We are excited to announce that the 11th edition of the Southern Workshop in Empirical Political Science (SoWEPS) will take place at Duke University on October 29-30, 2026.
The SoWEPS-11 workshop organizers invite submissions of (1) completed papers, (2) detailed research designs, and (3) expressions of interest in being a discussant or session chair. Only complete drafts of papers and research designs will be considered.
Graduate students and faculty (especially junior faculty) are both encouraged to submit their work. Priority will be given to graduate students on the job market. We anticipate having 4 to 5 papers presented during the plenary sessions. In addition, applicants whose proposals are not accepted to the main agenda are invited to participate in a poster session.
Please submit here
Submission deadline: September 11, 2026
In line with the workshop's mission to support rigorous and creative empirically focused research, priority will be given to submissions that use or propose innovative methods or innovative types of data across all subfields of Political Science. We are particularly interested in work that is pushing the frontier of both empirical causal work (field experiments, natural/quasi-experimental methods, etc.) as well as the frontier of empirical descriptive or predictive work (machine learning, text analysis, etc.). We also invite submissions utilizing new types of data (novel administrative data, remote-sensed data, historical data) and beyond.
As a workshop that is feedback-focused, we prefer the submission of completed papers that have not already passed through review at a journal. However, work that is having trouble finding a home in a journal is still very welcome.
Financial support is available for graduate students.
Key SoWEPS-11 (Fall 2026) Dates:
September 11, 2026: Submission deadline
September 28, 2026: Announcement of the accepted papers and program
October 15, 2026: Final papers are due from program participants for circulation
October 29-30, 2026: SoWEPS-11 Conference occurs in person
To sign up for SOWEPS mailing list, click here: https://forms.gle/WrvnaxRt3Cz6Ewzd8
SoWEPS-11 Conveners: Shelley Liu, Shikhar Singh, Martín Opertti, and Trung-Anh Nguyen.