From the Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory

Upcoming Academic Events

ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop 2026

Between Norms and Evidence: Connecting Normative Political Theory and Political Science 7-10 April 2026 University of Innsbruck, Austria We are pleased to announce that our Standing Group’s workshop proposal for the Joint Sessions has been accepted. We are now accepting abstract submissions for the workshop Between Norms and Evidence: Connecting Normative Political Theory and Political Science.

Organised by Sune Lægaard and Marina Vahter, this workshop is endorsed by the Methods of Normative Political Theory and the Analytical Politics and Public Choice standing groups. The Joint Sessions format allows for in-depth engagement with every paper over the four days. Each paper will have a dedicated discussant, assigned by the workshop directors, Sune and Marina. Thus, every paper will receive detailed feedback.

Have a look at the workshop outline here.

ECPR General Conference 2026

Methodological Reflections on the Status, Norms, and Institutions of Democracy 8-11 September 2026 Jagiellonian University, Kraków

The 2026 ECPR General Conference will be held in Jagiellonian University Kraków, Poland from 8 to 11 September 2026. Esma Baycan-Herzog and Ed Handby will be co-organising the Section for ECPR 2026. The deadline for paper and panel proposals is 5 January.

Apply here

The Section provides a venue for methodologists to contribute to the ongoing project of examining democratic norms and institutions in light of methodological reflections. The theme of the Section proposal for 2026 continues the work started with the 2025 Section, by applying recent innovations in methodology to the role and status of democracy. We encourage proposals that approach questions of method in the context of challenges to democracy: how to understand or model democracy in a way that strengthens norms and institutions, or propose viable alternatives. This includes papers on how to understand democracy in theory and practice, such as the role of democratic institutions, forms of justification in democracy, and the nature of democratic consent. Furthermore, the Section examines various core features of democracy, such as the nature of the democratic citizen, and how their investigation changes depending on the methodology and the kind of normativity employed. In this way, the focus of the Section is not only democracy more broadly, but its constituent parts.  Finally, the Section examines the place of democracy and democratic ideals. It invites comparisons between democratic and non-democratic forms of government, the online dimensions of democracy, and the very nexus between democracy and the study of methods itself.

Onora O’Neill Book Prize in Political Theory

We are delighted to announce that nominations for the Onora O’Neill Political Theory Prize are now open.

Sponsored by the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP), this prize honours the best book in political theory published in the last three years (from January 2022 onwards). The prize cuts across all traditions, orientations and approaches in political theory, political thought, and political philosophy, and does not take into account whether the nominated works are first book publications or not.

The winner will receive £250, and their book will be the subject of a panel at the 2026 ECPR General Conference, with potential publication as a symposium in CRISPP. Nominations, including a book abstract and PDF, should be submitted to ecproopt@gmail.com with the jury chair in CC (a.poama@fgga.leidenuniv.nl) by 31 January 2026.

Click here for details.

News

• Our Chair, Jonathan Floyd, will be giving a Keynote at the Brave New World Conference in Manchester happening in 2026.

Recent Publications

• Handby, Edmund. “Defending Methodological Anarchism in Empirically Informed Political Theory.” The Journal of Politics (Online First).
• Leader Maynard, Jonathan. “The Logic of Idealization in Political Theory.” American Journal of Political Science, Vol: 69 Issue: 3 (2025): 779-1195.

Res Publica, Vol. 32, issue 1, which is forthcoming in the beginning of 2026, will include a special issue on “Ideal Principles, Real Behaviour, and Possible Experiments”, edited by Jonathan Floyd and Sune Lægaard. The papers going into the special issue are already published online as follows:

