Twenty Years of WGAPE: Interview with Daniel Posner and Edward Miguel
Amy Shipow (Global Networks Senior Associate, CEGA) speaks to Daniel Posner (Political Science, UCLA) and Edward Miguel (Economics, UC Berkeley, CEGA) about the evolution of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE), which they co-founded two decades ago. Now co-led with colleagues Amanda Robinson (Political Science, Ohio State University) and Amma Panin (Economics, University of Louvain), WGAPE brings together faculty and graduate students who combine field research experience in Africa with training in political economy methods. The group has met semi-annually since 2002 to discuss the work of its core members and invited guests. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Amy: The Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) turned twenty in 2022, which seemed like a great opportunity to talk about how WGAPE began and how it’s evolved. What would you say are its key ingredients?
Dan: I would point to three key ingredients. First, the meeting format: we read papers in advance. No presentations — just discussion. We strive to make each other’s work better. This ethos is reflected in our decision to accept pre-analysis plans and early stage work alongside polished papers. Participants understand that meetings are about taking advantage of the brain power and experience in the room.
Second, the commitment to deep knowledge of field work in Africa and modern political economy training. One of the things that makes the meetings work is that people in the room have different strengths that complement each other. The application of this combination to make the research better is at the core of WGAPE.
Third, having graduate students in the room. The experience of being in the room and hearing about the research in a different, broader way is important. Graduate students learn a lot from listening to these comments and learning from the ethos of intellectual vulnerability. I give Ted a lot of credit for the supportive tone of the discussions. In-your-face grandstanding is very common in economics. It’s competitive. But Ted, as the most senior economist in the room, sets a positive tone and always offers constructive feedback.
Ted: Our field is often very hierarchical. It is ingrained in academic culture, but it’s not very productive to the production of knowledge. Having your ears open to good ideas, regardless of who is sharing it, is important. From its outset, WGAPE has always welcomed academics at different career stages, all seated together, all with equal air time. I see this as a key ingredient of the WGAPE culture.
Tell me about WGAPE’s inception. Where did you get the idea to start this type of convening?
Dan: Like many great ideas, it was the product of several sources of inspiration. The Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (LiCEP), Kanchan Chandra, a graduate student at Harvard at the time, and David Laitin, who was running Wilder House at UChicago, organized an initial series of interdisciplinary workshops. It was David who proposed that we hold the LiCEP meeting under Wilder House rules: papers were read and circulated in advance of the meeting and everyone was expected to read ahead of time.
Later, my colleague Miriam Golden approached me about organizing a working group under a center she ran that sponsored cross-disciplinary working groups bringing together faculty across UC campuses. Around this time, David asked if I would attend a seminar at Stanford that Ted was giving on ethnic diversity and school funding. Afterwards, I went to lunch with Ted, and when Miriam approached me about organizing the working group, I thought of him.
Can you share more about the integration of African scholars into WGAPE’s leadership and administration? When and why did that become central to the mission?
Dan: WGAPE always aspired to greater participation from African scholars, but it became possible when the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the National Science Foundation (NSF) started supporting us. This outside funding for our annual meetings allowed us to extend invitations to scholars from countries in Africa. But then we realized: let’s just have the meeting on the [African] continent. Amma Panin gave a fantastic presentation at the first of these meetings in Cape Town. She joined the Organizing Committee soon after.
The NSF and Hewlett funding enabled us to support many of the grad students who spent time in WGAPE and then got jobs. When they negotiated their first jobs, they often asked for funds to start WGAPEs in their institutions. For example, Amanda Robinson and Kim Yi Dionne started MGAPE (Midwest WGAPE) because they had a great experience in WGAPE as graduate students. Macartan Humphreys and others at Columbia, Yale, Princeton, and NYU likewise created CAPERS, the Comparative African Political Economy Research Seminar. I also started the Boston-based B-WGAPE when I was briefly at MIT, which continues today.
Ted: We are seeing this trend on the African continent. For example, Kelly Zhang organized a Nairobi chapter called the Working Group in Kenyan Political Economy. WGAPE has been one of the most constructive intellectual communities for many scholars, but I am most proud of its training mission of graduate students and junior faculty. The scholars who benefited, who learned, whose research improved — this taught them how to run their own seminars after they finished their training. The roster of WGAPE participants and alumni is amazing.
What do you hope WGAPE looks like twenty years from now?
Dan: I hope to continue building the WGAPE community by bringing in more African scholars. I also want to be able to offer more funding to more scholars through small grants so that WGAPE can become a research incubator of sorts. We could then use the WGAPE meetings as an opportunity for grant recipients to garner feedback at varying stages of their projects. That way, WGAPE could generate scholarship by identifying promising projects and people and then nurturing the projects over time. As a grantmaking organization, we offer both a jury of academics who recognize promising projects and several great opportunities to present and receive feedback. This opportunity to receive mentorship and feedback at different stages of the research project is really unique.
Ted: I agree and I think it’s interesting to think about how WGAPE grows. The intense interaction in the room limits the amount of people who can be there. This could be why there are spin-offs of WGAPE. In some sense, there has to be some size limit — the relative intimacy enables us to provide substantive comments and thoughts to better the research. So, there should be more meetings, in more countries, in more cities, more frequently. These meetings would keep the essence, spirit, and model of WGAPE but would catalyze further opportunities to have those interactions. In the next twenty years, I hope that the next scholars will mostly be based in LMICs. This is where we are hoping to take WGAPE.
For more about WGAPE, explore the full archive of WGAPE papers and read the full conversation with Ted and Daniel.
