This year's American Political Science Association was held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on 15-18 September 2022. The APSA convention is one of the largest academic gatherings in the discipline, and its over 1,500 events include special advanced training workshops ("short courses"), thematic mini-conferences, and poster sessions as well as over 1,000 panels and roundtables.
Twelve researchers from the Department of Political and Social Sciences (SPS) participated in the meeting, as did six faculty members from SPS and the Robert Schuman Centre, two EUI visiting fellows and a research associate at the Robert Schuman Centre, and eight Max Weber Fellows.
Three SPS researchers organised a panel on 'Vulnerable Populations' in political science fieldwork; the presentations included conceptual papers on researchers' and subjects' vulnerabilities, with case studies from Hong Kong and Colombia. Other topics that were presented at the convention by SPS researchers include nationalism and redistribution, racism and ancestral ties to slavery, citizen support for democracy, polarisation and depolarisation in party/voting behaviour, solidarity and public opinion in the pandemic, and Irish politics. Notably, SPS Alumnus Samuel D. Schmid received the Best Graduate Student Paper Award for an article deriving from a chapter of his PhD thesis.
Head of the SPS Department, Professor Elias Dinas contributed a paper on national stigmas and origins of political behaviour; Professor Miriam Golden presented on legislative politics in democracies and dictatorships; Professor Filip Kostelka presented on voters' behaviour in 'difficult democracies' in Eastern Europe; and Professor Jeffrey Checkel taught a short course on qualitative methods/process tracing as well as chairing the 'Vulnerable Populations' panel.
Fellows and associates from the Robert Schuman Centre presented on defense-industry alliances, as well as counterterrorism and the Islamic State. RSC Director Erik Jones chaired a session on the topic of contemporary Italian politics, while Joint Chair at the SPS Department and the RSC, Stephanie Hofmann presented two papers on institutional complexity in global politics.
Topics presented by Max Weber fellows included health and populism, migrant political rights, public opinion on immigration, and corruption and auditing. Additional contributions focused on the politics of space in colonial contexts, procurement regulation and firms’ networks, and homophobic violence in the military. Furthermore, Max Weber fellows Victoria Finn and Natalia Garbiras-Díaz were also awarded a best thesis award for their dissertations, respectively from the Association’s section on Migration and Citizenship, and from the section on Methods.
Photo credit: American Political Science Association (APSA)