Jennifer Bussell is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Center on Contemporary India. Her research concerns the political economy of development, democratic politics, and governance. Her recent book, Shocks and Politics: Understanding Disaster Preparedness (Cambridge University Press) examines the conditions under which governments prepare for natural hazards, arguing that political elites can be mobilized to lead preparedness efforts when there is a risk that past exposure to hazards will lead to political instability. In Clients and Constituents: Political Responsiveness in Patronage Democracies (Oxford University Press), she considers the provision of constituency service by high-level elected officials in India and elsewhere, using elite and citizen surveys, interviews, qualitative shadowing, and experiments. Her book Corruption and Reform in India: Public Services in the Digital Age (Cambridge University Press) examines the role of corrupt practices in shaping government adoption of information technology across India's states. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Hillel David Soifer is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Temple University. His first book State Building in Latin America was published by Cambridge University Press. 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.

Sebastián is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on historical political economy. His book project, Tamed Democracy: Officeholding Requirements and Redistribution during the First Wave, examines how authoritarian elites shaped the redistributive trajectories of first-wave democracies. His broader research explores long-term patterns in political development, with particular attention to state-building dynamics in Latin America. His research has been supported by the American Political Science Association and the SNF Agora Institute.
Paper: "Causal Inference in Comparative Historical Analysis: Insights from the Differences-in-Differences Framework"

Jerik Cruz is a PhD candidate at MIT whose research investigates the causes and consequences of the global rise of knowledge capitalism. His book project challenges theories of developmental states and reexamines the governance foundations that enabled countries like China, India, and the Philippines to emerge as exporters of knowledge-based services. He also develops new frameworks for integrating qualitative and computational social science research methods. He is a recipient of the MIT Open Data Prize and the MIT Homer A. Burnell Presidential Fellowship.
Paper: "Bayesian Reasoning and Typological Updating: Towards a Unified Qualitative and Computational Framework"

Ahmet Ergurum is a Political Science Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in International Relations from Bilkent University. He studies public opinion and foreign policy, international security, and the geopolitics of emerging technologies. His work has appeared in International Political Science Review and in edited volumes including Non-Western Middle Powers in the Multipolar Order (Routledge, 2025).
Paper: "Systematic Protocols for Integrating Open-Ended Survey Responses in Multi-Method Research"

Gessica de Freitas is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in Comparative Politics and Methods. She holds an M.A. and B.A. in Political Science from the University of State Campinas (UNICAMP, Brazil). Her dissertation investigates shifts in Executive–Legislative relations in Latin America, focusing on the strengthening of legislatures despite the legacy of executive centralization inherited from authoritarian regimes. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Political Science.
Paper: "Measuring What Matters: A New Approach to Bill Importance in Multiparty Legislatures"

Christopher Carter's research examines the historical foundations of Indigenous groups' demands for autonomy in the Americas. His book The Long Shadow of Extraction: The Origins of Indigenous Autonomy Demands was published by Princeton University Press in September 2025. The project won the 2020 APSA Best Fieldwork Award and the 2021 Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies, among others.

Mollie Cohen studies elections, public opinion, and voting behavior, especially in Latin America. Her work examines how democratic crises and features of election administration affect citizens' attitudes and decisions at the ballot box. Her book None of the Above: Protest Voting in Latin American Democracies won the 2025 David O. Sears Award for the best book in mass behavior. Her research is published in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, The Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, and Political Analysis.

Danielle N. Lussier's research focuses on democratization, political participation, religion and politics, and conceptualization and measurement, with geographic expertise on post-communist Eurasia and Indonesia. She is a methodological pluralist employing hierarchical and psychometric models alongside open-ended interviews, participant observation, and content analysis. She is the author of Constraining Elites in Russia and Indonesia: Political Participation and Regime Survival (Cambridge University Press) and co-author of The Many Faces of Political Islam, Second Edition (University of Michigan Press).

David Samuels received his Ph.D. from UCSD in 1998. He has published seven books, including Partisans, Antipartisans, and Non-Partisans: Voting Behavior in Brazil (Cambridge, 2018) and Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach (Cambridge, 2014), which won the APSA's Merze Tate–Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Award and the APSA Political Economy Section's William H. Riker Best Book Award. He currently serves as co-editor of Comparative Political Studies.

Flávia's research examines comparative political behavior in Latin America, focusing on polarization, misinformation, and democratic backsliding. She employs mixed methods combining qualitative approaches such as interviews and text analysis with computational and experimental methods. Her dissertation investigates citizens' roles in what she terms the "culture of impeachment," exploring how they can protect or erode democracy. She holds an M.A. in Brazilian Studies from UIUC and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Brasília.

Sarah's research interests include comparative politics, human rights and state oppression, gender, religion, and integrating qualitative and natural language processing computational methods. She has conducted research in East Africa, Western Europe, and the United States. Publications appear in the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Harvard Data Science Review, and the Washington Post Monkey Cage. She is a former NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington.

Mohamed combines diverse methodological approaches to examine attitudes, behavior, and institutions in North Africa and the Middle East. He integrates historical and biographical analyses with social network analysis and (quasi-)experimental methods using data from conventional and social media, archival sources, and interviews. His dissertation investigates elite survival and resistance to regime change. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University.