• Midtgaard, Søren Flinch. “X-Phi and Theory Acceptance in Political Philosophy.” Res Publica, Vol. 32 Issue: 1 (2026).
• Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper. “Can Experimental Political Philosophers be Modest in their Aims?” Res Publica, Vol. 32 Issue: 1 (2026).
• Erman, Eva and Niklas Möller. “Why Normative Behaviourism Does Not Improve Political Realism.” Res Publica, Vol. 32 Issue: 1 (2026).
• Cozzaglio, Ilaria. “Revised Normative Behaviourism: An Experimental Proposal.” Res Publica, Vol. 32 Issue: 1 (2026).
• Kim, Hwa Young. “What Should We Say to Denmark? Mentalism as an Essential Complement to Behavourism.” Res Publica, Vol. 32 Issue: 1 (2026).
• Favara, Greta. “Normative Behaviourism and Action-Guidance: The Challenge of the Climate Crisis.” Res Publica, Vol. 32 Issue: 1 (2026).
• Maynard, Jonathan Leader. “Comparative Historical Analysis in Political Theory.” Res Publica, Vol. 32 Issue: 1 (2026).
• Floyd, Jonathan. “Experimental Political Theory: Behavioural, Careful, Radical.” Res Publica, Vol. 32 Issue: 1 (2026).

Announcing ‘Public Political Philosophy’, themed issue at Public Humanities guest edited by George Boss (Queen Mary University of London), co-edited by Jonathan Floyd (University of Bristol) This themed issue investigates the persistent gap between political philosophy and everyday politics. That gap has come under growing scrutiny. In part, this has been driven by external pressures from universities, funders, and policymakers to deliver measurable impact and show public engagement. More fundamentally, though, the methodological turn within the field itself has led to growing calls for forms of philosophising that are more closely attuned to the empirical realities of everyday life, and whose significance reaches beyond the academy. Responding to these shifts, the issue gathers political philosophers with diverse approaches to examine the nature, aims, and practices of public political philosophy. Together, the contributions map the conceptual contours of this emerging agenda, assess its prospects and challenges, and sketch the possible trajectories of its future development. The following contributions have already been made available by Public Humanities, with the full issue due for release in early 2026:

• Baderin, Alice. “Making Political Philosophy Public: The Role of Empirical Inquiry.” Public Humanities (2025).
• Halldenius, Lena and Moa Petersén. “When Philosophy Meets the Street: Lived Experience and Epistemic Recognition in Field-Based Philosophy.” Public Humanities (2025).
• Doughty, Jamie. “Reclaiming Public Space: Statues as Resources for a Queer Political Philosophy.” Public Humanities (2025).
• Stitzlein, Sarah M. “Philosophy of Education as Public Political Philosophy: Practice, Possibilities, and Provocations.” Public Humanities (2025).
• Stevens, Simon. “Public Political Philosophy, Moral Sentimentalism, and Larp.” Public Humanities (2025).
• Hamilton, Lawrence. “The Attitude and Audience of the Public Political Theorist: Thinking Critically and Politically with Fellow Citizens.” Public Humanities (2025).

---

Editorial Team

Edmund Handby is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research examines methodological questions in the history of political thought, empirically informed political theory, and politics, philosophy, and economics. His work has appeared in The Journal of Politics, the European Journal of Political Theory, and The Journal of the Philosophy of History.

Glorianne Wilkins is a Ph. D. student at the department of Political Theory at the University of Potsdam. Her thesis is on 'Uncertainty and Decision Making in a Political World'. Her research engages with the theoretical disciplines of political philosophy, political epistemology, and liberal democratic theory. She is particularly interested in the nature of unquestioned assumptions as it relates to particular concepts taken as fundamental to contemporary politics: truth, (liberal) democracy, among others. In recent times these values have wavered in their ability to unite decision makers, instead becoming conceptual weapons wielded by all sides. Through her research she considers how engaging with these concepts and their assumptions can inform how we make decisions under greater conditions of uncertainty.

Sania Ismailee is an Assistant Professor at the School of Law, BML Munjal University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political philosophy, law, and religion. Sania’s research interests also include critically examining the methodology of Indian political theory debates. Her dissertation examined normative justifications around diverse religious family laws in India (the Uniform Civil Code Debate) from perspectives on secularism, gender justice, and religious freedom. She was a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Researcher at Columbia University and a Commonwealth Split-Site Fellow at the University of Oxford. Sania has published on the Karnataka hijab controversy, comparing V D Savarkar’s and B R Ambedkar’s comments on Muslims, affective approaches to justice, along with several book reviews on religion and political theory.

