertions of good governance. This working group studies different types of violence and its consequences for democracy with an empirical focus on India, the world’s most populous and functional democracy. We focus on the mechanisms and consequences of qualitatively different forms of collective violence, namely communal (or ethnic) riots, political violence, lynching, and vigilantism, on targeted minorities such as Sikhs in Kashmir, Kashmiri Muslims in Delhi, Muslims in Gujarat, and Buddhist Tibetan refugees. Our purpose, therefore, is to facilitate comparative analyses. We use diverse methodologies such as ethnography, digital ethnography, statistical analysis, spatial analysis, archival research, and policy analysis and use displacement as a lens in that we avoid hierarchies or genealogies. This group has met before to discuss the theoretical and methodological framework of collective violence—the mechanisms, producers, and consequences—at conferences in Paris and New Delhi. The goal this time is to investigate the long-term implications of violence on institutions, spaces, in forging common will and as a political strategy to obtain power. At APSA in 2019, we plan to attend many panels to consider the processes and effect of violence on identity, governance and the larger polity such as institutions and the state. The group would like to draw scholars from other countries in South Asia and beyond to add to the comparative dimension of our work.

View full schedule here.