dr. Patrick A. Mello

Patrick A. Mello works at the intersection of international relations, comparative politics, and social science methods. His research has two complementary strands. The substantive strand examines the domestic politics and political contestation of international security: why democracies differ in their involvement in military operations and their stance on military assistance, how parliaments and political parties shape decisions on the use of force, and how foreign policy changes, most recently in work on Germany’s Zeitenwende and European responses to Russia’s war against Ukraine. The second strand is methodological. Here, he focuses on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) as a set-theoretic method for descriptive and causal inference. He is particularly interested in multi-method research design, especially on combining QCA and process tracing for cross-case and within-case inference.

Mello is Co-Investigator in the VU Starter Grant project “NEST: Navigating the Storm: European Political Contestation in Geopolitical Transformation” (2023–2027; PI Chendi Wang, with Ben Crum and Wolfgang Wagner; funded from sector funds of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; €300,000). He leads the work package on the Russia–Ukraine war and the political contestation of foreign policy and co-designed the project’s YouGov survey, fielded in September and October 2025 in the Netherlands and 11 other EU member states. The project examines how Russia’s war against Ukraine is reshaping European politics, from the fiscal consequences of the crisis to the foreign policy orientations of states, parties, and voters, and the strategies of representation and justification that European politicians adopt in response.

Previously, he was Co-Investigator in the research project “International Bureaucracies as Runaway Agents? How Organizational Structure Affects Agency Slack” (2017–2022; German Research Foundation, project 370183851; PI Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt; €488,878). He co-authored the grant proposal, was responsible for the comparative research design and the QCA analysis, and coordinated the project team. The project investigated under what conditions the secretariats of international organizations deviate from their mandates and act in ways unintended by their principals, using fuzzy-set QCA across 27 international bureaucracies. He also obtained an earlier workshop grant for “Parliaments and Security Policy” (2016; German Foundation for Peace Research; Co-PI with Dirk Peters; €10,740), which funded an international authors’ workshop at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and led to a guest-edited special issue of the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2018) and a lead article in Sicherheit und Frieden (2017).

Since 2025, Mello has served as methodological consultant on the QCA component of the NIH-funded project “Putting Implementation Into Context to Advance the Management of Mechanically Ventilated Patients” (PI Meeta Prasad Kerlin, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania; project budget USD 2.8 million). The four-year project examines the interplay between contextual and intervention features in care delivery for patients who undergo invasive mechanical ventilation, in more than 30 intensive care units in 16 hospitals.

At VU Amsterdam, Mello teaches and coordinates courses across the political science curriculum, including “Qualitative Research and Methods in Political Science” for the Bachelor's Political Science, “Applying Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Political Science” and “Qualitative Comparative Analysis” for the Master's in Political Science, and courses on international security and collective security in the LLM programme Law and Politics of International Security, which he co-directs. He holds the University Teaching Qualification (BKO, 2024) and is pursuing the Senior Teaching Qualification (SKO). His teaching has been recognized with the Teaching Excellence Award of the University of Erfurt (2018 and 2021).

Beyond the VU, Mello teaches research methods internationally: a week-long QCA course at the Summer School in Social Sciences Methods at Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano (since 2016), earlier courses at the ECPR Summer School (2014–2017), and invited methods workshops and masterclasses at universities and institutions across Europe and beyond, including in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Poland, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has also taught a guest course on “The Politics of Multinational Military Operations” at Univerzita Karlova, Prague (2019).

Doctoral supervision: Mello currently co-supervises doctoral projects at VU Amsterdam (R. Sonneveld, with W. Wagner and M. Onderco, Erasmus University Rotterdam) and the University of Antwerp (W. Piot, with B. Cambré and S. Damen). He co-supervised two completed PhD projects (T. Fernández-Maya, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2025; S. Wakhu, University of Erfurt, 2020), served as external committee member for three PhD theses (B.P. Toulabi, VU Amsterdam, 2021; P. Álamos-Concha, Université catholique de Louvain, 2018; T. Haesebrouck, Ghent University, 2016), and was external reviewer for the midway evaluation of P.M. Waaler, University of Oslo (2024).

• International Studies Quarterly (Oxford University Press) | Oxford | Editorial board member | 2024-01-01 - present
• Ethics Committee, German Political Science Association | Berlin | Elected committee member | 2022-11-24 - 2027-10-31
• Foreign Policy Analysis (Oxford University Press) | Oxford | Editorial board member | 2018-01-01 - present
• Contemporary Security Policy (Taylor & Francis) | London | Editorial board member | 2018-01-01 - present
• University of Pennsylvania (Perelman School of Medicine) | Philadelphia, PA | Adviseur | 2025-08-01 - 2029-05-31

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