This Research Group entitled “Empirical Studies of Civic Engagement and Civic Education” will focus on showcasing international empirical research on the effects of civic engagement on building political efficacy and trust. Although it is widely believed that promoting civic engagement and citizenship education can help develop an informed and engaged citizenry, there is little in the way of systematic, generalizable empirical research that examines the effects the student participation in such programs. Indeed, as Chittum, Enke and Finley (2022) note, “existing research on community-based and civic experiences among … students most often examine a single community-based practice, primarily service learning” They note that very little of this work is generalizable beyond individual cases and certainly not across national cases. Nonetheless, educators across the globe are increasingly concerned with civic engagement and citizenship education (Matto, McCartney, Bennion, Blair, Sun, and Whitehead 2021). However, recent advances in data collection on civic engagement and citizen education (see for instance the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study, from IEA) now provide opportunities for comparative empirical research assessing the effectiveness of such efforts.

This Research Group invites submissions that examine the effectiveness of civic engagement and citizenship education specifically on building political efficacy and trust. We are especially interested in international perspectives on these topics.

Most of the world’s population already live in cities, and as the Global South continues to rapidly urbanize, the global urban population will continue to increase by over two billion people in the next three decades. The process of rapid urbanization will have profound social, economic, and ultimately political implications. Across the Global South, many — and sometimes most — of the urban population live in informal settlements, in precarious housing with insecure property rights, and work in low-paying, volatile occupations in the informal economy. In the Global North, as well, urban housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable for many segments of society, leading to displacement and conflict over space. How will governments respond to increasing pressure over urban resources? And how do these trends shape everyday politics for city-dwellers around the world? Moreover, how can scholars generate timely evidence on these dynamic processes? And how can comparing the implications of urbanization across time and space further an understanding of the politics of cities? This virtual Research Group follows up on key issues addressed at the APSA Comparative Urban Politics Short Course in 2023.

The proposed workshop brings together the contributors for an edited book arising from panels at the International Conference of Public Policy, the Italian Political Science Association and from the recently held final conference of the Gender, party politics and democracy in Europe (EUGenDem) project. While the workshop would take place after the book proposal stage, we would still proceed with an open call to present at the workshop panel either for joining the project or for future collaborations. While part of the sessions would take the form of an author workshop, a panel would be dedicated towards future prospects and collaborations. This would allow us to consider developing a grant proposal for a small conference on these themes to solidify an international community of scholars working from a gender perspective on fiscal policies, economic governance, and crisis responses.

Substantively, the workshop focuses on the gender equality politics and policies of the Covid-19 crisis and recovery. The Covid-19 crisis has contributed to widening gender gaps in employment, care responsibilities, incomes, and health outcomes. In parallel, the immediate policy responses to the health crisis as well as the recovery can contribute to mitigating or, conversely, further worsening the toll of the pandemic for women. Countries deployed highly heterogeneous response models differing in their gendered implications. A key example early in the crisis concerns the degree of reliance on policies such as childcare and school closures and assuming that the task of caring can simply be picked up by parents (in practice, mainly women). Cross-country differences in gendered containment measures cannot be fully attributed to differences in the severity of outbreaks, as some countries that were minimally impacted by certain waves enacted extensive school closures while for instance limiting workplace closures while others with high levels of contagion opted to keep schools open.

In this context, the unequal and gendered impact of the pandemic has received extensive attention and longstanding barriers to equality such as the availability of and access to child and eldercare have gained renewed centrality within the debate. At the same time, the heterogeneous implications for women and men of policy responses such as school closures play a fundamental role in shaping the cost of the pandemic for gender equality. The same logic applies to recovery policies. Indeed, recovery investment and reforms may address gender gaps through equality policies or amplify them by, for instance, privileging men dominated sectors. A case of particular interest is the European Union where the common recovery effort under Next Generation EU – mobilizing substantial resources to fund the post-pandemic reconstruction – is central for reforms and investments in the aftermath of the pandemic, raising the question of whether it promotes gender mainstreaming. From this perspective, the pandemic crisis challenges progress towards gender equality, while at the same time offering extensive opportunities for advocacy, investments, and reforms toward gender mainstreaming in the recovery.