Qin's substantive interests focus on political economy, institutional change, and bureaucratic politics, with a focus on China. His dissertation seeks to identify and explain the varieties of the socialist market economy across Chinese provinces. Methodologically, he explores the potential of machine-learning algorithms in complementing qualitative induction, focusing on utilizing classification algorithms to enhance qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and clustering algorithms for hypothesis generation.

Elizabeth's research concentrates on contentious and autocratic politics in the contemporary Middle East. Her book project traces the autonomy and impact of organizations representing Jordan's public school teachers and healthcare workers, questioning how class-based organizations emerge and survive in ethnically and religiously polarized environments. Her work has received awards from APSA sections on Middle East Politics, Labor Politics, and Education Politics. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2024.

Klaudia Wegschaider is a Democratic Innovations postdoctoral researcher at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University. Substantively, her work focuses on the causes and consequences of enfranchisement and other electoral reforms. Methodologically, she combines case study methods and computational approaches for episode analysis in historical political science.

Charles is director of the Fundamental Needs Lab and a scholar of discrimination, researching it in new populations and understudied identity groups across new contexts. His work emphasizes testing new theoretical mechanisms and ways of reducing discrimination. His research has been published in over 40 journals including the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Nature Human Behavior, and PNAS.

Daniel is a social and data scientist with substantive interests in political behaviour, democracy, and Southern Africa. His methodological interests include causal inference, the digitization and use of historical data, and new forms of data (spatial, image, text). He is an affiliate of the LSE Data Science Institute and Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Government.

Alan specializes in comparative political economy and public policy, political behavior, and methodology. His book Governing for the Long Term won the APSA's Gregory Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics and the Giovanni Sartori Award for Best Book Developing Qualitative Methods. His 2023 book with Macartan Humphreys, Integrated Inferences, examines how process tracing, large-N analysis, and multi-method causal inference can be grounded in causal models.

Beth's research and teaching focus on the roles of interest groups, social movements, and the mass media in the public policy process. She frequently uses semi-structured elite interviews in her research and has written articles about the method. She is author or coauthor of Basic Interests (Princeton, 1998), Lobbying and Policy Change (Chicago, 2009), Meeting at Grand Central (Princeton, 2013), and Lobbyists at Work (Apress, 2013).

Jonathan received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2012. His book Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in International Politics (Princeton, 2017) won the 2017 Lepgold Prize from Georgetown's Mortara Center and the 2019 Best Book Award from the International Studies Association. In 2025, he received the Karl Deutsch Award from the ISA, presented annually for the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations.

Paul's research focuses on political violence and international security, with a regional focus on South and Southeast Asia. His books include Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Cornell, 2014) and Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group–State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation.

Ulaş is also pursuing a Master's degree in Applied Statistics and is a fellow in the Middle East and North African Studies Program. He is broadly interested in the relationship between organized violence and political order, studying civil wars, state-building, contentious politics, and political regimes. His methodological interests include multi-method research design, conflict and protest event analysis, conceptualization and operationalization, and data reliability issues in violent and authoritarian contexts. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University.

Shagun's research focuses on public trust in local governments, emphasizing variation in trust among residents of unauthorized colonies in Delhi, India. She uses network analysis and survey methods investigating how household ties to neighborhood associations shape localized perceptions of government capacity. She holds an M.Sc in Global Governance and Diplomacy from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in Political Science from Hindu College, University of Delhi.

Irene's research interests include transnational politics, online political advocacy, and competitive authoritarianism. Her dissertation examines the political incorporation of immigrants from competitive authoritarian contexts and the democratic norms they bring to new countries. She is a passionate educator who worked as a teacher for several years before her Ph.D. program.

Salih received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University in 2023. He studies comparative political institutions, institutional change, and postcolonial development with a focus on Africa and Southern Africa. His book manuscript, "The Legacies of Liberation," analyzes the historical origins of contrasting political legacies of 20th-century liberation struggles against settler-colonial domination in five Southern African countries. He applies small-N and comparative-historical methods with an interest in innovating qualitative and mixed methods.

Eun-A specializes in Comparative Politics and International Relations with a regional focus on East Asia. A former human rights activist, she worked for NGOs in South Korea and Canada advocating for North Korean human rights. Her current research examines how host citizens' preferences toward migrants shape intergroup relations and national belonging of migrants in South Korea. She is a Fulbright Foreign Student Scholarship awardee (2019–2023).

Ozlem received her B.A. and M.A. from the Political Science and International Relations Department at Bogazici University, Turkey. Her current research agenda focuses on elections and political parties in autocracies, opposition cooperation and coordination, autocratic reversal, authoritarian regimes, and elite behavior. Her dissertation research addresses pre-electoral coalitions formed in electoral autocratic regimes. Her research has been published in Party Politics, the Journal of Peace Research, and the Journal of Civil Society.

