Half-Day Short Course | 9:00am – 1:00pm

This short course is designed for political science instructors who seek to intentionally redesign their pedagogy to more fully support democratic citizenship and civic engagement. Political science has long held a dual mission: advancing students’ understanding of political institutions and processes while also preparing them for participation in democratic life (American Political Science Association 2011). In the contemporary political context—marked by polarization, declining trust in democratic institutions, widespread misinformation, and concern about democratic backsliding—many faculty are reflecting more deliberately on how their teaching can contribute to sustaining democratic capacity.

Civically engaged pedagogy is an approach to teaching that intentionally integrates disciplinary learning with the development of students’ capacities for democratic participation, creating structured opportunities to connect political knowledge with civic skills, judgment, and action. In political science, this approach positions civic engagement as a core educational outcome—preparing students not only to understand political institutions and processes, but also to participate thoughtfully, responsibly, and effectively in democratic life. Research in political science suggests that political knowledge alone is insufficient to foster durable civic engagement or democratic efficacy. Instead, students benefit from structured opportunities to practice deliberation across difference, evaluate political information critically, understand institutional accountability, and reflect on the emotional dimensions of political participation. When intentionally designed, civically engaged pedagogy enables political science courses to cultivate these capacities without sacrificing disciplinary rigor or conflating political analysis with political advocacy.

Many political science faculty already incorporate discussions, simulations, applied projects, or experiential learning into their courses. Yet the civic dimensions of these practices often remain implicit, unevenly developed, or difficult to assess. This short course supports instructors who wish to make civic learning more explicit, intentional, and pedagogically coherent—whether they are building on existing approaches or reconsidering their teaching in light of contemporary democratic challenges.

Grounded in the Democratic Citizenship Framework (Mathews-Schultz and Sweet-Cushman 2024), the course uses the framework as an organizing tool for translating civic commitments into intentional course design. The framework conceptualizes democratic citizenship as four interconnected capacities—knowing, caring, choosing, and doing—and operationalizes them through five citizenship competencies: institutional, participatory, deliberative, informational, and emotional. Together, these elements provide instructors with concrete targets for assignment design, instructional practice, and assessment.

Learning Objectives
In this course, participants will: (1) apply the Democratic Citizenship Framework to articulate civic learning goals for at least one political science course; (2) design or revise a course assignment aligned with one or more democratic citizenship competencies; (3) develop assessment strategies that make civic learning visible while remaining nonpartisan and consistent with disciplinary norms; and (4) construct an implementation plan appropriate to their instructional context.

Structure, Audience, and Outcomes
This course is intended for graduate students, early-career faculty, and experienced instructors seeking to refresh or deepen their civic pedagogy. Facilitation will blend brief interactive framing with hands-on design workshops that encourage participants to consider their own teaching contexts and capacities. Participants will leave with a ready-to-use civic engagement module, a preliminary assessment plan, and a transferable framework for scaling democratic citizenship across their curriculum. The course ultimately aims to strengthen political science educators’ ability to contribute to democratic capacity-building across subfields and teaching environments.”

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

An increasing number of states, university systems, universities, and colleges that now require undergraduate students to complete an American government or civics course to graduate. In the fall of 2025, the American Political Science Association’s Departmental Services Program launched a working group on American Civics Undergraduate Course Mandates. The working group features 30 political science faculty members from public and private institutions across the U.S. Meeting during the 2025-2026 academic year, the working group began developing resources and a report to support political science departments whose programs and courses help their university or college meet these externally mandated American politics and civics undergraduate credit requirements. Our work is focused on four core areas: (1) developing curriculum and learning outcomes (2) understanding variance across the requirements (3) generating departmental strategies for dealing with increases in their undergraduate enrollment, and (4) departmental advocacy for resources to meet these requirements.

We would use the APSA short course to convene the working group in person and continue its ongoing research with an aim to release materials to the discipline in 2027. The full day short course would allow for working group members to present ongoing research and collaborate in person on these research efforts.

Half Day Short Course | 1:30pm – 5:30pm

Scholars are frequently called upon to share their expertise with a diverse range of publics outside the confines of academia—from policymakers to civic organizations to the media. A critical part of public engagement—and the place where it often begins—is the publication of a book with a “trade press” (i.e., a commercial, non-university/academic publisher, with a powerful marketing and publicity apparatus).

For academics who want to engage with the “public sphere”, there is often confusion about where to begin, and a lack of resources to help with the process. Worse, there are sometimes institutional disincentives, in the form of tenure clocks, skepticism from colleagues, or the pressure to produce “real scholarship” that advances the field.

This workshop is for scholars interested in better understanding the process of finding an agent, landing a commercial book deal, writing in a more accessible register, and other skills related to making the transition into writing for the general public.

The workshop will cover the basics of commercial publishing – how it differs from academic publishing, what to expect, the pros and cons of trade publishing, and some of the resources available for scholars wanting to make this transition.

Half Day Short Course | 1:30pm – 5:30pm

Instructors: Tasha Fairfield, European University Institute; Andrew Bennett, Georgetown University

This short course introduces participants to the Bayesian logic of qualitative case studies, with practical advice, examples, and exercises to enable them to use this method in their work. It builds on Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference: Rethinking Qualitative Research by Tasha Fairfield and Andrew Charman (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

The core idea motivating this course is that the way we intuitively approach qualitative case research is similar to how we read detective novels. We consider various different hypotheses to explain what occurred—whether the emergence of democracy in South Africa, or the death of Samuel Ratchett on the Orient Express—drawing on the literature we have read (e.g. theories of regime change, or other Agatha Christie mysteries) and any salient previous experiences we have had. As we gather evidence and discover new clues, we update our beliefs about which hypothesis provides the best explanation—or we may introduce a new alternative that occurs to us along the way.

