Andrew Bennett is Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He teaches courses on the American foreign policy process, international relations theory, and qualitative research methods. He has been a fellow at arms control and international relations research centers at Stanford and Harvard Universities, and he has written on the U.S. foreign policy process, research methods, alliance burden‐sharing, and regional conflicts and peacekeeping. Professor Bennett is the author of Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet‐Russian Military Interventionism 1973‐1996 (MIT Press, 1999). He is, with Alexander George, the co‐author of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2005). From 1994‐1995, as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, he was Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Joseph S. Nye Jr. His op‐eds have appeared in the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, and he has appeared on National Public Radio, CNN, and Fox News.
Christopher Carter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and John L. Nau III Assistant Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is also a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development at the University of California, Berkeley. In his book project, he examines the emergence as well as the political and social effects of Indigenous autonomy in Latin America. All of his work employs a multi-method approach, using experimental and natural experimental data as well as extensive interviewing and archival research.
Zenobia Chan is a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics at Princeton University and a USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). She studies the international and domestic politics of economic statecraft. Her dissertation book project investigates how economic inducements, such as foreign aid, loans, investment, and sales of natural resources, work in influencing the preferences and behavior of elites and the public abroad. Prior to her doctoral studies, Zenobia was an analyst and geo-data engineer at Google, and consulted for the United Nations, OECD, and World Bank. She holds master's degrees from Princeton University, Columbia University, and Sciences Po Paris, and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Hong Kong.
Dana El Kurd is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Richmond and a senior non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington. She is the author of "Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine" (Oxford University Press, 2020). Dr El Kurd's work focuses on authoritarian regimes in the Arab world, state-society relations in these countries, and the impact of international intervention.
Tasha Fairfield is an Associate Professor at the London School of Economics, with a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, Private Wealth and Public Revenue in Latin America: Business Power and Tax Politics (CUP 2015), won the Latin American Studies Association’s Donna Lee Van Cott Award. Her methodological works (with A.E. Charman) include “Explicit Bayesian Analysis for Process Tracing” (Political Analysis 2017), which won the American Political Science Association’s Qualitative and Multi Method Research Sage Best Paper Award, and Social Inquiry and Bayesian Inference (CUP 2022), which was initiated during a 2017-18 Mellon Foundation Fellowship at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her current research examines the debate on SARS-CoV-2 origins from a Bayesian perspective, evaluating how strongly available evidence weighs in favor of zoonosis vs. lab-leak scenarios.
Gabreélla (Ella) Friday is a postdoctoral researcher dually appointed in the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Brown University. Her areas of specialization include mass incarceration, women, gender and sexuality studies, time and social theory, and social movements. She worked as a prisoner’s rights advocate, community organizer, and researcher for her forthcoming book project, Weaponizing and Resisting Time. Here, she explores incarcerated women’s relationship to and resistance of time in a rural upstate New York jail where she conducted four-years ethnographic advocacy. Friday received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Binghamton University in 2022.
Gary Goertz is an independent scholar working from Ann Arbor, MI. He is the author of numerous methodological articles and books, including "A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences," "Multimethod Research, Causal Mechanisms, and Case Studies: An Integrated Approach," "Social Science Concepts and Measurement}: new and completely revised edition, 2020" (all with Princeton University Press).
Stephan Haggard is the Krause Distinguished Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. His publications on international political economy include Pathways from the Periphery: The Newly Industrializing Countries in the International System (1990); The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000); and Developmental States (2018). His work with Robert Kaufman on democratization, inequality and social policy includes The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995); Democracy, Development and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe (2008); Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites and Regime Change (2016) and Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World (2020). His work on North Korea with Marcus Noland includes Famine in North Korea (2007), Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (2011) and Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements and the Case of North Korea (2017). His current work includes a book on large-N qualitative analysis (LNQA) with Gary Goertz; a collective research project on authoritarian regimes and international organizations; and an intellectual history of the analysis of authoritarianism and international relations from 1930 to 1950.