Lucas de Melo Prado is a PhD candidate at University College Dublin, specialising in applied political theory and distributive justice. His current research examines the last seven presidential elections in the USA and Brazil to evaluate candidates’ rhetoric of inequality from a liberal perspective. Before his PhD studies, Lucas worked for nine years as a lecturer of Moral and Legal Philosophy at three Brazilian law schools (Uniavan, Sinergia, and Univali). He also published in various Brazilian peer-reviewed journals, such as the Brazilian Journal of International Law and the Brazilian Journal Law and Politics (“Revista Eletrônica Direito e Política”).

---

The quarterly newsletter of the ECPR Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory On behalf of the Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory, we are happy to announce that the quarterly newsletter of the Methods of Normative Political Theory will appear at the beginning of March, June, September, and December. The newsletters will remain accessible on the standing group’s website. We are happy to receive your updates regarding new publications, calls for proposals, events, Summer / Winter PhD Courses and job advertisements pertaining to methods of political theory by email to ecprmethods@gmail.com.

From the Standing Group on Methods of Normative Political Theory

Nominations for the Onora O'Neill Political Theory Prize are now open. Submit your nomination by emailing ecproopt@gmail.com, with a.poama@fgga.leidenuniv.nl (the jury chair) in CC. The deadline for nominations is 23:59 CET on 31 January 2026. Details about the nomination process follow below.

The Onora O’Neill Political Theory Prize [1], sponsored by Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP), aims to recognise the best book published in political theory in the last three years. Political theory is widely construed to include political philosophy, the history of political thought, the methodology of political theory and philosophy, public ethics, and the ethics of public policy.

The prize cuts across all traditions, orientations and approaches in political theory, political thought, and political philosophy, and does not take into account whether the nominated works are first book publications or not. The prize is sponsored financially and editorially by CRISPP, and organisationally by four ECPR political theory and political thought Standing Groups (Political Theory, International Political Theory, Kantian Political Thought, Methods of Normative Political Theory).

Procedure

• The prize is awarded every year at the ECPR General Conference, at the beginning of the ECPR Theory Plenary.
• The winner of the prize commits in principle to be present at the ECPR Theory Plenary.
• The prize is accompanied by a £250 financial reward.
• The prize-winning book will be the topic of a panel at the ECPR General Conference. This panel will be considered for publication as a book symposium in CRISPP (following consideration and acceptance of a proposal by the CRISPP editorial team detailing the symposium editor, contributors and abstracts of their papers; and subject to peer review of the final submission). Publication is not guaranteed.

Nomination requirements

• Only books published in the last three years are admissible (i.e., not earlier than January 2022).
• In the nomination text, please submit a book abstract (no longer than 1,000 words) and a PDF copy of the book. Hard copies should be sent only if the book has been long-listed for the prize (see below).
• Books can be nominated by one academic affiliated with an ECPR institution (the nomination can come from PhD students, postdocs, tenure-track or tenured academics) or be self-nominated.
• The book will be considered for a symposium publication in CRISPP. As much as possible, nominations have to indicate 3-5 names of academics that could take part in the book symposium.
• Books may be nominated more than once.
• Nominations have to submitted by 31 January 2026. The decision is taken and announced during the summer of 2026. Our aim is to have a book prize symposium panel included in the 2026 ECPR General Conference (8 – 11 September 2026). If needed, the symposium panel will be organised in hybrid format, irrespective of the speakers’ mode of participation.

Jury composition

• The jury is composed of one secretary (with a term of four years, renewable once), and eight members (two members/Standing Group from Political Theory, International Political Theory, Kantian Thought, and Methods of Normative Political Theory). The jury members serve a one-year term, renewable twice.
• The jury members are nominated by the Steering Committees of their Standing Groups in coordination with the secretary of the jury. It is desirable that the members of the jury (other than the secretary) are not members of the Steering Committees (in particular, to ensure increased diversity and wider participation across those Standing Groups).
• When selecting jury members, Steering Committees are required to ensure gender diversity
• The secretary of the jury is selected every four years, following open vote, by the members of the four Steering Committees of the Standing Groups indicated above.
• The jury members are not allowed to nominate/have nominated a book for the prize, and they should disclose any potential conflict of interest with the authors of the short-listed books