Bayesianism provides a natural framework that is both logically rigorous and grounded in common sense, that governs how we should revise our degree of belief in the truth of a hypothesis—e.g., “mobilisation from below drove democratization in South Africa by altering economic elites’ regime preferences,” (Wood 2001), or “a lone gangster sneaked onboard the train and killed Ratchett as revenge for being swindled”—given our relevant prior knowledge and new information that we obtain during our investigation. Bayesianism is enjoying a revival across many fields, and it offers a powerful tool for improving inference and analytic transparency in qualitative research.

The first part of this course introduces basic principles of Bayesian reasoning with the goal of helping us leverage common-sense understandings of inference and improve intuition when conducting causal analysis with qualitative evidence. We begin with the general logic of Bayesian inference, that is, how we update our prior view about which explanation is more plausible when we learn new evidence. We explain the importance of working with rival hypotheses and discusses how to formulate well-constructed explanations to compare. We then elaborate practical procedures for evaluating the inferential import of the evidence by “mentally inhabiting” the world of each hypothesis and asking which one makes the evidence more expected, and then updating our prior views about which hypothesis provides the best explanation. We include examples and exercises to illustrate how this process works with real-world qualitative evidence.

The second part of the course turns to comparative case studies. Methodological literature often treats cross-case (e.g., comparative) analysis and within-case analysis (e.g., process tracing) as distinct analytical endeavors that draw on different logics of inference. Within a Bayesian framework, however, there are no fundamental distinctions; all evidence contributes to inference in the same manner, whether we are studying a single case or multiple cases. In essence, each piece of evidence we obtain weighs in favor of one explanation over a rival to some degree, which we assess by asking which explanation makes that evidence more expected. Evidentiary weight then aggregates both within any given case, and across different cases that fall within the scope of the theories we are testing. In addition to showing how this process works with examples drawn from published comparative case studies, we will introduce a Bayesian approach to case selection and discuss how to articulate scope conditions and tentatively generalize our hypotheses.
 
Note: This course does not require any prior training in process training, Bayesianism, probability theory, or logic. The only technical skills that will be assumed are basic arithmetic.

Half Day Short Course | 9:00am – 1:00pm

This seminar provides an in-depth exploration of community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches within the context of political science. CBPR is a collaborative research methodology that involves partnerships between researchers and community members to address complex sociopolitical, socioeconomic, human rights, health, and environmental issues. The need to integrate local knowledge and perspectives into the implementation of policy initiatives has been recognized by scholars in political science, especially as it pertains to establishing more equitable partnerships with underrepresented communities. CBPR offers scholar a way to conduct research that highlights cultural sensitivity and contextual understanding, promotes collaborative problem solving of global challenges, and contributes to more equitable, sustainable, and inclusive approaches to political science scholarship. Through a combination of theoretical frameworks, methodologies, case studies, and practical exercises, participants will gain the knowledge and skills necessary to design, implement, and evaluate CBPR projects in diverse national and international settings. They will also be equipped with the knowledge and tools to critically reflect on their own positionality as researchers and engage in ethical and equitable research practices.

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

The China Development and Governance Workshop (CDGW) preconference short course is designed as a structured, pedagogically oriented program that equips participants with the analytical and communicative tools necessary to present, contextualize, and engage with original research on China in an international academic setting. The primary goal of the course is to strengthen participants’ capacity to articulate their research in English, situate it within global political science debates, and engage in constructive scholarly exchange across disciplinary and methodological boundaries.

The theme of the course, China Development and Governance: Understanding, Rethinking, and Rebuilding, reflects its focus on critically examining established frameworks in China studies while encouraging participants to develop innovative approaches to questions of development and governance. Initiated in 2020 by Asia Fellows at Harvard University, the CDGW has evolved into a well-recognized academic forum. Previous iterations have demonstrated strong scholarly impact, including the 12th CDGW held on the Harvard campus, with outcomes featured in the Harvard Gazette.

The short course will be conducted as a full-day, interactive preconference program. The course structure combines panel-style presentations, guided roundtable discussions, featured talks, and a book talk to balance formal instruction with participant engagement. Sessions are intentionally designed to emphasize learning and skill development rather than traditional conference presentation. Participants will receive guided feedback on research framing, argumentation, and scholarly communication, as well as opportunities for peer exchange and collaborative discussion.

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

This short course will bring together experienced as well as novice practitioners and researchers of gaming pedagogies across the discipline. Gaming pedagogies is interpreted as distinct from simulations, but as broadly constituting techniques that invite students to learn through play, be it competitive or cooperative traditional analog board games, mobile and video games, collaborative story-driven role-playing games, and using other gaming tools and technologies, such as toys. Over the sessions of the short course, participants will explore gaming pedagogies and share resources, brainstorm research possibilities deriving from such pedagogies, as well as possible methodological approaches to said research, and participate in round-table discussions of best practices/troubleshooting activities.

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

Comparative historical analysis (CHA) is a methodological tradition that bridges the strengths of historical narrative and social scientific inquiry. Widely used to examine problem-driven, macro-historical questions, CHA allows researchers to use the past not only to generate rich descriptions and typologies, but also to develop generalizable, testable theories. This full-day short course introduces scholars to the core elements of CHA’s unique analytical toolbox, offering both theoretical grounding and practical applications.
 
The course is structured around four methodological components: exploration and description, data visualization, temporal thinking, and theorizing. Participants will learn how CHA emphasizes descriptive clarity to generate new research questions, uses visualization techniques like periodizations and chronologies to map historical processes, and employs a nuanced temporal vocabulary to explain both rapid changes and long-term developments. The course also explores how CHA fosters an iterative relationship between theory and data, helping researchers uncover hidden confounders and refine existing explanations.
 
