By Xun Pang
On January 8 and 9, 2016, the third Asian Political Methodology Meeting was held at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. The meeting was co-sponsored by the Department of International Relations of Tsinghua University and Program for Quantitative and Analytical Political Science of Princeton University. The conference was also supported by Tsinghua University’s Initiative Scientific Research Program. The first and second Asian PolMeth Meetings were hosted by The Tokyo Institute of Technology and Gakushuin University in 2014 and The Institute of Political Science of Academia Sinica in 2015.
The Asian Political Methodology Meeting is devoted to promoting research and education of quantitative social sciences in Asia, and providing opportunities for individual quantitative social scientists and local research communities around the globe to exchange research ideas and build academic ties. The conference program committee sent out Calls for Papers and Posters in September 2015, and received 30 paper applications and 13 poster applications by October 15, 2015. The final program of the 2016 Meeting included 2 invited talks, 12 paper presentations, and 19 poster presentations. Conference participants were from Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Hongkong, and the Mainland China, 11 countries and regions in total (please see http://asiapolmeth.princeton.edu/online-program for the conference program).
We were very honored to have two distinguished invited speakers at the 2016 meeting. The first speaker was Professor Jeff Gill from Washington University in St. Louis, the President of the Society for Political Methodology from 2009 to 2011. Prof. Jeff Gill gave a talk entitled “A Review of Missing Data in Political Science and Some New Tools.” The second keynote speaker was Professor Andrew D. Martin, Dean of College of Literature, Science, and the Arts of the University of Michigan. Dean Martin’s talk was about the future of quantitative social sciences at modern research universities. On the two days of the conference, 12 research papers were presented and discussed. The topics covered a wide range of methods, including causal inference, experiments, textual analysis, prediction, Bayesian inference and big data analysis (conference papers can be downloaded at the above URL). The poster session was held on the afternoon of January 8. There were 19 faculty and graduate student posters presented in the session. In addition, about 150 people did on-line or on-site conference registration and attended the conference. Among them, about 110 attendees were faculty members and graduate students from Chinese universities and research institutes.
The Department of International Relations of Tsinghua University is highly honored to be the local host of the 3rd Asian Political Methodology Meeting. The Department is nationally well-known for its advocacy of quantitative research methods. The Department is eager to collaborate with international scholars and institutions to promote and upgrade quantitative methods training and research in Political Science in China.
The program committee for this conference was composed of Xun Pang (Tsinghua University, China, committee chair and local host), Fang-Yi Chiou (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), Kentaro Fukumoto (Gakushuin University, Japan), Benjamin Goldsmith (University of Sydney, Australia), Kosuke Imai (Princeton University, USA), and Jong Hee Park (Seoul National University, South Korea). The Asian Political Methodology Conference was first organized by Professor Kosuke Imai in 2013, and the local host serves as the committee chair of the year.
The 2017 Annual Meeting will be held in Sydney from January 9 to 11, 2017. Doug Rivers of Stanford University has agreed to be the plenary speaker. Ben Goldsmith will be the committee chair. We look forward to seeing you in Sydney next year!
Xun Pang is Professor, Department of International Relations, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.