2026 APSA Political Psychology Pre-Conference

In increasing numbers, political psychologists now span the traditional subfields of Political Science, producing impactful work in International Relations, Comparative Politics, American Politics, and Theory. This growing diversity - extending even into emerging areas like computational political science - has led scholars to ask fresh questions in new contexts, expanding psychological work well beyond its traditional home in social psychology.

That expansion has proven generative. Recent political psychology work offers new ways of thinking about emotion, motivation, attitudes, and other key processes and outcomes, while applying these insights to a wider range of social and political phenomena than ever before, with implications that reach into other subfields as well.

This conference will provide a space for scholars making innovative contributions to the expansion of political psychology theory, measurement, and application to connect with political psychologists across subfields for rigorous debate of new ideas. We invite scholars from across the discipline to register (for free) for the conference and to apply to present recent work that fits the conference theme.