Led by Marcus Kreuzer, Professor of Political Science at Villanova University and author of The Grammar of Time: A Toolkit for Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge, 2023), the course draws on his extensive teaching experience at IQMR, ECPR, and MethodsNet. Designed for scholars across subfields, this course will benefit anyone interested in using CHA to investigate complex political transformations across time.

Half Day Short Course | 9:00am – 1:00pm

Course Overview: Discover the world of qualitative data analysis with NVivo, a user-friendly software designed to help students and researchers alike. This half a day workshop offers a comprehensive introduction to NVivo, equipping you with the skills to efficiently integrate it into your research projects.

Who Should Attend: Students and researchers at any stage of their academic career. Suitable both for beginners to NVivo and for those looking to enhance their existing skills.

Course Outline

• Part 1 – Exploring NVivo BasicsSetting Up Your Project
• Creating and Importing Sources
• Managing Data: Cases, Attributes, and Sets
  Part 2 – Delving Deeper into NVivo
• Editing and Linking: Getting “Up from the Data”
• Coding and Recoding: Handling Ideas
  Part 3 – Starting with Analysis and Reporting
• Finding Items and Querying the Data
• Exploring Patterns in Matrices
• Reporting and Showing Your Project

Bring Your Own Data: Build your project using your own research materials. You may bring academic articles, documents, reports, or primary data such as interview transcripts. Alternatively, a sample dataset will be provided for hands-on practice.

Outcomes: By the end of this workshop, you will be equipped with the knowledge and hands-on experience to use NVivo confidently in your research projects.”

Half Day Short Course | 9:00am – 1:00pm

Estimating treatment effects when the data are observational rather than experimental presents a challenge in many research areas. This course provides an introduction into the problems of causal inference that arise in the context of observational data, and presents an overview of statistical methods and techniques to overcome these challenges. Commonly used techniques for estimating treatment effects such as regression adjustment, inverse-probability weighting, and propensity-score matching will be discussed. In addition, we will also present techniques for performing model checking and model selection, and we will introduce methods for dealing with more complex causal models such as causal mediation models. Finally, we will present a number of hands-on examples that demonstrate how to perform causal inference and treatment effect estimation. The examples are shown using the statistical software package Stata, but no prior knowledge of Stata is required. Attendees should be familiar with basic statistical methods and techniques such as regression modeling.

Half Day Short Course | 9:00am – 1:00pm

One of the original rationales for the organization of the Campaign Finance Research Group (CFRG) was to bring together campaign finance scholars, reform advocates, and policy makers “in order to inform the policy debates on campaign finance issues.” As the authors of CFRG’s 2001 application for Related Group status wrote, “the CFRG will help shrink the often wide gap between the work of scholars and that of policy makers and help make the results of research done by political scientists more relevant for lawmakers, government officials and citizens.”  With this purpose in mind, we propose here a short course that brings together scholars, policy makers, and reform advocates to discuss public funding programs and proposals for small-dollar financing of American political campaigns. Broadly speaking, the aim of the short course is for scholars, policy makers, and reform advocates to learn from each other and, ultimately, to lay out a research agenda moving forward that would advance the development, evaluation, and fine-tuning of public financing and small-dollar campaign finance programs.

The participants in the short course will be a group of scholars who have conducted research in the area of public financing and a group of reform advocates and policymakers who have advocated for, developed, and/or participated in these programs. Thematically, we plan to organize the course around a series of broad discussions:

• Ways to improve and expand scholarly and reform advocate collaboration
• Perspectives on whether public financing programs are achieving their aims, which are generally thought to be the following:
o Minimizing representational distortion by encouraging legislation in the broad interest of voters;
o Broadening and diversifying the donor pool;
o Broadening and diversifying the candidate pool;
o Promoting political equality among citizens and candidates;
o Preventing corruption;
o Increasing public confidence in government and the electoral system.

• Methodological approaches for building a record of evidence to assist policymakers
• Outlining an agenda for advocate and scholarly collaboration

As we envision the workshop, there will be significant opportunities for non-panelists to participate in the discussion.

Broadly speaking, the aim of the workshop is to help build a network of campaign finance scholars and practitioners interested in remaining in contact with each other beyond the workshop in order to exchange information, generate ideas, and produce useful research in the area of campaign finance reform that can serve policymakers. Ideally, moreover, the agenda we outline at the workshop can serve as the basis for grant proposals to support the research.     

Because the existing systems of publicly financed elections are publicly transparent, there is extensive data available to analyze. Many of these systems have been in existence for more than a decade. Although analysts have evaluated a few of these systems, many have received little attention and much work remains. For example, there has been very little cross-comparison of the three basic models of small-donor based reform and the variations within each model.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this effort. With the “collapse of campaign finance regulation in the United States facilitating a path toward oligarchic power redistribution” (Hasen 2025, 1), it is not inconceivable that a climate conducive to national reform—similar to that which emerged in the 1970s (Sorauf 1988; Zelizer 2004)—will materialize in the present-day U.S. If such a climate does in fact take shape, it will be crucial for policy makers to have evidence-based policy proposals at the ready in order to take advantage of the window of opportunity. What’s more, multiple states and localities are already exploring and moving forward with new public funding programs. The network of scholars and reform advocates we build here can be instrumental in providing a foundation for such proposals.
 
