Advancing Political Methodology in Times of Crisis

In the past twenty years, several kinds of crises such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the economic crisis of 2008/2009 or the fast influx of refugees in 2015 have heavily shaped political science research in two major ways. On the one hand, these crises challenged our discipline to better understand the world around and fueled new, cross-cutting research. On the other hand, answering these research questions has triggered methodological developments leading to substantial innovations. The on-going COVID19 pandemic, a current crisis heavily affecting all areas of life, has been mostly discussed with regard to its negative impact on scientific research. Amongst others, restrictions on social contact have severely disrupted academic research and have led many researchers to not being able to conduct or finalize their collection of data. In search for alternatives, researchers often had to change their methodological approaches to new modes of data collection. Even though the negative sides of the COVID19 crisis are large and evident, the crisis might also provide positive aspects with regard to methodological innovations in data collection as well as in research design and data analysis. This section explores both the challenges and new approaches in the field of political methodology in general but specifically so in times of crisis, with regard to the current pandemic but also on the lessons learnt by past crises. Being critical research junctures, crises may have both positive and negative consequences at the same time. For example, interviewing experts via video conferencing software instead of meeting them face-to-face could decrease the openness and trustworthiness within the interviewing process. On the flipside, it could also decrease research costs and increase participation rates, hence providing the chance to interview a greater variety of experts and get an even deeper insight into the research topic. Together with newly developed transcription tools this may provide qualitative researchers with an even greater depth of methodologically sound insights. In addition, survey and experimental research may also see two sides of effects from the pandemic. Societal lockdown or sudden crises events may mean that findings from time points before and after the events cannot be compared any more, but it could also be integrated as a kind of natural field experiment into the collection or analysis of data, helping us overcome ever pressing issues such as pre-treatment effects or the ability of generalizing findings from somewhat artificial experimental settings. Furthermore, especially qualitative research methods that traditionally take place in society – such as, observing the discourse structures in closed / open networks – may have become impossible. But this may have led researchers instead to search for other methodological approaches by observing the shift in such discourses in online settings which, again, may have both methodological benefits and disadvantages. Finally, reflecting on the current methodological approaches and practices from a critical perspective can lead to additional innovations in data collection and data analysis, and advancements in qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition, this section also broadens its view to other developments in methodological research in Political Science that are taking place because of scientific crises and major developments – that is, points in time where traditional methods can no longer be applied for theoretical or empirical reasons – and not due to societal or political ones. To that end, we not only invite papers affected by real-life crises but also those discussing innovative methodological designs and instruments that help us in overcoming existing scientific problems. To hence understand the impact crises of very different nature like the COVID19 pandemic or scientific crises may have, this section invites papers and panels addressing: 1) Novel methods of data collection that have evolved during or as a result of research in times of crisis, such as an increasing use of implicit measures, new ways of detecting and correcting measurement bias, new survey methods and questions, innovative experimental designs, ways to harvest and analyze big data, and to link different sorts of data formats; 2) Crisis-related issues in qualitative data collection such as the implementation of new interviewing or other techniques on the one side, but also problems related to the format of interview in itself, research protocols, focus groups and other ethnographic methods; 3) New ideas to systematically apply and document critical methods to create sophisticated analytical frameworks; 4) Challenges to traditional and new methods of data analysis across methodological approaches that new research objects bring about, especially in the face of the seemingly ever-increasing sequence of crises. The organizers of the section will explore the possibility of a special issue based on the contributions to this section. The section is organized by the members of the Steering Committee of the ECPR Standing Group on Political Methodology. Sabrina J Mayer is the Head of the Data and Methods department at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM) in Berlin as well as Senior Research Fellow (PD) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her main research interests are comparative electoral behaviour, political psychology, immigrant integration, and survey methodology. Bernd Schlipphak is Associate Professor for Empirical Research Methods at WWU Muenster. In his research on elite communication and public attitudes toward the domestic and international level, he collects and links different sorts of data stemming from survey experiments, (automated) content analysis and observational data collection. Luana Russo is an Assistant Professor in Quantitative Methods at Maastricht University. Her substantive research interests are in comparative politics, electoral and political behavior, polarization, political participation, electoral geography and quantitative methods. She is a member of the NWO Tafels (Law, Public Administration, and Political Science) and co-editor in chief of the journal Politics of the Low Countries. Theofanis Exadaktylos is Reader in European Politics at the University of Surrey. He researches European public policy, austerity politics, Greek politics, emotions in public policy making and Europeanisation from a range of methodological approaches. He is the co-editor of the JCMS Annual Review and co-author of a forthcoming textbook on Methods in Politics and IR (Palgrave, 2021).