Decision procedure

• The secretary draws a list of admissible nominations (books have to fall in the relevant discipline category). Based on their open access to the list of nominations received, jury members can veto any nomination exclusion. This brings a nominated book back into the list of admissible nominations.
• The selection procedure includes a long and a short list of nominations (max. nine books for the long list; max. five books for the short list).
• It is desirable that hard copies of the book be sent to the jury members at a deadline indicated following the selection to the long list.
• Only jury members directly vote and deliberate on the ranking of the nominations, on the long and short lists, on the prize winner and, should that be the case, on the runner-up.
• The secretary plays a coordinating and facilitating role in the deliberation process leading to the selection of the long and short lists, and of the prize winner.
• The winner is selected, as much as possible, via jury consensus. If that is not possible, the winner is selected following a qualified majority rule (6/8).
• Should the decision result in an ex aequo situation, the secretary votes as well.

CRISPP Guidelines for Book Symposium Editors

CRISPP will consider the proceedings of the prize laureate for publication, but publication is not guaranteed. The contributions should be short essays of 3,000 words maximum, inclusive of abstract and references. This would mean a maximum of of 4x3 for the commentators, and 1x4,000 for the author to reply. CRISPP would also like the editor to write a brief introduction (1x3000) setting the context for the symposium – why the book is important in the debates it addresses, and outlining the main arguments of the book so the symposium could be read by someone yet to read the book. This adds up to a maximum of 20,000 words for the entire Symposium (building in some wiggle room). It is very important to keep to that limit as CRISPP needs to be able to include three or four other articles in the issue. CRISPP also expects that there to be a good gender balance among the contributors and some ethnic, career stage and geographical diversity. We require that either two referees look at the whole symposium, or that each piece is refereed separately. We can agree who that would be beforehand – CRISPP would be grateful if you could suggest referees and then if they look adequate (a concern is avoiding using people CRISPP has recently approached) you as the symposium editor can make the arrangement with them directly.  It is best to get the commentators’ pieces refereed first before the author writes his/her reply, otherwise it can be difficult to ask for revisions. So, the response should only be written once the commentaries are approved. CRISPP would then like to see the reports and the authors responses to them. Note that we do all of this outside the editorial manager system – I spare those unused to its quirks the unedifying experience of grappling with it.

NB: important issues concerning submission: All contributions must be in CRISPP format. It’s very important these are done properly and follow the guidelines.
 

---

[1] Onora O’Neill’s work combines political philosophy, political theory and moral philosophy scholarship with public policy-oriented activities. She has extensively published on questions pertaining to trust and trustworthiness, justice, accountability, consent, the role of public universities, and the ethics of communication in the context of emerging digital technologies. She was the president of the British Academy, served as the chair the Nuffield Foundation and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and was member of the Medical Research Council and Banking Standards Board. She is the recipient of various awards, prizes and official recognitions (including the Berggruen Prize). 

Past Academic Events

---

ECPR General Conference 2025

26-29 August 2025 Aristotle University Thessaloniki, Greece

This past August, we gathered in at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki for the ECPR General Conference. This year’s Section was co-organised by Glorianne Wilkins and Ed Handby. The Section featured a wide range of topics, across a diverse set of panels as well as plenty of walking to take in the sights and sounds of Thessaloniki. On behalf of the organising team, it was great to see the continuing development and expansion of the presence of methodologists at the General Conference, which will only continue through the Joint Sessions and next years General Conference.

Alongside the presentations and socialising, the Standing Group also made plans and prepreations for the next round of ECPR events. The Standing Group will be submitting a workshop proposal for the Joint Sessions to be held in Innsbruk, Austria. Marina Vahter and Sune Lægaard will be orgainsing this proposal. Secondly, the 2026 ECPR General Conference will be held in Kraków, Poland. Esma Baycan-Herzog and Ed Handby will be co-organising the Section for ECPR 2027.