Matthew C. Ingram is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He researches topics at the intersection of law, politics, violence, and methods, with a geographic focus on Latin America. The centerpiece of his research thus far is his book, Crafting Courts in New Democracies: The Politics of Subnational Judicial Reform in Brazil and Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Additional academic work includes articles in several peer-reviewed journals, an edited volume on justice reform in Latin America (Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America, co-edited with Diana Kapiszewski), and chapters in multiple edited volumes. He was born and raised in Mexico and speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Alan M. Jacobs is a Professor of Political Science and Head of Department at the University of British Columbia, specializing in comparative political economy and public policy, political behavior, and methodology. He is the author of Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment (2011), recipient of the APSA’s Gregory Luebbert Award for the Best Book in Comparative Politics and the APSA’s Giovanni Sartori Award for the Best Book Developing or Applying Qualitative Methods. His research has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and other venues. His forthcoming book with Macartan Humphreys, Integrated Inferences: Causal Models for Qualitative and Mixed-Method Research, examines how process tracing, large-N analysis, and multi-method causal inference can be grounded in causal models. Jacobs is currently President of the APSA’s Qualitative and Multi-Method Research section and has previously served as co-editor of the section’s publication and co-chair of the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations. In 2017, he was co-recipient of the QMMR section’s David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award.
Diana Kapiszewski is Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of Government and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University. Her research interests include public law, comparative politics, and research methods. She has published several books (authored and co-edited) and multiple articles on comparative law and courts, as well as on field research and research transparency. Her ongoing work includes a co-edited volume on concepts, data, and methods in comparative law and politics, and projects examining institutions of electoral governance in Latin America, and how research methods are used in political science scholarship. Kapiszewski directs SIGLA (the States and Institutions of Governance in Latin America database project, www.sigladata.org) and co-edits the Cambridge University Press “Methods for Social Inquiry” book series.
Diana Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. Her scholarship is animated by concerns with how modern states develop capacity to define people at the edges of respectable society, constructing what it means to be illicit, marginal, and deviant. Diana’s book, Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia was published with Princeton University Press in 2020. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and held a Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. In addition to teaching comparative politics, public policy, and transnational histories of colonialism and empire in Southeast and East Asia, Diana co-curates the Invisible Histories project, a digital platform for researchers to share photographs in context and explore the hidden narratives behind them.
Marcus Kreuzer is Professor Political Science at Villanova University. He has been working on the origins of European and post-communist party systems as well as qualitative methodology. He is the author of Institutions and Innovation: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy – France and Germany 1870-1939 (Michigan 2001) and The Grammar of Time. A Toolkit for Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge, 2023). He is interested in the conundrum of how to study a disorderly and continuously changing world in the most orderly fashion possible and with methodologies mindful of temporal dynamics. To disentangle this conundrum, he looked to how comparative historical analysis employs a nuanced temporal vocabulary, uses distinct notions of causality, and draws on a more heterodox understanding of methodology than standard variance-based analysis. His articles have dealt with path dependency, conceptions of time, historical exceptionalism, conceptualizations of historical change, and proper use of historical evidence, and the nature of historical description. They have appeared in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Central European History, and Perspectives on Politics.
Will Lowe is Senior Research Scientist at the Hertie School in Berlin. Lowe is a political methodologist specializing in statistical text analysis with applications to legislative politics, international relations, social media, and central banking. Before the Hertie School, Lowe was a Senior Research Specialist in the Department of Politics and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and Senior Researcher at the Mannheim Centre for Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim. Prior to joining MZES he was assistant professor in research methods at Maastricht University and has held postdoctoral research positions at Trinity College, Dublin, the University of Nottingham, and Harvard University. He has published on methodology in the American Political Science Review, Political Analysis and International Organization, legislative politics in Legislative Studies Quarterly and Electoral Studies, on international politics in China Quarterly and the Journal of Peace Research, on public administration in European Union Politics, and social media in Information, Communication & Society.
Lauren MacLean is the Arthur F. Bentley Chair and Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the political economy of state formation, public service provision, and democratic citizenship in Africa. MacLean has published award-winning books including: Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa: Risk and Reciprocity in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire (Cambridge University Press, 2010), The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2014), co-edited with Melani Cammett, and Field Research in Political Science (Cambridge University Press, 2015), coauthored with Diana Kapiszewski and Ben Read. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals and supported by grants, including from NSF, SSRC, RWJ, and Fulbright-Hays. As a Carnegie Fellow (2017-19), she started a new book project focused on the politics of the electricity crisis and the exercise of democratic citizenship in Ghana. She was the recipient of the APSA QMMR 2016 David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award.
