IWU Goes to the MPSA
Nine people. One class. One paper. From Politics in Developing Societies taught by Professor Juan Gabriel Gomez Albarello came a group of students dedicated to plumbing the depths of political science. Not content just to read articles and summarize their contents, then report back, we broke the mold and instead began questioning the research itself.
Namely, we wondered, why are so many articles written citing many sources from nations other than the nation on which the article was written? Specifically, this seemed to be very prominent in articles dealing with the developing world.
Originally, our theory was that scholars from the developing world were being deliberately silenced. Professor Gomez encouraged us to apply to the Midwest Political Science Association Conference. We were not expecting much of it, but we were accepted.
We began to re-work our paper. It became apparent that the situation which we attributed to simple bias was far more complex, with a whole constellation of variables to consider.