Workshop: Support for Conferences and Mentoring of Underrepresented Groups in Political Methodology

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This project supports the Society for Political Methodology's efforts to support underfunded graduate students, expand mentoring and networking efforts for women and members of underrepresented groups, as well as to develop new inclusive programs for making the subfield more accessible to groups with historically lower participation in the activities of the subfield. In addition, the project also supports providing undergraduate students with the tools and counseling needed to pursue political methodology in graduate school. During the award period the project will: (1) ensure that qualified, but insufficiently-funded graduate students can attend and participate in our highly successful Summer methodology meetings, (2) continue holding small thematically oriented meetings that emphasize particular technical skills and foster a high level of networking and mentoring,(3) continue a series of small meetings for women methodologists that deliberately mix senior leaders in the subfield with young, emerging scholars who can benefit substantially from such close personal interaction, and, (4) providing one on one interaction between undergraduate students and political methodologists with the goal of preparing undergraduates to do graduate work in political methodology. This includes maintaining and developing multiple venues for presenting, discussing, and advancing quantitative methods in political science, with a direct focus on finding, mentoring, and enabling under-represented groups in political methodology. Since all of the programs and initiatives in this proposal are targeted at individuals in these circumstances, the effect is to dramatically widen the access to the intellectual breadth of methodology. The summer meeting is well known in the discipline for faculty-student interaction, network formation between junior and senior faculty, and revealing the process of creating new knowledge in quantitative political science. Methodology plays a special role in the large, diverse field of political science, since it reaches across other areas of research in the discipline, with a history of providing knowledge and tools that help researchers who are not themselves self identified as methodologists. Thus the planned investment in graduate students and increased inclusion of underrepresented groups from this support will have an impact that stretches across the discipline. In addition, the techniques developed and presented at political methodology conferences has been of use to a wide variety of users from scholars in other social sciences to people in the private sector to analysts working for various government agencies.