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. 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, and (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. 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.
The purpose of this grant was to provide support for women and under-represented groups, and for graduate students and junior faculty of limited means to attend academic conferences and participate in academic activities in the area of Political Methodology (statistical methods for political science). It's aims in doing so were to advance the frontier of statistical methods applied to the scientific study of politics and to share and disseminate work advancing this subfield called "political methodology", and especially to involve and integrate women & underrepresented groups, and graduate students & junior faculty of otherwise limited means in the work of the subfield. The grant provided no funding to its Principle Investigators; instead, all resources in the grant went toward assistance for women and under-represented groups, and for graduate students and junior faculty of limited means to attend academic conferences and participate in academic activities in Political Methodology. The conferences supported in part by this grant (with the remaining funds, over 50%, provided by host universities) included 3 general conferences of the Society for Political Methodology, 3 conferences of the Women in Methodology group within The Society, and one small thematic conference (on Causal Inference for Network Analysis) (http://polmeth.wustl.edu/conferences.php?i=4).Advances in political methodology are often leading advances in social-science statistical methodology and increasingly informing and even occasionally leading statistical methodology generally. The advances in political methodology presented at these conferences, accordingly, are almost always published in academic journals, and often in the top academic journals, in political methodology, related areas of social-science methodology, or in general statistical-methods journals.
