Collaborative Conference Proposal: Support for Conferences and Mentoring of Women and Underrepresented Groups in Political Methodology

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The General Summary: This award continues long-standing Foundation support for the research and training activities of the Society for Political Methodology. Past support has propelled the development of the field of political methodology from a small group in the 1980s to its current position as a leader in the development of quantitative methodologies across the social sciences and has contributed to the career development of hundreds of scholars including nearly every leading researcher in the field today. Support provided in this award maintains and further develops venues for presenting, discussing, and accelerating quantitative methods in political science, with a core focus on encouraging, mentoring, and enabling under-represented groups in political methodology. Political methodology reaches across research areas in political science and increasingly beyond, into other disciplines and pure statistical sciences generating advances that facilitate the creation of new knowledge across the discipline and the social sciences. Thus, this investment in graduate students and increased inclusion of under-represented groups have important impacts. The Technical Summary This award supports the research and training missions of the Society for Political Methodology. Funds provided will: (1) ensure that qualified but insufficiently-funded graduate students can participate in the Society's Summer Meeting, (2) continue incentivizing universities to underwrite and convene small thematically-oriented meetings that emphasize particular technical skills and foster high levels of networking and mentoring, (3) continue the convening of small conferences and related efforts for women methodologists, and (4) continue the development of an aggressive diversifying undergraduate-outreach program, the Advanced Empirical Research in Politics for Undergraduates Program (AERoPUP). The AERoPUP program targets undergraduates (particularly women, under-represented minorities, and students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds) at colleges and universities and/or majoring in disciplines in which opportunities for exposure to contemporary quantitative empirical political science are otherwise limited.