Advancements and Innovations in Research Design and Methods: New Conditions or New Challenges?

In the last decade, political data have passed from rarity to abundance. There have been plenty of innovations in the way we create, collect, store, access and decipher data. Advances in technology (e.g., computer capacity, web-tracking/cropping, tracking cookies, machine learning and AI for data analysis, including for qualitative data), institutional capacity (e.g., archiving policies, advertising and marketing strategies, privacy laws), new research programmes (e.g., large-scale electronic surveys, simulation tools and experiments, codification of visual ethnographic data) and new practices (e.g., se of social media, new communications methods) have contributed to these innovations. These advancements and innovations create new conditions and challenges for political science and research design. Can the new methods solve old questions? What are the new questions emerging out of the methodological developments and innovations? If these innovations provide a new lens through which to conduct political research, how do we deal with them? Some of our existing methods and research design techniques may not be fit for purpose and miss out on the use of new data. Conversely, due to their novelty, new data may have limitations including an overflow of strategic information (by governments or organisations). The new practices of data collection and storage may also create new problems regarding ethics and analysis. How do we safeguard privacy and informed consent in light of the use of ‘big data’? What are the challenges in terms of archiving and reusing interview or ethnographic data? All fields of political research are affected by the presence of new data and new techniques, from political behaviour to political ideologies, public policy, comparative politics, political psychology, ethnography, and discourses. Quantitative methods have benefited from new developments and innovations, but beyond this, qualitative research software has also become a lot more sophisticated as a result of machine learning and digitisation. Some questions have turned from theoretical to empirical as a result, and some political phenomena can be densely documented or triangulated, even in the context of political theory. All this creates a challenge for academia: how do we connect these findings to inform practitioners in their pursuit of new political tools? This Section aims to bring scholars from different fields and traditions together in a fruitful dialogue, sharing thoughts on the above challenges. This is important, because methodological silos and demarcations can frequently miss data linkages and connections between methods, and can also cause duplication of methodological advances. The Section thus welcomes Panels and Papers that examine new data sources and/or new research practices, demonstrate how these practices have developed, and consider their implications for political methodology. Panels and Papers may also deal with how, through new evidence in a field, new data sources can revive theoretical developments or help bridge theoretical divisions. Section Chairs also welcome Panels and Papers that identify challenges in one given subfield or area of our discipline. This Section is endorsed by the ECPR Standing Group on Political Methodology.