From Thursday, July 18 to Saturday, July 20, the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for Political Methodology (“Polmeth”) was held at the Riverside Mission Inn & Spa. The event was hosted by the University of California, Riverside (UCR) School of Public Policy and the Society for Political Methodology (SPM).

“Polmeth” was established in 1984 as the leading event in political science for advancing applied statistics and machine learning methods. This year’s conference was led by UCR Professor of Public Policy and Political Science Kevin Esterling, and gathered upcoming political scientists to share their research through panels and poster presentations. The attendees, arriving from across the world, included faculty, advanced PhD students and well-known researchers ready to receive insight on their latest work in political methodology.

Here are a select few panels:

• Redistricting Reforms Reduce Gerrymandering by Constraining Partisan Actors
• Voter Preferences for Young and Female Candidates: Comparing Conjoint Experiments with Real-World Behavior
• Empathy for the Devil: Using Counter-Stereotypical Deepfakes to Manipulate Affective Polarization and Democratic Attitudes
• Does AI help humans make better decisions? A methodological framework for experimental evaluation

“We at the UCR School of Public Policy were honored to have helped provide this opportunity for scholarly interchange and professional networking,” said Mark Manalang, Director of External Engagement at the School. “UCR  is committed to diversity and inclusion, making UCR, Riverside, and the Mission Inn & Spa's diverse history and architecture a perfect backdrop and complement to the 41st Polmeth Conference.”

“I'm really excited to have been a part of Polmeth,” said Samuel Shroff, a UCR public policy student. “Especially as the political landscape has changed, it is increasingly important to make sure that we keep our research in political methodology well-versed, and there is no better way than with Polmeth, the biggest political science conference in the region. It will be very important because you see many debates over the elections have fallen out of favor and I think that finding new tools to observe the political landscape will be crucial to see where we will be heading as a political society.”

For more information about the event, contact Professor Kevin Esterling.

Watch the video recap here.

Album of event photos available here.