Dual Purpose Sim: Introducing Research Methods through a Simulation of Autocracy

• In Event: TLC at APSA: Doing Global Politics: Simulating the Dynamics of International and Comparative Political Phenomena

Abstract

Simulations typically aim to teach concepts or to provide procedural training. The “Authoritania” simulation does both, with an eye toward teaching concepts related to authoritarian governance while also introducing students to research methods. Online and in-person, students adopt roles, communicate, and carry out actions in a fictional authoritarian regime. Students learn about authoritarianism through role construction, pre-brief and debrief sessions, and the simulation itself. Uniquely, the simulation leverages technology to maintain different forms of data, produced by student communication and interaction, to be used later for quantitative, qualitative, and interpretive analysis. In short, students create a case study through their interactions and communications that become the material artefacts for post-simulation research projects. Students take off their “actor hats” from the simulation and put on their “researcher hats” to collect and analyze their self-generated data for empirical inquiry. In this paper, I present the simulation, its use of technology to preserve data, and the way methods are introduced to students and used by students. I argue that introducing students to the fundamentals of research in this way increases “buy in” as students directly contribute to the construction of the case they subsequently investigate.

Author

• Andrew M. Spath, American University, School of International Service