The workshop aims to address the questions of gendered policies and politics in the response to the pandemic and recovery, welcoming papers on the gendered implications of national or supranational pandemic responses and recovery measures, both at single country and comparative level.

The scope of the panels includes all phases of policymaking in the aftermath of Covid-19, such as:

• gendering policy debates within the pandemic and recovery agenda
• gender sensitive crisis responses in the pandemic
• assessing success and failure in gender mainstreaming response and recovery policy output
• direct outcomes of gender equality policies and indirect gendered implications of response and recovery policies
• the politics of gender equality in the pandemic and recovery.

Themes of interest span factors that facilitate or hinder the promotion of gender equality structurally or within the policy-making process, the key actors responsible for gendering response and recovery policies and their strategies.

The Research Group/workshop aims to gather academic colleagues, researchers, and also practitioners at different stages of their careers to reflect and debate about research problems/issues in the area of migration (international human mobility) and citizenship. It focuses on the pitfalls and promises of political science in this field of research, but it will also analyze its progress during the last two decades. We welcome works-in-progress that examine 1) new theoretical approaches and promising theories that may lead the next generation of scholars in the study of migration (in political science subfields such as comparative politics, IR, political theory, public policy, or public law or work across disciplines); 2) methodological innovations, new research designs and their application to the field of migration that account for new dynamics, and also for promising valuable solutions to old problems, such as measuring irregular stayers, integration policies pitfalls, etc.; and 3) other under-researched areas that call for the attention of scholars and practitioners (especially issues of governance and international governance of human mobility and the so-called public policy gaps). The output of the workshop will be a collection of papers that will be the basis for a special issue of a journal/review specialized in political science or migration/citizenship.

1. Overall Summary

The Religion and Politics Organized Section proposes a Research Workshop entitled “Religion and Democracy: New Research Frontiers” for the inaugural APSA Virtual Research Meeting. The workshop’s primary goal is to gather a group of scholars from diverse subfields of the discipline to highlight new challenges and opportunities for research in the contemporary age of democratic fragility, in the United States and across the globe. Research Group Leaders plan this virtual meeting as a first step towards future scholarly output, whether through a journal special issue or edited volume, and possess robust institutional resources to support these subsequent steps.

Religion’s impact on democracy, whether promoting Third Wave democratization or threatening liberal rights through the rise of radical movements, was a key force promoting the growth of scholarship on religion in political science in the late Twentieth Century. The global study of democracy is as vital as ever, with significant challenges facing democratic institutions across regions, including in the United States. Yet scholarship on religion and democracy has only begun to respond to these new global dynamics. Under what conditions do public expressions of religion foster or hinder the consolidation of democratic governance and minority rights?  How does the public role of religion differ in this period from religion’s role in the Third Wave? And how could the causal arrow run in reverse, with trends in democracy reshaping the nature of religious affiliation and authority? This workshop’s primary goal is to build a community of scholarship addressing these research opportunities, through a series of panels spotlighting distinct dimensions of research.

2. Potential Structure and Participants

While the precise structure of the three sessions of our workshop will reflect the nature of eventual submissions, we envision several themes structuring the panels. First, we will work across core subfields of Political Science, including American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Political Theory, to encourage mutual learning between researchers addressing this topic from varied research traditions. Second, we will foreground methodological debates and innovations, reflecting our own diverse methodological expertise and the extent to which research methods in the study of religion and politics have progressed in the past two decades. Third, we will focus on the importance of conceptual precision, as core concepts in religion and democracy, from “Christian nationalism” to “political Islam” and even “secularism” require careful definition and operationalization for research to progress.

We plan a virtual workshop that blends senior scholars, younger researchers, and those unable to attend the in-person APSA Annual Meeting. Each of the Research Group Leaders serves on the Religion and Politics Section’s Executive Committee, and there are certainly senior members of our field who we would hope to recruit to the event. We also, in our capacities as section leaders, believe that this virtual event could be an ideal opportunity for younger scholars, graduate students, and international scholars to become engaged in our section’s work. The Religion and Politics section prioritizes promoting young scholars, particularly through our section-funded Small Grants program, established in 2020. We see this Virtual Workshop as another stage in that work.

