Who is eligible to attend the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition?

The event is open to individuals at the college level and above, including scholars, researchers, and students in political science.

122nd American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2026

Name: 122nd American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2026
Start: 2026-09-03T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-09-06T00:00:00Z
Location: Boston

Sep 3–6, 2026Boston, United StatesIn-person

Starts in 26 daysRegistration open

The 122nd American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition is a significant gathering for political science scholars and practitioners. Hosted in Boston, USA, this annual event provides a platform for presenting research, discussing contemporary political issues, and fostering academic collaboration. It serves as a central forum for the discipline, drawing participants from various subfields of political science.

Committees & topics

Topics
Democracy Under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild · Political Science as a Discipline: Methods, Pluralism, and Public Relevance · International Relations in a Multipolar Era · Disarmament & International Security · Economic & Financial Affairs · Social, Cultural, and Humanitarian Affairs · Human Rights · Public Health and Global Health Governance

Why it matters

This annual meeting is crucial for the advancement of political science as a discipline. It facilitates the dissemination of new research findings, encourages critical debate on pressing global and domestic political challenges, and helps shape future research agendas. The gathering of experts allows for a comprehensive examination of political phenomena, from theoretical frameworks to empirical analyses.

The event's location in Boston, USA, a prominent intellectual hub, further amplifies its relevance to international observers. The insights and discussions emerging from this conference often influence policy discourse and public understanding of political processes, both within the USA and globally. For those engaged in political analysis, understanding the themes and conclusions presented here is vital for staying abreast of the field's evolution.

How to prepare

To maximize engagement with the 122nd American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition, prospective attendees should consider several preparatory steps. Familiarizing oneself with the historical context of political science research presented at previous APSA meetings can provide valuable background. Reviewing the association's publications and past conference proceedings will offer insight into recurring themes and methodologies.

For those interested in specific areas, such as the dynamics of international relations or comparative politics, identifying key scholars and their recent work will be beneficial. Engaging with the concepts of "Gender Dynamics Across Cultures" or understanding the role of "Hidden Stakeholders" can provide a framework for analyzing diverse political contexts. Participants should also consider how the discussions might intersect with broader geopolitical trends, preparing to engage in nuanced conversations that reflect a deep understanding of political theory and practice.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

United States

Host nation and a primary subject of political science research.

Role in topic

As the host country, the USA provides the logistical framework for the conference in Boston. Its political system, foreign policy, and societal dynamics are frequently central to the research presented, offering a rich context for academic inquiry and debate among scholars.

United Kingdom

Significant contributor to political theory and comparative politics.

Role in topic

Scholars from the GBR often contribute significantly to discussions on political institutions, historical political thought, and comparative governance, bringing a distinct European perspective to the global political science discourse at the meeting.

Canada

Engaged in North American political studies and international relations.

Role in topic

CAN academics frequently present research on North American political dynamics, environmental policy, and multilateralism, offering comparative insights alongside USA-focused studies and contributing to broader international relations discussions.

Germany

Key player in European political science and international cooperation.

Role in topic

DEU scholars are prominent in areas such as European Union studies, political economy, and democratic theory. Their contributions often highlight the complexities of European integration and Germany's role in global governance, enriching the conference's international scope.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Democracy Under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild

Concerns about democratic backsliding have moved from a niche academic conversation to a central preoccupation of political science over the past decade. Indices from V-Dem, Freedom House, and the Economist Intelligence Unit have charted consecutive years of net declines in democratic quality, with cases ranging from outright authoritarian consolidation in Russia, to elected-autocrat trajectories in Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to acute stress tests in established democracies including the United States, Brazil, India, and Israel. Scholars debate whether the pattern reflects a structural 'third wave' reversal driven by inequality, polarization, and information disorder, or a cyclical adjustment that institutions can absorb. The core dispute centers on causes and remedies. One camp emphasizes elite behavior — partisan norm erosion, weaponization of executive power, and capture of courts and electoral administration — while another stresses socioeconomic drivers such as deindustrialization, migration backlash, and platform-mediated polarization. Responses under discussion include pro-democracy coalitions, electoral reform, judicial insulation, regulation of political finance and online speech, and the question of whether external actors — democratic alliances, international election observation, and sanctions regimes — can meaningfully bolster domestic resilience. Today the agenda has shifted from diagnosis to rebuilding. Following contested elections and constitutional confrontations across multiple regions in 2024–2025, political scientists are examining how democracies recover from near-misses: lustration and accountability after autocratic episodes, civic education, depolarization interventions, and the role of AI-generated content in the 2024–2026 election supercycle.

