Patrick A. Mello

International Politics, Security, and Methods

Tag: ECPR

  • ECPR Joint Sessions, Mons 2019

    47th ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops at UCL Mons, Belgium

    From 8-12 April 2019, UCL Mons hosted the 47th ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops. I took part in the workshop “Formal and Informal Intergovernmental Organisations in Time: Explaining Transformations in Global Governance”, chaired by Eugénia Heldt (TU Munich) and Duncan Snidal (University of Oxford). The three-day workshop featured 22 research papers from 27 contributors from the USA, Australia, and all across Europe. Our research team presented first empirical results from the ongoing DFG project “International Bureaucracies as ‘Runaway Agents’? How Organizational Structure Affects Agency Slack” (2018-2021, grant volume 488.000 €), based on a paper co-authored with Eugénia Heldt, Omar Ramon Serrano Oswald, and Anna Novoselova (all from the Bavarian School of Public Policy, TU Munich). Details on the DFG research project can be found here. For Information on the ECPR Joint Sessions in Mons see this link.

  • ECPR General Conference, Hamburg 2018

    12th General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research in Hamburg

    From 22-25 August 2018, the University of Hamburg hosted the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). I participated as discussant for Panel 123 “Don’t Stop at the Water’s Edge: Exploring the Role of Political Parties in Foreign Policy” (Chairs: Wolfgang Wagner & Fabrizio Coticchia), with papers from Afke Groen, Magdalena Góra, Wolfgang Wagner et al., Sandra Destradi & Johannes Plagemann, and Valerio Vignoli & Fabrizio Coticchia. Full documentation of the conference can be found 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]

  • ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques 2016

    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, 28 July – 13 August 2016

    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]

  • ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques 2015

    Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Fuzzy Sets

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

    Methods Course taught for the European Consortium for Political Research at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, 23 July – 8 August 2015

    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]

  • ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques 2014

    Set-Theoretic Methods: Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Related Approaches

    Patrick A. Mello (Week 1), Carsten Q. Schneider (Week 2), Priscilla Álamos-Concha, and Nena Oana (Teaching Assistants)

    Methods Course taught for the European Consortium for Political Research at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, 24 July – 9 August 2014

    Course Outline: “This course introduces participants to set-theoretic methods and their application in the social sciences with an emphasis on Qualitative Comparative Analysis and fuzzy sets. The introductory course is complemented by an advanced course that is taught during the ECPR Winter School in Vienna. The course starts out by familiarising 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 analytic tool is used for analysing social science data. All analytic issues will be introduced based on crisp sets and later expanded to fuzzy sets. Right from the beginning, the course will also teach the use of the available software packages (predominantly R and fsQCA). When discussing set-theoretic methods, in-class debates will further 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. Real-life published applications are used throughout the course. If available, participants are also encouraged to bring their own data. Some basic empirical comparative training is useful to get more out of the course, but this is no prerequisite in a strict sense.“ [Read Further]

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