Erik's empirical research focuses on European and North American responses to religious, racial, and ethnic diversity through media, policymaking, public attitudes, social movements, and legal decisions. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods including archival research, interviews, statistical analysis, experiments, and large-N text-as-data analysis. He is the most recent author of Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective. Published in Comparative Political Studies, PNAS, Social Forces, and World Politics.

Agustina's research addresses subnational and national democratic and semi-authoritarian regimes, subnational politics, and unequal access to public goods. She is the author of Democrats and Autocrats: Pathways of Subnational Undemocratic Regime Continuity within Democratic Countries (2015) and co-author of Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics (2019). Her work is published in the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Latin American Politics and Society, among others.

Michelle has been a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Visiting Scholar at the JHU Global Food Ethics & Public Policy Program, and Visiting Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She worked full-time in USAID's Office of Food for Peace as an AAAS Fellow (2017–2018). Her research focuses on international food security, ethics and aspiration, human rights, and description in social sciences. Published in World Development, International Studies Quarterly, and Global Governance.

Danielle's research interests include international security, reputations and coercion, civil-military relations, and experimental and multi-method methods. She is the author of Reputation for Resolve: How Leaders Signal Determination in International Politics (Cornell University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 J. David Singer Book Award. Published in American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis, and Security Studies, among others.

Lauren's research focuses on the political economy of public service provision, democratic citizenship, and climate justice in Africa. Her award-winning books include Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa (Cambridge, 2010), The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (Cornell, 2014), and Field Research in Political Science (Cambridge, 2015, with Diana Kapiszewski and Ben Read). She is the recipient of the 2016 APSA QMMR David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award.

Juan is co-editor of Qualitative & Multi-Method Research, the APSA Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section's biannual publication. His research combines multiple methods and involves extensive fieldwork, studying political and criminal violence. He is particularly interested in how individuals and communities in violent settings make choices and how experiences shape political preferences. His research focuses on Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Italy.

Marco received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. His research studies citizen well-being with a focus on criminal violence and criminal governance.

Ankushi examines the politics of forced migration and migrant integration. Her dissertation explains how relationships between international humanitarian and development organizations, refugee-hosting states, and refugee communities shape refugee lives and experiences, particularly in global South settings. She has worked at the World Bank, 3ie, and Innovations for Poverty Action. She is an APSA ICER Fellow particularly interested in civically-engaged research collaboration.

Sarah develops a mixed-method toolkit emphasizing the utility of multi-method logics beyond causal inference. Her substantive work focuses on legacies of violent conflict, the political economy of development, and subnational state-building with a regional focus in Latin America.

Sara's research focuses on gender and elite political behavior, explaining individual and state-level variation in women's political ambition and representation. Through interviews with 57 organizations recruiting and training political candidates, she developed a theory of Organizational Identity Signaling, demonstrating how women's candidate training organizations better signal their capacity to address barriers faced by historically-excluded groups.

Fulya specializes in Comparative Politics and International Relations. Her previous research focuses on international migration, citizenship, ethics of immigration, and forced migration. Her current research interests include transnational political engagement, emigration, and diasporas. Her dissertation project examines whether and how emigrants from non-democratic regimes engage with their home countries.

Marcus holds a Ph.D. from Brown University and has previously been a lecturer at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. His research focuses on democracy and urban politics, with a specific focus on Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa. His book project, Democracy Out of Order, looks at the role of contentious politics in mediating the relationship between democracy and urban citizenship.

Cathie Jo's most recent book Education for All (Cambridge University Press, 2023) investigates the deep cultural roots of education reform in Britain and Denmark. Her previous book The Political Construction of Business Interests (Cambridge, 2012, with Duane Swank) received the APSA Politics and History book award. Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies. She received her Ph.D. from MIT (1987) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark (2019).

Dan's research examines challenges digital networks pose to democracy and develops tools for measuring democratic institutions. He is co-director of the Digital Society Project, co-developer of the Unified Democracy Scores, and a steering committee member for the Varieties of Democracy project. His research also explores the interplay between legislative behavior, political careers, and party organization.

Ben's research focuses on local politics in mainland China and Taiwan. He is the author of Roots of the State: Neighborhood Organization and Social Networks in Beijing and Taipei (Stanford, 2012) and co-author of Field Research in Political Science: Practices and Principles (Cambridge, 2015). His work is published in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, China Journal, and China Quarterly, among others.

Ryan has written on measurement, case selection, comparative area studies, and Weberian ideal types. His empirical research focuses on state development. His first book, State Building in Boom Times: Commodities and Coalitions in Latin America and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2014), examines how politics surrounding commodity exporting affects state formation.

Jaye's research interests include comparative political parties and political behavior, and methodology — particularly multi-method research designs and causal inference. She is the author of Party-System Collapse: The Roots of Crisis in Peru and Venezuela. Her research is published in Political Analysis, Perspectives on Politics, and Comparative Political Studies, among others.

Erica's work focuses on contentious politics, particularly in Latin America. She is the author of Meaningful Resistance: Market Reforms and the Roots of Social Protest in Latin America (Cambridge, 2016), which won the 2017 Charles Tilly Award. She co-edited (with Nicholas Rush Smith) Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge, 2021). Her work is published in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and Theory and Society.