James Mahoney is Gordon Fulcher Professor of Decision-Making and Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Northwestern University. He is a comparative‐historical researcher with interests in national development, political regimes, and methodology. He is the author of the prize‐winning books, Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). His other books include Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (coedited with Dietrich Rueschemeyer; Cambridge University Press, 2003), Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (coedited with Kathleen Thelen; Cambridge University Press, 2010), and A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Science (with Gary Goertz; Princeton University Press, 2012). Mahoney has been President or Chair of four different Organized Sections of American Political Science Association and the American Sociological Association. He has been Chair of Sociology at Northwestern, and he is currently on the APSA Council. His most recent book is The Logic of Social Science (Princeton University Press, 2021).
Rochona Majumdar is a historian of modern India with a focus on Bengal. Her writings span histories of gender and sexuality, Indian cinema especially art cinema and film music, and modern Indian intellectual history. Majumdar also writes on postcolonial history and theory. She is the author of Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), Writing Postcolonial History (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). She is co-editor with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Andrew Sartori of From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: OUP, 2007) and with Margrit Pernau and Helge Jordheim, Civilizing Emotions (New York: OUP, 2015).
William Mazzarella writes and teaches on the political anthropology of mass publicity, critical theory, affect and aesthetics, psychoanalysis, ritual and performance, and the occult shadow of the modern. His books include Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Duke, 2003), Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Duke, 2013), The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago, 2017), and, with Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster, Sovereignty, Inc: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (Chicago, 2020). He is also the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Indiana, 2009), and the editor of K D Katrak: Collected Poems (Poetrywala, 2016). His article 'The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement' appears in the 2019 issue of Annual Review of Anthropology. For a sampling of Dr Mazzarella’s publications, please visit his academia.edu profile.
Lily Medina is a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her broad interests include political violence, criminal governance, experimental methods and causal inference. Prior to attending U.C. Berkeley, she was a predoctoral fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) within the Institutions and Political Inequality unit. Her work includes evaluating community-driven development initiatives and their effect on citizen attitudes toward authority as well as R-packages for Bayesian methods for causal inference (CausalQueries) and for experimental designs (DesignLibrary). Lily holds an M.S. in statistics from Humboldt University of Berlin and a B.S. in industrial engineering from University of Los Andes of Bogota.
Ioana-Elena Oană is a Research Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. She is the main developer of the R package SetMethods for QCA and has extensive experience in teaching QCA using R at various international methods schools and universities (IQMR, ECPR, IPSA-Flacso, Lund University, University of Helsinki, EUI, etc.). She has co-authored with Carsten Q. Schneider and Eva Thomann the book ‘Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) using R: A Beginner’s Guide’ published at Cambridge University Press, 2021. Besides research methodology, Nena's substantive interests revolve around comparative politics and political behavior. Her current work within the SOLID project hosted at the EUI focuses on collective mobilization, public opinion, and party competition dynamics for the study of the multiple crises that have hit the EU since 2008.
Timothy Pachirat graduated from IQMR in the early aughts and has been teaching ethnography at IQMR since 2009. Timothy is author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2011), Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power (Routledge, 2018), and various essays on interpretive methodologies and ethnographic methods in the social sciences. Timothy works as Professor of Critical Political Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Jonnell Robinson is an Associate Professor of Geography and the Director of the Syracuse Community Geography Program at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests include community-based and participatory action research, and specifically Participatory GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Robinson collaborates with grassroots and community-based organizations to use geographic inquiry to better understand and address social and economic disparities. Robinson is also interested in how and why community-based organizations use geospatial technologies, as well as the limitations to these approaches, in advancing grassroots action research agendas. She teaches courses in community geography, geographic field methods, participatory research, and GIS. She received a Ph.D. in Geography (2010) and a Master of Public Health (2003) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Fred Schaffer is a Professor in the Critical Political Studies division of the Political Science department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His substantive research examines the meaning and practice of democracy across cultures and back in time. His methodological writings develop language-centered interpretive methods for foundational research tasks like comparing, interviewing, and working with concepts. He is author of Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide (2016), The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform (2008), and Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture (1998). He also edited Elections for Sale: The Causes and Consequences of Vote Buying (2007). His most recent methodological writings include “Two Ways to Compare” in Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (2021) and “What is Interpretivist Interviewing?” in The Oxford Handbook of Methodological Pluralism in Political Science (forthcoming 2023). He is past chair of both the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and the Committee on Concepts and Methods of the International Political Science Association.