Key players

Political Science as a Discipline: Methods, Pluralism, and Public Relevance

Political science emerged as a distinct discipline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, institutionalized in the United States with the founding of the American Political Science Association in 1903 and parallel developments in Europe rooted in law, history, and political economy. The behavioral revolution of the mid-20th century, the rational-choice turn of the 1970s–1990s, and the credibility revolution in causal inference over the past two decades have each reshaped what counts as rigorous knowledge about politics, while qualitative, interpretive, and area-studies traditions have continued to push back against methodological monism. The core contemporary disputes concern methodological pluralism, the replication and transparency agenda (DA-RT, preregistration, open data), the discipline's engagement with race, gender, and decolonization, and the proper relationship between scholarship and public engagement. Debates over the role of formal theory, the rise of computational social science and large-language-model-assisted research, and the ethics of fieldwork in authoritarian or conflict settings have all intensified. Funding pressures, the contraction of tenure-track positions, and politicized attacks on universities in several democracies add an institutional dimension. Today the field is negotiating how to remain scientifically rigorous while addressing urgent real-world problems — democratic erosion, climate politics, AI governance, and conflict — and how to communicate findings credibly in a fragmented information environment.

Key players

International Relations in a Multipolar Era

International relations as a field of study and as a domain of practice has been reshaped by the return of great-power competition. The post–Cold War 'unipolar moment' has given way to a more contested system in which U.S.–China rivalry, Russia's war against Ukraine, and the assertiveness of middle powers such as India, Brazil, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia define the strategic landscape. Long-running theoretical debates between realist, liberal, constructivist, and critical approaches now interact with new questions about technology, climate, and the durability of the liberal international order. The core disputes concern whether the current system is best characterized as bipolar, multipolar, or 'multiplex'; whether institutions built after 1945 — the UN Charter framework, Bretton Woods, the NPT, the WTO — can be reformed or are being hollowed out; and how to manage simultaneous crises in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Sahel, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea. Sanctions, export controls, industrial policy, and the weaponization of interdependence have moved to the center of statecraft, complicating older distinctions between economic and security policy. Today IR scholarship and diplomacy converge on questions of deterrence in the nuclear and cyber domains, the governance of frontier technologies, and the legitimacy of a Western-led order facing demands for reform from the Global South, including via BRICS+ expansion and alternative financial architectures.

Key players

Disarmament & International Security

The global disarmament architecture, built around the NPT, BWC, CWC, and a network of conventional-weapons treaties, has come under unprecedented strain. The 2022 NPT Review Conference ended without consensus, New START is set to expire in February 2026 with no successor agreement between the United States and Russia, and the INF Treaty has been defunct since 2019. China's strategic-force expansion, North Korea's ongoing tests, Iran's advancing nuclear program, and Russia's nuclear signaling around the war in Ukraine have collectively eroded confidence in mutual restraint. The agenda has simultaneously broadened to emerging technologies. The UN Group of Governmental Experts and a parallel Open-Ended Working Group on lethal autonomous weapons systems have struggled to agree on whether meaningful human control should be codified in a binding instrument. ASAT tests by Russia, China, India, and the United States have made outer space a contested military domain, while stalled PAROS negotiations and an aging Outer Space Treaty leave a normative gap. Cyber norms, addressed through successive OEWG processes, remain aspirational in the absence of enforcement. Today the central dispute is whether arms control can be salvaged through incremental, technology-specific arrangements — on AI in nuclear command and control, on space debris and rendezvous operations, on cyber thresholds — or whether the system requires a more fundamental renegotiation among the major powers.

Key players

Economic & Financial Affairs

The global economy is navigating overlapping shocks: post-pandemic inflation and monetary tightening, the energy and food disruptions caused by Russia's war in Ukraine, and a structural shift toward industrial policy, export controls, and 'friend-shoring.' The IMF and World Bank warn of a 'great divergence' between advanced economies and many low- and middle-income countries, where debt-service costs have crowded out spending on health, education, and climate adaptation. Roughly 60 percent of low-income countries are in or near debt distress. The core disputes turn on the architecture of sovereign-debt restructuring — the G20 Common Framework has delivered slowly for Zambia, Ghana, and Sri Lanka and remains unattractive to many eligible debtors — and on the reform of the international financial institutions, including capital adequacy, special drawing rights reallocation, and the voice of borrowers. The Bridgetown Initiative, the UN Financing for Development process (FfD4), and proposals for a UN Tax Convention have raised the prospect of a partial shift of governance away from Bretton Woods. Today the agenda also includes climate finance after COP28's loss-and-damage fund, the taxation of multinational enterprises and the digital economy under the OECD/Inclusive Framework deal, and the macroeconomic consequences of AI-driven productivity shifts and trade fragmentation.