Although we do not yet have a complete list of scholars and practitioners in place for the short-course, several individuals have committed to participating. They include the following:

Scholars
• Jennifer Heerwig (SUNY Stony Brook)
• Elizabeth Rigby (George Washington University)
• Michael Malbin (SUNY Albany)
• Ray LaRaja (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
• Jennifer Victor (George Mason University)

Reform Advocates
• Nick Nyhart (Former President & CEO, Public Campaign/Every Voice Center)
• Sarah Bryner (Public Agenda)
• Keshia Morris Desir (Demos)
• Patrick Llewellyn (Campaign Legal Center)
• Brendan J Glavin (Open Secrets)
• Ian Vandewalker (Brennan Center)

Half Day Short Course | 1:30pm – 5:30pm

Research data management entails developing a data management plan and handling research materials systematically throughout the research lifecycle. Effectively managing data makes research more robust, allows data to be useful over a longer period of time, and facilitates sharing data with the broader research community. This short course equips participants with a range of strategies for effectively managing qualitative data in its many different forms: interviews, ethnographic materials, archival resources, online sources, etc. While the focus of the course is on conceptual issues, we will cover useful software and hardware for data management and security. The short course also covers writing data management and sharing plans (DMSPs), as required by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and other funders and organizations, for research involving qualitative data. We also consider the benefits and challenges of sharing data and demonstrate appropriate techniques for mitigating them, again with the help of exercises and tools that participants will be able to use with their own research. Finally, the short course introduces and briefly discusses techniques for making qualitative research more transparent, including developing methods appendices and tables for qualitative work, documenting analysis performed in qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS) software, and employing Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI).

Half Day Short Course | 1:30pm – 5:30pm

The Internet serves as a vital platform for information access and global connectivity. Individuals are increasingly spending a significant portion of their lives online. From online deliberation to communication between elected representatives and constituents, the Internet has also had a significant relationship with democracy since its inception. The impact of the Internet has also been experienced in the context of threats to democracies such as online surveillance, Internet shutdowns, and online conspiracies about election processes. This widespread online engagement offers unprecedented opportunities to study human behavior at scale, yet researchers face significant ethical and technical barriers when attempting to collect data for academic studies. In particular, major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have progressively restricted access to their official Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which previously served as primary tools for researchers to create customized datasets from specific platforms for studying online content production and engagement behavior. Content exposure and app usage behavior on mobile phones is an even rarer source of data despite a large chunk of online activity taking place on these devices. This workshop introduces the National Internet Observatory (NIO), an alternative data collection framework and infrastructure designed to help researchers study online behavior, with a particular focus on content viewing—the predominant form of online activity. The Observatory model offers an alternative, more democratic model to data access and use for academic research, including pathways to understand and analyze online traces of democratic crises. This course presents NIO’s informed data donation process, participant demographics and behavioral traces, secure computing infrastructure and pathways for data access, and examples of analyses and innovative research with this new source of data for the network science community. The course includes interactive activities and hands-on sessions with real datasets that demonstrate NIO’s capabilities for enabling novel cross-disciplinary and cross-platform research across web and social network environments to offer insights into the crises of democracy as experienced by Internet users in the US.

This short course is designed for academic researchers from all disciplines represented at APSA. There are no formal prerequisites for participation. Anyone interested in online activity data collection and research can participate and learn from this course. While a background in digital behavioral research helps participants better understand the challenges and opportunities that NIO presents, it is not required to learn about this new data collection infrastructure. By the end of this course, participants will:

• Learn about various methods of online activity data collection along with their pros and cons.
• Learn about a new infrastructure and framework for data collection in the post-API age.
• Learn about the research and analytical possibilities enabled by NIO and data donations, including the cross-platform potential of working with participants browsing activity, the kinds of research enabled by trace data being linked with survey data, research potential offered by trace data from mobile devices, and the interdisciplinary uses of these alternative data collection methods.
• Understand the data collected by NIO and how it could inform their own ongoing or future research.

Half Day Short Course | 9:00am – 1:00pm

Creating inclusive classrooms is essential for student learning. As the student population in many of our courses changes, it is even more important for faculty to think about how to design these courses to include all students. This includes thinking intentionally about how to structure courses first generation students, students of color, LGBTQ students, returning students, students with accessibility needs and more. In this short course, you will learn the basic principles for creating courses where all of our students are given the tools they need to succeed. Topics will include universal design, transparency in teaching and learning, and more. This course will be of particular interest to graduate students and newer faculty, but given the general lack of pedagogical training available to most faculty, even more seasoned faculty members will likely benefit from this course.

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

Workshop Overview

The global political economy is undergoing profound and overlapping transformations. Rising geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruptions, industrial policy revival, financial volatility, and intensifying distributional conflicts have reshaped the relationship between politics and markets across advanced and developing economies alike. Understanding how these disruptions emerge, how they are governed, and how they reshape political behavior is a central task for scholars of International and Comparative Political Economy.

Workshop Structure:

The workshop will feature approximately 12 presentations organized into four thematic blocs, each focused on a key topic in political economy. Each bloc will include three 15-minute presentations, followed by discussant comments and interactive audience Q&A. This format is designed to promote rigorous yet collaborative engagement and to provide presenters with constructive feedback to advance their research.

The workshop is open to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including economics, political science, international law, and sociology. We have accepted rigorous research at various stages of development and using a range of methodological approaches, including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods.

Thematic Focus Areas:

The workshop will address a broad range of International and Comparative Political Economy topics. The selected papers collectively engage a variety of interrelated themes, including:

Geopolitics, Fragmentation, and Global Economic Networks
Research in this area examines how geopolitical rivalry, economic fragmentation, and strategic competition reshape global supply chains, trade and financial networks, and patterns of interdependence. Papers explore how states and firms respond to heightened uncertainty, risk, and power asymmetries in the international economy.