Rachel Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on civil war and its legacies, statebuilding, corruption, and human rights in Central America, as well as qualitative methods. Her book Undermining the State from Within: The Institutional Legacies of Civil War in Central America was published by Cambridge University Press in early 2023. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), and her work has been published in scholarly journals like the Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Global Security Studies, Latin American Politics & Society, Revista de Ciencia Política, Small Wars and Insurgencies, and Studies in Comparative International Development. During the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2019.
Jason Seawright is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Professor Seawright's research interests include comparative politics, with an emphasis on comparative political parties and on political behavior; and methodology, particularly involving multi-method research designs and issues of causal inference. He is the author of Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela. His research has been published in Political Analysis, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and a range of other journals and edited volumes.
Erica Simmons is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and holds the Political Science Department Board of Visitors Professorship. Her research and teaching are motivated by an interest in contentious politics, particularly in Latin America, and qualitative methods. She is the author of Meaningful Resistance: Market Reforms and the Roots of Social Protest in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2016), which was recognized by the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association with the 2017 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award. She is also the co-editor of a recent book on qualitative comparisons titled: Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press 2021). Her research has been published in a range of journals, including World Politics, Theory and Society, Comparative Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Comparative Political Studies and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Mellon Foundation, and the Tinker Foundation, among others. Currently Simmons is pursuing research projects on interactions among protesters and targets, the politics of natural resource extraction, and approaches to generalization in political science.
Nicholas Rush Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York – City College and Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. His primary research interests are on democratic politics as seen through the lens of crime and policing in post-apartheid South Africa and on qualitative and ethnographic methods. He is the author of Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019) and, with Erica Simmons, co-editor of Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Research (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His work has been published in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, and Violence: An International Journal.
Hillel David Soifer is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Temple University. He has a BA in the Growth and Structure of Cities from Haverford College, an MA in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, and a PhD in Government from Harvard. His first book State Building in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press, and he has also published a wide range of articles on Latin American politics, issues in research design and methodology, and conceptual and empirical questions about state capacity and state development. He received the QMMR section's David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award in 2022. He is currently finishing a book on some of the inferential issues entailed in the study of spatial aggregate units.
Jonah Stuart Brundage is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He is a political and historical sociologist with interests in state formation, empire and geopolitics, social elites, the origins of capitalism, and comparative and historical research methods. Currently he is working on a book tentatively titled “Performing World Order: British Diplomats and the Politics of Recognition among Empires, 1688–1815,” which studies how social practices of diplomacy and treaty-making shaped the rise of the British Empire. His work has appeared in journals like the American Sociological Review and Comparative Studies in Society and History. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California-Berkeley in 2019.
David Waldner is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses on research design, qualitative methodology, and comparative politics. His research interests are the political and economic development of the post-colonial world and qualitative causal inference. He is the author of State Building and Late Development, Rethinking the Resource Curse, and multiple articles and chapters on qualitative inference. His current book projects are Qualitative Causal Inference & Explanation and American Nation-Building from the American South to Afghanistan: Militarized Democracy Promotion by an Imperfect Democracy. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. She is also Associate Faculty in Anthropology. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). Among her articles are the following: “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004); “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009); “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010); “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013); and “Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East” (2016). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. For Authoritarian Apprehensions, she received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award (2020), sponsored by the Interpretative Methodologies and Methods group; the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award (2020); the IPSA award for Concept Analysis in Political Science (2021); and the Gordon J. Laing Award, given annually for the book that brings the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press (2022). She is currently completing an edited volume with Joseph Masco entitled Conspiracy/Theory (Duke University Press); a coedited Oxford University Handbook with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth, tentatively entitled Reimagining Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press); and, with Aarjen Glas and Jessica Soedirgo, the interpretive methods part of an Oxford University Handbook on Methodological Pluralism in Political Science (edited by Janet Box-Steffensmeier et al.). Wedeen is making plans for another ethnography in the Middle East.
Steven Lloyd Wilson is assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University, project manager for the Varieties of Democracy Institute, and co-PI of the Digital Society Project. His research focuses on comparative democratization, cyber-security, and the effect of the Internet and social media on authoritarian regimes, particularly in the post-Soviet world.
Gabriel Winant is assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is a social historian with interests in labor, capitalism, inequality, and social policy in the twentieth-century United States. His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, was published in 2021 by Harvard University Press