Patrick A. Mello

International Politics, Security, and Methods

  • ISA San Francisco 2018 Program Announced

    59th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, 4-7 April 2018, San Francisco

    The ISA has announced its program for the 2018 convention. I’m excited to be involved with papers in two panels. The first panel on parliaments and security policy includes papers that are part of a forthcoming special issue of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (co-edited with Dirk Peters). The other panel focuses on the politics of multinational military operations: I’m also taking part in a methods café and a roundtable, and serving as discussant for one session of the Junior Scholar Symposium. The methods café is an ISA Innovative Panel that brings together scholars that represent diverse methods and approaches in foreign policy analysis (co-organized with Falk Ostermann). The methods café format provides an informal setting where participants can meet panelists at separate tables to discuss methods-related questions. The roundtable sponsored by the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States looks into US-Canadian relations after the first year of the Trump Administration (organized by Carolyn C. James). See the full ISA 2018 program here.

  • ECPR General Conference, Oslo 2017

    Panel P050: “Closed and Coopted? Parliamentary
    Oversight when Security is at Stake”

    Paper: “The Unintended Consequences of
    Parliamentary War Powers: A Comparative
    Analysis of Canada and Germany” (with Philippe Lagassé)

    Abstract: “This paper argues that there is a need to question whether parliamentary war powers actually lead to the intended effects of increased democratic deliberation and responsiveness. We compare the unintended consequences of parliamentary votes on the use of force in two ‘most-different cases’: Canada and Germany. Despite substantive differences in the formal war powers of their parliaments, we find that military deployment votes on Afghanistan led to less democratic deliberation and responsiveness. Applying rationalist institutionalism, we argue that the deployment votes incentivized major parties to collude together to lessen debate on the Afghan mission, despite increasing public opposition and media attention. Rather than enhancing deliberation and responsiveness, as assumed by proponents of greater parliamentary war powers, these parliamentary votes effectively diminished the willingness of parties to debate the mission.“ A PDF of the conference program can be accessed here. [More Information]

  • ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques 2017

    Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Fuzzy Sets

    Patrick A. Mello (Week 1), Carsten Q. Schneider (Week 2), and Nena Oana (Teaching Assistant)

    Methods Course taught for the European Consortium for Political Research at Central European University, Budapest, 27 July – 7 August 2017

    Course Outline: “This course introduces participants to set-theoretic methods and their application in the social sciences with a focus on Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The introductory course is complemented by an advanced course that is taught at the ECPR Winter School in Bamberg. The course starts out by familiarizing students with the basic concepts of the underlying methodological perspective, among them the central notions of necessity and sufficiency, formal logic and Boolean algebra. From there, we move to the logic and analysis of truth tables and discuss the most important problems that emerge when this analytical tool is used for exploring social science data. Right from the beginning, students will be exposed to performing set-theoretic analyses with the relevant R software packages. When discussing set-theoretic methods, in-class debates will engage on broad, general comparative social research issues, such as case selection principles, concept formation, questions of data aggregation and the treatment of causally relevant notions of time. Examples are drawn from published applications in the social sciences. Participants are encouraged to bring their own raw data for in-class exercises and assignments, if available“ [Read Further]

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