Trade, Globalization, and Domestic Political Consequences
Several contributions focus on trade, trade agreements, and the political and distributional consequences of economic integration. These papers examine how trade liberalization, tariff design, and ideological alignment influence welfare outcomes, electoral behavior, and political backlash.

Finance, Debt, and Macroeconomic Governance
This theme includes work on sovereign borrowing strategies, the political determinants of domestic versus external debt, and emerging forms of geoeconomic risk. Papers highlight how domestic political competition and international constraints shape financial policy and economic vulnerability.

Institutions, Ideas, and Economic Governance
Papers in this area examine how political economy operates through institutions, ideas, and regulatory processes. Topics include corporate political advocacy, regulatory exchange, and the role of knowledge, expertise, and norms in shaping economic governance.

Power, Inequality, and Political Economy Beyond the State
Finally, several papers engage broader questions of power, representation, and inequality in the global political economy. These contributions examine issues such as sovereignty and decolonization, gender and economic governance, and how structural constraints shape political and economic outcomes over time.

Together, these themes reflect the workshop’s focus on understanding how politics and economics interact in a period of global transition and disruption.

Objectives:

• Engagement with Critical Issues: Provide a platform for research addressing pivotal political and economic transformations.
• Mentorship and Feedback: Connect starting and advanced PhD students and post-doctoral fellows to foster collaboration and supportive networks.
• Inclusive Networking Opportunities: Promote dialogue and exchange among scholars from diverse backgrounds and methodological traditions.

Expected Outcomes:

This pre-conference workshop will enrich the APSA Annual Meeting by generating new insights into contemporary challenges in international and comparative political economy, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, and supporting the professional development of emerging scholars. By situating the discussion in the context of ongoing global disruptions, the workshop offers a forward-looking perspective on the political and economic forces shaping the contemporary world. Collectively, the workshop highlights the continued relevance of International and Comparative Political Economy for understanding and navigating periods of transition and uncertainty.

Half Day Short Course | 9:00am – 1:00pm

How do we identify individual political beliefs that people subjectively find most polarizing? Which cognitive phenomena are sufficient or necessary for the emergence of a structured (and so, polarized) attitude network?

ResIN (short for Response Item Networks) combines the statistical prowess of item-response theory (IRT) with the computational efficiency and ease of interpretation of belief network analysis (BNA). ResIN provides a flexible and easy to implement framework to visualize and make statistical inferences about complex inter-relationships between survey item responses. More specifically, by simulating item responses as charged particles in a latent attitude space, ResIN utilizes the location of political attitude nodes in a latent ideological space.

ResIN models thus benefit from additional information about the spatial intersections of major attitudinal cleavage lines, the relative strengths and correlations between different latent attitude factors, and the approximate position of attitude nodes that bridge different ideological camps.

Workshop participants will be given a detailed theoretical and practical introduction to belief network theory more generally, and ResIN-modeling more specifically. The goal of the applied tutorial in R is to assess the extent to which the spatial location of attitude-bridging nodes correspond to the real world ability of such attitudes to enable compromise between different ideological groups.

Background rationale: The advent of the internet has enabled people to connect, access information, and engage in free debate, leading to remarkable collective projects such as Wikipedia and the Polymath project. However, we are also witnessing a contrasting phenomenon, where individuals are becoming increasingly segregated into ideological camps often engaged in an ideological war against each other. For example, in the United States only 4% of couples are currently composed of a mix of Republicans and Democrats. This environment has shown to be heavily detrimental for collective action potential and so for thriving societies. In the past, research on collective intelligence has focused on the importance of diversity. In this workshop, we would use methods such as ResIN to study the distinction between positive and negative diversity among people’s socio-political attitudes. Under positive diversity, people hold numerous, often diffuse opinion combinations on different topics. In case of negative diversity, opinions on different topics tend to be strongly correlated (for example, in the United States, people who support gay rights tend also to be in favor of women rights and gun control). Therefore, positive attitude diversity harbors greater potential for two or more groups to find a common denominator and enable cross-group collaboration.

ResIN (short for Response Item Network) is an effective method to distinguish between positive and negative diversity. During the workshop, we will examine longitudinal datasets such as the ANES and ESS to observe how attitude networks have evolved over time, and how these structures are connected to variables such as affective polarization (i.e. the dislike between people of different ideological groups), which can limit the potential for cooperation and collective action. Using ABMs we will also explore which conditions are sufficient for producing highly structured networks and the foundations of affective polarization. For example, some preliminary studies suggest that simply the possibility of recognizing the association between two attitudes in other people, together with the ability of learning this pattern, may be enough to produce polarization. Finally, we will combine ABM and data analysis to study possible interventions. Specifically, we will focus on which attitudes may be responsible for most polarization and which types of online interaction could increase or decrease polarization. The participants of this project will receive a detailed introduction to ResIN, including how they can apply the modeling approach in their own research fields and get familiar with the computational implementation in R. The goal of the workshop will be to identify a low number of potential attitude candidates for a simple experiment on polarization reduction in the US and in one other European country. Participants are highly encouraged to bring in their own ideas about additional applications of these research methods and how to test them in novel contexts.

Half Day Short Course | 1:30pm – 5:30pm

The “Studying Cool Stuff Seriously” Short Course includes a methods workshop and a panel discussion on publication and promotion strategies. The workshop is comprised of two sections designed to develop skills and ideas for analyzing cultural content and practices in political science. The first section tackles questions of how to study art and aesthetics in order to make claims about the political world. The second will expand options for scholarly knowledge production by asking participants to reflect on the narratives contained in their own projects and consider alternative media for sharing their research. The panel discussion includes experts at diverse career stages to discuss how to position “cool” research on art and pop culture as rigorous academic inquiry for journal editors, reviewers, search and tenure committees, etc.

