Academic Exchange at the APSA Annual Congress in Philadelphia
From September 5 to 8, Dr. Lars Lott and Dr. Simon Primus from the Institute of Political Science participated in the annual congress of the American Political Science Association. The APSA Annual Meeting is one of the world’s most important conferences, bringing together international scholars from all subfields of the discipline. Dr. Lott presented a paper on the panel Democratic Backsliding and Academic Freedom, co-authored with Staffan Lindberg and Katrin Kinzelbach. The focus was on the conditions under which universities can succeed in maintaining their freedom in increasingly authoritarian states. Dr. Primus’ conference paper dealt with measuring ethnic tensions. The work points out that the subjective relevance of ethnic identities is often overlooked and proposes an innovative method for comparatively measuring ethnic conflicts in national politics. Additionally, Primus presented a poster demonstrating that shortages of basic goods in low-income countries directly influence government evaluations, regardless of ethnic and partisan affiliations. The findings challenge the common assumption that political perception in developing countries is primarily shaped by identity and clientelism.