3. Potential Outcomes and Next Steps

The Research Group Leaders envision this initial virtual convening as a first step in a broader effort to build a community of research and practice in this area. Should this convening produce productive exchanges, we plan to follow it with an in-person workshop grappling with similar themes, as well as an eventual collaborative publication. That could include a special issue of a journal, or an edited volume focused on the topic.

Each Research Group Leader brings professional experiences and resources that could aid in that process. Buckley directs a research center at the University of Louisville with substantial programmatic funds. Tezcür directs a school at Arizona State University that is also home to the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. Djupe is former editor of the APSA journal Politics and Religion and edits a prominent book series on religion and politics. Each group leader also has extensive experience in publicly engaged scholarship, government service, and/or NGO consulting, which could provide further opportunities for developing and disseminating research from the group.

Are political party conventions (and other party meetings) a dinosaur past their time, merely a balloon drop and campaign media opportunity — or possibly a critical intermediary organizing and agenda-setting meeting that represents an untapped research and professional opportunity? Launched in 2023, the Research Collaborative on Studying Political Party Conventions & Meetings Comparatively starts with this question: What can political scientists offer and learn by collaborating on convention and party meeting observational and delegate research based on best practices and new challenges in the post-COVID and post-January 6th context where the American model of democracy is increasingly questioned?

This Research Group is focused on the political science challenge that the study of American politics is isolated from comparative politics. This challenge is increasingly problematic given the multiple global democracy crises that are faced both in the U.S. and abroad. The United States does have different and even unique constitutional and structural features, but party meetings, campaigns, party agendas and partisan agenda setting, and governance and party functions are ubiquitous across the globe. Sadly, most comparative studies and databases exclude the U.S. as an “outlier” while America politics researchers continue to operate on a dated and narrow conceptualization of party accountability (do parties enact their platforms?) based upon a “textbook” understanding of how parliaments and cabinets theoretically work. This excludes the edging of American congressional polarization more akin to parliamentary parties and the “presidentialization” of prime minister elections and growing challenges of failed cabinet coalitions in Britain and the European Union (EU). Ironically, the EU parliamentary/consensus model alone is used to comparatively study the range of hybrid regimes in the development context which combine elements of both the presidential and the parliamentary systems often combining the worst features of both systems. Moreover, distinctive features of party systems in developing countries not commonly found in the global North are rarely studied comparatively (e.g., parastatals/state-owned enterprises/limited and skewed private/civil society sector; parties that own businesses; ex-single parties; post-conflict contexts, role of external expatriates; others).

As a Research Group, our focus is both substantive and methodological and emphasizes how political science can use collaborative research to expand research and knowledge (e.g., much more common as in the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) Core Group of Political Party Scholars or the Comparative Study of Election Systems (CSES) among others).

While this Research Group is focused on an initial study of the 2024 American political party conventions, this Research Group aims at truly comparative work and welcomes comparative researchers interested in innovating new research methodologies and conceptual/theoretical approaches that deepen our collective knowledge around political parties and democratic governance based upon grassroots collective action (which informs public opinion) versus authoritarian misuses of political party structures (which breeds corruption and manipulates public opinion).

We are especially interested in mixed methods that link high quality surveys and other bridging/external quantitative data with ethical participant observation, rigorous designs, and new theoretical conceptualizations that go beyond left-right comparisons to encompass political party organizations as institutions in both their “permanent” and “temporary” party intermediary structures. Political parties connect executives, legislators/parliaments, members, and activists at all levels of government, and conventions are the one meeting that brings them all together to govern the national party. How can we better study the “lymphatic system” of political parties in meaningful ways that allow comparisons across time, context(s) and regime structures?