Workshop Section 1: “Methods Considerations in Studying the Politics of Art,” led by Tania Islas Weinstein

Whether artists intend it or not, their work often becomes part of museums, national heritage collections, and public culture. Paintings appear in textbooks, poems are taught in schools, and music and films circulate widely through the media. Art also travels across borders, frequently promoted as a symbol of a state or a nation. It serves as testimony to the words and actions of individuals and communities and is mobilized by politicians and social movements to represent people and ideas. Yet art is more than a reflection of its political context. It can transcend its origins, evoking responses far beyond the circumstances of its creation. While art can be analyzed as evidence to help us understand the world as it is, it can also invite us to imagine scenarios that disrupt rather than affirm familiar narratives and encourage new ways of thinking.

This raises a fundamental question: How do we analyze art when our goal is to understand and make claims about the political world? To contend that we can definitively determine the political impact of a work of art would require oversimplifying the complex and varied ways in which artistic practices can be said to “work” in the world. There is a complex causal connection between art and politics. Because artistic practices are influenced by political processes, analyzing art can shed light on those processes. But art is never a simple reflection of its context. It also has the capacity to invite people to see the world not as it is but as it could be. This dual capacity to reflect and to disrupt creates methodological challenges for scholars who seek to use art as a lens into politics. While these challenges can never fully be resolved, there are ways of analyzing art that can help us understand why the world is as it is while simultaneously inviting us – as scholars and citizens – to see it differently.

In this workshop, we will explore how art both mirrors and shapes political realities. We will discuss how a variety of research methods, such as ethnography, visual and discursive analysis, and descriptive approaches, can help us analyze art as a source of evidence and as a catalyst for thinking otherwise. In the process, we will consider artists not only as research participants and informants we can interview but also as political thinkers whose work invites us to see the world anew.

Workshop Section 2: “Creativity and Method in Research Output,” led by Michelle Weitzel

This part of the workshop will focus on storytelling and visuals, asking what might be gained by pushing scholarly praxis beyond exclusively textual forms of production and standard academic formats. Participants will reflect on their own research projects to reimagine them as narratives that follow a plot—not with the intention of “illustrating” or adorning a final product, but with the goal of discovering new ways of shaping the questions they ask, the communities they engage, the data they collect, and the arguments they advance. Using comix, graphic novels and other forms of inspiration, we will discuss strategies for planning and conducting research that keeps creativity at the forefront of inquiry, and how to make these practices work in service of—not against—disciplinary expectations.

Panel: “Strategies for Success in the Discipline”

Composed of women working in comparative and IR areas ranging from museum art collections to graffiti and memes, from celebrities’ UN advocacy to right-wing YouTubers and memes, the panel will include an open and frank discussion of gender and other biases that such scholars face, as well as and suggestions for overcoming these biases in publishing and career advancement. The panel will include Micah English, Lisel Hintz, Tania Islas Weinstein, Alexis Lerner, Samantha Majic, Jelena Subotic, Michelle Weitzel, and Colleen Wood. Scholars at any stage of their research and with any level of familiarity working with cultural content are welcome to attend.

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

OVERVIEW
From China to Cuba to Chad and most recently in Afghanistan and Syria, around one-fourth of post-1945 civil wars have ended in rebel victory, whereby rebels win control of the central state (either militarily or in the first postconflict elections) or successfully secede and control a newly-independent state. Most existing work has found that rebel victors tend to craft the most enduring authoritarian regimes (Meng and Paine 2022), especially revolutionary rebel victors (Lachapelle, Levitsky, Way and Casey 2020). Yet, the consequences of rebel victory extend far beyond the bounds of regime durability to include the nature of domestic political, economic, and social institutions, political violence within and outside a rebel victor’s country, and global institutional and political change.

This invitation-only short course would support engagement and development of an edited volume on the implications of rebel victory. The short course would be designed to provide scholarly exchange and detailed feedback for the contributors of the edited volume. A significant portion of the short course would be dedicated to professional development and networking for junior scholars who, alongside leading senior researchers, are contributors of this volume.

SHORT-COURSE STRUCTURE
The short course will involve read-ahead submissions and will include 4 to 5 panels with 12 to 15 presentations, each approximately 15 minutes long. A discussant will provide feedback on papers before opening them to the floor for in-depth scholarly engagement. The short course will include one module for brainstorming about missing gaps and next steps in the process, and it will include breaks for mentoring, networking, and professional development for junior scholars.

RELEVANT DIVISIONS
Autocracy and Democracy: What is the nature and durability of the regimes rebel victors create? How does rebel victory shape the domestic institutions of other countries?
Conflict Processes: How does rebel victory shape post-conflict reconstruction? How does rebel victory shape political violence within and outside their states?

COURSE OBJECTIVES
1) Scholarly Engagement: we seek to create a vibrant and engaging space for scholars working on rebel victory and its domestic and global consequences
2) Professional Development: with several junior scholars included in the edited volume, we aim to provide professional development opportunities regarding the book publishing and development process, feedback with conceptual development, and new opportunities for guidance in writing
3) Networking: we aim to establish a group of scholars from diverse backgrounds, institutions, and ranks who share an intellectual community and research output.

DELIVERABLE
An edited volume that addresses the following: From the moment they control the state, rebel victors face incentives and challenges that, in most cases, they have never experienced. Unlike incumbent victors, who already controlled the pre-war state, they must attempt to implement their goals with an inherited state apparatus shaped by the defeated government and its predecessors. Rebel victors enjoy greater control over the shape of the postwar state than rebels-turned-parties or coopted warlords in the context of negotiated settlements, but also confront unique challenges. While these victors may have ambitions for great transformation, their hold on power is frequently precarious, and vulnerable to domestic and international threats.

