Pernicious Political Polarization and Legitimacy

Half Day PM (1:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.)

We propose a half-day workshop to be held during the APSA conference as a more in-depth treatment of a theme, but not as an instructional course. Recent national votes, from BREXIT to the rejection of the Colombian peace accord to the victory of Donald Trump have highlighted the disruptiveness of unexpected outcomes of national consultations on polarizing issues. This workshop aims to advance knowledge about the causes, consequences, and solutions to severe political and societal polarization in democracies around the world. Highly-polarized societies pose threats to governability, peaceful coexistence, and prosperity. They derive from contexts in which opposing groups question the moral legitimacy of each other, viewing the opposing camp as an existential threat to their way of life or the nation as a whole. The legitimacy of elected leaders or national referenda in such contexts is undermined by the dynamic of extreme polarization: that is, when the natural differences within a democracy become aligned within two camps with mutually exclusive identities and interests. These are highly polarized polities with pernicious outcomes. At the extreme, each camp comes to perceive the “Other” in such negative terms that a normal political adversary with whom to engage in a competition for power is transformed into an enemy posing an existential threat to be vanquished. This workshop brings together Americanists and comparativists studying polarization from a range of perspectives, including social and moral psychology, institutional and electoral rules, and structural grievances and crises. Some of the scholars participate in an international research group analyzing negative polarization in the U.S., Europe, MidEast, Africa, Latin America and SE Asia. (McCoy leads the team; Lebas on Africa; Arugay on SE Asia; Garcia on Venezuela; Handlin on Latin America; Firat cross-nationally; and Abramowitz on the U.S). Another scholar (Hawkins) leads an international group of scholars studying polarizing populism in Latin America and Europe. And others work on the United States or comparisons of polarization in the U.S. and Europe (Campbell and Reifler). The proposed participants are conducting some of the most exciting new research on these issues with methodologies ranging from socio-neuro experimental analysis (Firat) to social and political psychology (Motyl and Johnson) to new survey measures of societal and political polarization to comparative institutional analysis. In terms of solutions, the workshop intends to brainstorm potential means to prevent or ameliorate pernicious forms of polarization, through social psychological interventions, policy choice, institutional/constitutional engineering, media messaging, community interventions, reconciliation and dialogue, or international mediation. The workshop employs short presentations, roundtable discussions, and brainstorming among participants to address the following questions:

• Is polarization elite-driven or mass-driven?
• What measures best capture mass-level, societal polarization?
• What are the social psychological underpinnings of polarization – in terms of moral decision-making, tolerance, authoritarianism?
• Are institutional/electoral rule changes desirable to ameliorate the negative consequences of polarization? If so, which ones? What are the risks?
• What interventions at the individual and community level are useful (from community psych, social and moral psych, communication)?

Each of the three sessions within the workshop employs a roundtable format with a moderator asking questions of the listed presenters based on their research findings and generating a discussion among them, with time allotted for participation by audience attendees.

**All Short Courses will take place on Wednesday, August 30 at the APSA 2017 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA.**

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Managing and Sharing Qualitative Data and Qualitative Research Transparency

Half Day AM (9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.)

This short course has three central goals. First, the course provides guidance to help scholars manage data through the research lifecycle. We show how participants can meet funders’ data-management requirements and improve their own research by creating a data management plan. We discuss strategies for effectively documenting data throughout the research process to enhance their value to those who generated them and to other scholars. We also provide practical advice on keeping data secure to protect against data loss as well as illicit access to sensitive data. Second, we consider the multiple benefits of sharing data, the various uses of shared data (e.g. for evaluating scholarly products, for secondary analysis, and for pedagogical purposes), the challenges involved in sharing qualitative research data (including copyright and human participants-related concerns), and various ways to address those challenges. Finally, we discuss transparency in qualitative research. Production transparency and analytic transparency facilitates the effective interpretation and evaluation of scholarly products. Production transparency is achieved by clearly describing how the information that underpins a study was collected and how data were generated from that information. Analytic transparency is achieved by clearly demonstrating how data and analysis support the empirical claims and inferences in published work in a manner appropriate to that work’s research design. We also introduce participants to ways to achieve production and analytic transparency in qualitative research, paying particular attention to work that uses narrative causal approaches supported by individual data sources.

**All Short Courses will take place on Wednesday, August 30 at the APSA 2017 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA.**

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• Register for the APSA Annual Meeting.

Process Tracing (QMMR 3)

Half Day AM (9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.)

This course will cover the underlying logic and best practices of process tracing, which is a within-case method of developing and testing causal explanations of individual cases. The first session of the course will briefly summarize the philosophy of science behind explanation via reference to hypothesized causal mechanisms. It will then outline the logic of process tracing in terms of Bayesian methods of inference, including the application of “hoop tests,” “smoking gun tests,” “doubly decisive tests,” and “straw in the wind tests.”

The second session of the course will focus on best practices and examples of process tracing, including the more inductive use of process tracing for theory development as well as its deductive use for theory testing. As time allows, and depending on the number of students, the instructors will ask students to outline briefly how they plan to use process tracing in their current research project. This will allow the instructors and fellow students to offer constructive advice on how best to carry out process tracing in each student’s project.

**All Short Courses will take place on Wednesday, August 30 at the APSA 2017 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA.**

• View more Short Courses.
• Register for the APSA Annual Meeting.