Given the multiple access, methodological and theoretical challenges in participant/ethnographic observation and research at what is essentially a private event, sadly, too many prior convention and party meeting research efforts in the U.S. involved political scientists who only attended one convention, which raised partisanship and bias concerns or whose research aspirations over-reached their capacity to collect data onsite. Conventions in the U.S. since the 1960s have seen political scientists episodically appear in one year, produce a book and disappear in the next cycle. While previous political science convention collaborative efforts did not seek to develop common and/or complementary approaches, the democracy challenges in 2024 and going forward call for greater social science insights and perspectives that can only be realized by cross-researcher collaboration for multi-site case study research.

Our goal is to consider multiple research entry points (events, groups, party leaders, elected officials, delegates, platforms, etc.), changes in American political party organizations and functions (e.g., party machines to state utility parties and party institutionalization post-1960s/70s reforms to more recent polarization and the presidentialization of politics since the 1990s?), and the ebb and flow and intermediary capacity of various groups and factions present at political party conventions over time. We believe that this approach will inform how to better study conventions and party meetings comparatively.

The goals of the Research Group are: 1) early identification of the pool of likely on-site political science/sociology/other researchers at the 2024 conventions, 2) building consensus over common research paradigms for studying conventions & delegates and other party meetings, 3) supporting increased research quality and rigor in the study of party organizations, conventions and meetings, 4) establishing a better foundation for political science engagement and community of knowledge building contributing to useful intellectual and evidence-based insights for reform, and 5) collaborating to obtain shared funding for research.

Research Group members and leads will share their expertise at the in-depth sessions, and proposals and inquiries welcomed.

The Racial & Ethnic Politics Research Group is led by Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien and Christopher Towler, the current editors for the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. The purpose of this group is to assist researchers in preparing their material for publication in the journal, potentially as part of a special issue. Submissions can be for any work that considers race and/or ethnicity through the lens of urban politics, state and local government, political theory, public law, political development, comparative politics, or international relations. The goal will be to provide participants with an outlet for presenting and revising their work based on peer and editorial review. At the conclusion of the group, all papers should be ready for submission. While we welcome participants at all stages of their careers, this will likely be of the most value to graduate students and junior faculty who are looking to build their publication record.

The Research Group “Traumatized Nationalism and its Effects on Democracy” is dedicated to dissecting the intricate relationship between collective national trauma and its repercussions on the functioning of democratic institutions. This interdisciplinary consortium brings together scholars, researchers, and experts from fields such as political science, psychology, history, sociology, and international relations. The primary objective of this Research Group is to unravel the multifaceted connections between traumatic historical events, collective memory, and the evolution of nationalist sentiments within a democratic framework. By delving into case studies from various regions and time periods, the group endeavors to identify patterns, triggers, and mechanisms that link traumatic experiences – such as wars, conflicts, colonization, and oppressive regimes – to the formation and transformation of nationalist ideologies. The Research Group operates on the premise that nationalism, when influenced by trauma, can manifest in ways that both strengthen and potentially undermine democratic systems. Through meticulous analysis, the group aims to shed light on the ways in which collective traumas can either galvanize a sense of unity and resilience or foster divisions and exclusions within a society.

Key areas of exploration for the Research Group include:

1. Narratives of Trauma and Identity Formation: Investigating how historical traumas are incorporated into a nation’s collective memory, and how these narratives contribute to shaping and reinforcing nationalist identity.
2.  Political Behavior and Mobilization: Examining how traumatized nationalism influences citizen participation, political engagement, and the rise of populist movements within democratic contexts.
3. Democratic Erosion and Resilience: Exploring the potential for traumatic nationalism to fuel polarization, intolerance, and erosion of democratic norms, as well as strategies for safeguarding democratic institutions in the face of such challenges.
4. Transnational and Comparative Analysis: Conducting cross-country and transnational studies to uncover commonalities and distinctions in the impact of traumatized nationalism on democracies, taking into account diverse cultural, historical, and social contexts.
5. Policy Implications and Conflict Resolution: Providing insights into policy interventions and conflict resolution strategies that can mitigate the negative effects of traumatized nationalism on democratic societies.