Despite growing attention to post-war political orders and rebel-to-party transitions, civil war scholarship still lacks conceptual, theoretical, and empirical frameworks for understanding and explaining variation in rebel victory and its aftermath. One body of literature on political orders primarily aims to understand post-rebel victory regime consolidation processes of democratization or autocratization. Other work focuses more on security, conflict, and post-war stability, examining either the recurrence of civil war after rebel victory or analyzing factors that may lead from rebel victory to the (in)security of the post-victory regime.

This volume aims to fill this gap by zeroing in on rebel victory as a unique and consequential form of civil war termination, while highlighting variation in post-victory politics around the globe. Rebel victory affects domestic political, economic, security, and social institutions and practices, as well as the durability of these policies. Rebel victory also has implications for the international system, and the international system shapes the nature of rebel victory.

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

What is a job talk? Simple, it is an oral presentation that displays your research. The problem is that you have spent all your time thinking and expressing your research in a medium other than the oral form of communication. Although the underlying ideas you wish to convey are largely the same, the medium in which you are now asked to express them is profoundly different. The primary challenge in crafting a research talk, then, is this: How do I translate my research from one mode of communication to another? This is precisely the question this workshop seeks to answer, and it does so by drawing on storytelling as the central translating device.

This workshop is designed to offer you, first and foremost, a general framework for how to think about the research presentation as storytelling. Our journey will take us through such questions as: What is storytelling? What makes storytelling so compelling? How can it be used in the context of research presentations? Alongside answering these deeper questions, the workshop will also walk through a portion of an actual presentation to demonstrate the principles of storytelling when applied to research. In the afternoon, participants will be afforded the opportunity to start crafting their own research presentation in the form of storytelling.

Morning:

• Introduces a general framework on how to think about the research presentation as storytelling.
• Walks through a portion of an actual job talk to demonstrate the principles of storytelling when applied to research.

Afternoon:
Building on the principles from the morning session, participants now have the opportunity to start crafting their own research presentation in the form of storytelling.

Who is the audience for this workshop?
Anyone interested in learning more about giving research presentations is welcome to join. My immediate goal, however, is to offer this to PhD students about to enter the academic job market — hence the title of the workshop.

Is this workshop mostly lecture based?
The workshop will consist of two modes, one where I will be the primary speaker and the other where you will be engaged in small group work. Especially the afternoon session of the workshop will be mostly small group work. Please come ready to participate.

Can participants attend just part of the workshop?
Sure. But if you do, I strongly recommend you attend morning session of the workshop. The afternoon will draw heavily on the things introduced in the morning.

Half Day Short Course | 1:30pm – 5:30pm

Are you interested in expanding undergraduate research opportunities in your courses and department, but are unsure how to do so? Do you already mentor undergraduate researchers but want to be more intentional, effective, and sustainable in that work? This half-day workshop is for you.

Undergraduate research can take many forms: scaffolded research assignments in introductory courses, semester-long research papers in upper-division seminars, independent studies and honors theses, and close collaboration with undergraduate research assistants on faculty-led projects. These contexts share a common foundation: teaching students the basics of research methods, empowering them to apply those methods to substantive real-world questions, and supporting their development as researchers in their own right. We will use this foundation as a starting point for our work.

Through a combination of short presentations, guided discussions, and hands-on activities, participants will examine practical strategies for mentoring undergraduate researchers. We will address how to introduce research methods in accessible ways, scaffold research skills over time, design meaningful research tasks, and provide effective feedback and mentorship. Particular attention will be paid to issues of inclusion, scale, and sustainability, including how to support students with diverse backgrounds and levels of preparation.

By the end of the workshop, attendees will:

1. learn about examples of mentoring undergraduate researchers in courses, independent projects, and faculty-led research teams, including reflections on challenges and best practices;
2. brainstorm ideas for integrating undergraduate research into their own teaching and research agendas;
3. review useful policies and tools related to recruitment, training, project design, and mentoring relationships;
4. discuss strategies for assessing student learning and evaluating the effectiveness of undergraduate research experiences; and
5. begin building a community of faculty interested in undergraduate research who can continue to share ideas, resources, and best practices beyond the conference.

Half Day Short Course | 9:00am – 1:00pm

The study of causal mechanisms (aka causal processes) is ubiquitous in the social sciences. The promise of mechanism-focused research using in-depth case studies is that we can gain a better understanding of how things work and under what conditions using actual cases instead of using controlled comparisons across cases (for example experimentally manipulating treatments to gain knowledge about mean causal effects). However, the potential gains of mechanism-focused research have not been fully reaped in the social sciences because of the tendency to reduce causal processes to simple one-liners (aka intervening variables), but that do not unpack the details of the chain of interaction going on in a case that links causes and outcomes together (e.g. that grievances are linked to democratization through social mobilization). By not unpacking process theoretically in more granular detail, we are less able to evidence how processes work because empirical material is only processual/mechanistic evidence when we can identify the theorized part of a process that it is evidence of.

Inspired by the mechanistic turns in fields such as medicine, policy evaluation and policy studies, the first session of the course discusses what ’good’ processual/mechanistic explanations can look like in the social sciences. The course introduces a conceptual language of episodic theorization inspired by work in fields like biology and medicine; which attempts to capture the causal structure of a process through making explicit what causal roles interactions between actors play in different phases of a process. While the particularities of processes as they play out in individual cases will always be case-specific, cross-case processual comparisons are made possible through the analytical simplification in the form of theorizing the episodes and their causal role that make up the causal structure. The final session discusses practical applications, including what and how we can ‘generalize’ from processual case studies, and how process-focused research can be used as an adjunct method to improve social science experiments in designing the experiment and interpreting the data.

