DPIR’s Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos wins APSA Best Article award

Professor of Comparative & Judicial Politics Ezequiel González Ocantos has been awarded the 2025 Alexander George Best Article Award from the American Political Science Association’s Qualitative and Multi-Methods Research section.
 

He was awarded the prize for his article ‘Aligning Interviewing with Process Tracing’ co-authored with Juan Masullo (University of Milan), which appeared in Sociological Methods and Research (SMR) in 2024.

It is not the first time Professor González Ocantos has won the prize, with him also being awarded the accolade in 2020 for his article ‘Process Tracing and the Problem of Missing Data’, written with Dr Jody LaPorte.

Commenting on his latest winning paper, the award committee wrote: 

‘The committee was unanimous in its decision. We found the article systematic in considering the various strategies for designing, sampling, and sequencing interviews to yield insights for process tracing. 

‘The resulting analysis provides a treasure trove of methodological insights and practical guidance for researchers using these tools and seeking to combine them.  

‘As such, the article adds to the important work in the field that seeks to go beyond a general defence of qualitative methods to the rigorous application and systematic improvement of these methods.’

We caught up with Professor González Ocantos to ask him about winning the award and what it means to him:

Congratulations on winning this award! Can you tell us a bit more about what the article is about?

This is a methodology article that develops a series of tools for scholars who rely on interviews to study contemporary and historical political processes. The paper offers guidelines to decide who to talk to and how to design questionnaires with the goal of strengthening causal inference.

How do you do this?

We do so by distilling our own experience as qualitative researchers, but also with reference to the work of others. 

How do you feel to have won this award?:

Juan and I started collaborating on this project when he was still at Oxford. The article had a tortuous journey through several journals until it found its home in SMR. We are delighted to receive this recognition for our work.