Key players

Human Rights

The international human rights system, anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ICCPR and ICESCR, and the Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review, faces simultaneous pressures from authoritarian consolidation, armed conflict, and rapid technological change. Investigations and commissions of inquiry on Ukraine, Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territory, Myanmar, Iran, North Korea, Xinjiang, and Sudan have generated detailed documentation but limited enforcement, while ICC arrest warrants — including against sitting heads of state — have tested the boundaries of international justice. The core disputes concern the universality of rights versus claims of cultural or developmental specificity, the politicization of country mandates, and the application of human-rights law to new domains. The 2022 General Assembly recognition of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment (Resolution 76/300) opened debates on climate obligations, while OHCHR's work on business and human rights and on AI has pushed the Council toward frameworks for algorithmic accountability, surveillance, and platform governance. Reprisals against civil society and shrinking space for human rights defenders are persistent concerns. Today the agenda centers on enforcement: how to translate documentation into accountability, how to apply ICCPR Article 19 to AI-mediated speech and content moderation, and how to protect economic and social rights amid debt distress and climate shocks.

Key players

Public Health and Global Health Governance

COVID-19 exposed deep weaknesses in the global health architecture: uneven surveillance, inequitable access to vaccines and therapeutics, and the limits of the 2005 International Health Regulations. In response, WHO member states adopted amendments to the IHR in 2024 and the WHO Pandemic Agreement in May 2025, which now enters an implementation phase centered on pathogen access and benefit sharing (PABS), technology transfer, and a coordinated financing mechanism. Implementation disputes mirror older North–South tensions over intellectual property and equitable access. Beyond pandemic preparedness, the public health agenda includes the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases, antimicrobial resistance, mental health, and non-communicable diseases — addressed at the 2025 UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs with 2030 targets that remain off-track in most regions. Conflict-driven health crises in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and the eastern DRC, and the climate-sensitive spread of dengue, cholera, and mpox, illustrate the interaction between health and other policy domains. Cuts to development assistance for health in several donor countries have intensified financing concerns. Today the central disputes concern operationalizing PABS, sustaining political attention to preparedness between crises, regulating AI in clinical and public-health decision-making, and ensuring that primary health care and universal health coverage remain on the agenda alongside high-profile pandemic threats.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 122nd American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

Supreme Court Upholds Election Commission Dis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

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Country dossier

United States College September 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

122nd American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2026

Sep 3–6, 2026Boston, United StatesIn-person

Starts in 26 daysRegistration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Democracy Under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild · Political Science as a Discipline: Methods, Pluralism, and Public Relevance · International Relations in a Multipolar Era · Disarmament & International Security · Economic & Financial Affairs · Social, Cultural, and Humanitarian Affairs · Human Rights · Public Health and Global Health Governance

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

United States

Host nation and a primary subject of political science research.

Role in topic

United Kingdom

Significant contributor to political theory and comparative politics.

Role in topic

Canada

Engaged in North American political studies and international relations.

Role in topic

Germany

Key player in European political science and international cooperation.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Democracy Under Threat: How to Understand, Protect, and Rebuild

Key players

Political Science as a Discipline: Methods, Pluralism, and Public Relevance

Key players

International Relations in a Multipolar Era

Key players

Disarmament & International Security

Key players

Economic & Financial Affairs

Key players

Human Rights

Key players

Public Health and Global Health Governance

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 122nd American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

Supreme Court Upholds Election Commission Dis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Media & Press Relations

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

United States College September 2026

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

The Future of U.S. & China Conference 2026: A Shifting Global Order

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Nations First Forum: Prospects for Transatlantic Cooperation and the Future of Nations

2026 Jordan Center Masters and Undergraduate Research Symposium

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2026 AGS Geopolitical Leadership Summit

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

The Future of U.S. & China Conference 2026: A Shifting Global Order

Turkey's evolving role in a new global geopolitical and security order

Nations First Forum: Prospects for Transatlantic Cooperation and the Future of Nations

2026 Jordan Center Masters and Undergraduate Research Symposium

Pakistan Conference @ Harvard 2026

2026 AGS Geopolitical Leadership Summit

Frequently asked questions