Half Day Short Course | 1:30pm – 5:30pm

This short course covers the underlying logic and best practices of process tracing, which is a within-case method of developing and testing causal explanations of individual cases. We begin by exploring the philosophies of science behind process tracing: critical realist and interpretive. Next, we highlight, define and provide examples of the central concept process tracing measures – causal mechanisms – noting their difference from causal effects and interpretive understandings of causation.

The core of the short course is then an introduction to the logic and best practices of process tracing, both its ‘front end’ data collection and ‘back end’ data analysis. For data collection, we consider the typical ways in which process tracing gathers evidence on the observable implications of causal mechanisms, including archival work, document analysis of secondary sources, various field methods (interviews, political ethnography, ethnography), and surveys. In reviewing these methods, we consider the inferential and ethical challenges each raises when accessing process-tracing data. On data analysis and process tracing, we begin by considering the informal manner in which many scholars proceed; more important, we survey the growing number of techniques (e.g., Bayesian logic, directed acyclic graphs) that allow us to conduct the process tracing analysis more formally and transparently. We finish this part of the course by articulating a set of best practices for conducting process tracing.

After this overview of the philosophical, causal and data logics of process tracing, the course introduces participants to two different types. We begin with the Bayesian approach—comparing rival hypotheses; evaluating the inferential weight of evidence by “mentally inhabiting” the world of each hypothesis and asking which one makes the evidence more expected; updating prior views about which hypothesis is more plausible; and fostering transparency through systemization. We then turn to interpretive process tracing—inductive approach; practice logic; establishing local causation; transparency through ethical self-reflection.

Throughout the course we will emphasize best practices and applications to exemplars of process tracing research. While the examples are primarily drawn from international relations and comparative politics, the methods we discuss are applicable to all the subfields of political science, to sociology, economics, history, business studies, public policy, and many other fields.

During the final part of the course, we will divide into smaller discussion groups to explore further the material covered. The instructor will circulate among the groups, stimulating reflections on or answering questions about data collection, causal mechanisms, Bayesian approaches, data analysis, ethics, and the like.

Half Day Short Course | 1:30pm – 5:30pm

This short course addresses both the theory (ontology; conceptualization) and practice (method) of the growing number of ways in which scholars put the social world into motion. Our approach is resolutely plural in that we are more interested in promoting learning and communication across traditions than in re-enforcing academic silos.

We begin the first hour with a meta-theoretical and theoretical discussion of the differing ways social scientists conceptualize process, relations, and dynamics. Ontologically, we introduce relationalism and argue that it provides the best meta-theoretical point-of-departure for all processual approaches. Building upon relational insights, we then survey the diverse concepts that are used to capture process, from causal mechanisms, to Bayesian hypotheses, to social practices, to situating objects, concepts, and categories across sites.

The core of the short course – two hours – then drills down to explore the various methods available to access and measure such dynamics. These include standard and Bayesian process tracing, but the course also moves beyond these methods by discussing approaches that are not as commonly used in political science: practice tracing, with roots in Bourdieusian sociology and continental social theory, as well as methodologies that “follow-the-thing” from critical geography, anthropology, and multi-sited ethnography.

Within these overarching methodologies, we explore the strengths and limitations of the various ‘methods within the method’ that do the heavy lifting in providing data on processes, relations, and sites. These include ethnography, political ethnography, photo elicitation, relational interviews, archival work, and document analysis.

We conclude this part of the course by mapping the (often missing) ethics of processual social science. At a time when exciting discussions on ethical reflexivity are emerging across the discipline – around feminist ethics of care and epistemologies as well as post-colonial ethics – too many processual approaches are silent on them. Why?

The course’s final hour is devoted to small-group breakout sessions, where participants workshop how they plan to use various processual methods in their research. Are there meta-theoretical, transparency, data access, data collection, data analysis, or ethical issues with which they are grappling? The instructors and fellow participants will offer constructive advice on how best to address such challenges.

Half Day Short Course | 1:30pm – 5:30pm

How can researchers effectively and ethically navigate the challenges of conducting fieldwork in politically sensitive and logistically complex contexts? This short course will explore the challenges of conducting fieldwork in countries and regions such as Africa, China, East Asia, India, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia. Participants will learn strategies for collecting archival, qualitative, quantitative, and experimental data in contexts where logistical and ethical challenges are magnified by political constraints. Topics will include mitigating security risks, managing researcher and participant well-being, collecting and triangulating different types of data, including digital fieldwork, and addressing positionality and reflexivity in research processes. The course will also examine how global and local political tensions influence research design, access, and outcomes. The session will feature a general overview and presentations addressing key themes. Each presentation will be followed by an interactive discussion, allowing participants to ask questions, share experiences, and gain practical insights into the ethical and methodological challenges of conducting fieldwork in complex settings. The instructors are Nermin Allam (Rutgers-Newark), Justine Davis (University of Michigan), and Roselyn Hsueh (Temple University).

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

Organized in partnership with the MENA Politics Section, this short course features seven early-career scholars whose research focuses on the MENA region. Papers will be shared in advance to maximize time for feedback and discussion among attendees. All Annual Meeting participants are welcome to pre-register and join the course.

Cosponsored by the APSA MENA Politics Section

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

This short course is invitation-only.

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

This short course is invitation-only.

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

Organized by the Southeast Asian Politics Related Group, this short course features research by five early career scholars from Southeast Asia. Papers will be shared in advance to maximize time for feedback and discussion among attendees. Annual Meeting attendees are welcome to pre-register and join the program.

Full Day Short Course | 9:00am – 5:00pm

This short course is invitation-only.