Best Paper Prize

The 2025 General Conference was the perfect opportunity to launch a new prize – the Best Paper at the General Conference. Participants and members of the audience were asked to nominate a presentation to the judging panel of Jonathan and Esma. They are happy to announce joint winners for the inaugural prize: Sania Ismailee and Lucas de Melo Prado.

This framework includes a classification of different types of social inequalities and a list of liberal claims used to justify them. The justificatory claims are organised according to their argumentative strength and their relationship to core liberal concepts. Both the classification and the justificatory claims of inequalities form a codebook, with precise definitions and examples designed for the qualitative coding and analysis of data. Moreover, Lucas’s paper outlines the ten theoretical and empirical steps he followed to develop and apply this framework of liberal claims of inequality. This ten-step procedure was conceived to be a replicable model, offering a pathway for researchers to create similar frameworks for other topics or other ideological and theoretical approaches. Lucas’s work, therefore, provides a practical tool for the analysis and evaluation of political rhetorics of inequality, as well as a methodological contribution to normative theory, particularly considering the methodological turn in the field.

Despite the fact that diverse religious family laws are discriminatory toward women, a dominant view among Indian political theorists is to oppose a UCC.
Sania’s research closely examines this puzzle. Her paper, “Contextualism in Indian Political Theory: Lessons from and for the Family Law Reform Debate,” offers a novel critique of how Indian political theorists engage with the UCC debate through contextualism. She identifies two crucial “contingent contextual considerations”—the rise of Hindutva nationalism and its impact on Muslim minorities—as the starting points for this conversation. By using Sune Lægaard’s concept of “critical distance,” Sania proposes a principled engagement with the family law reform debate in India. Her research has broader implications for how political philosophy is practiced in India and for theoretical engagements with religious family laws beyond the pervasive framework of multiculturalism.

Onora O’Neill Book Prize in Political Theory

Together with the other political theory standing groups in the ECPR, we are launching the Onora O’Neill Book Prize in Political Theory. This prize recognises and celebrates the best book in political theory released in a given year, not just first book! The jury for the prize will be comprised of two members from each of the four theory standing groups. A call for nominations for members of the jury was sent out by Jonathan earlier in September.

Upcoming Academic Events / News

---

On Friday October 3rd, our Chair, Jonathan Floyd, will be giving a one-day workshop on methods and methodology in political theory in Dublin, jointly hosted by University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, and organised in turn by Peter Stone (Trinity) and Alexa Zellentin (UCD).

---

Recent Publications

Turner, Ben. 2024. “Situating realism, the ethnographic sensibility, and comparative political theory within the methodological turn in political theory.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 27(1): 387–406.

---

Editorial Team

Edmund Handby is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research examines methodological questions in the history of political thought, empirically informed political theory, and politics, philosophy, and economics. His work has appeared in The Journal of Politics, the European Journal of Political Theory, and The Journal of the Philosophy of History.

Glorianne Wilkins is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Theory at the University of Potsdam. Her thesis is on “Uncertainty and Decision Making in a Political World.” Her research engages with the theoretical disciplines of political philosophy, political epistemology, and liberal democratic theory. She is particularly interested in the nature of unquestioned assumptions as it relates to particular concepts taken as fundamental to contemporary politics: truth, (liberal) democracy, among others. Through her research she considers how engaging with these concepts and their assumptions can inform how we make decisions under greater conditions of uncertainty.

Sania Ismailee is an Assistant Professor at the School of Law, BML Munjal University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political philosophy, law, and religion. Sania’s research interests also include critically examining the methodology of Indian political theory debates. Her dissertation examined normative justifications around diverse religious family laws in India (the Uniform Civil Code Debate) from perspectives on secularism, gender justice, and religious freedom. She was a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Researcher at Columbia University and a Commonwealth Split-Site Fellow at the University of Oxford. Sania has published on the Karnataka hijab controversy, comparing V. D. Savarkar’s and B. R. Ambedkar’s comments on Muslims, affective approaches to justice, along with several book reviews on religion and political theory.

Lucas de Melo Prado is a PhD candidate at University College Dublin, specialising in applied political theory and distributive justice. His current research examines the last seven presidential elections in the USA and Brazil to evaluate candidates’ rhetoric of inequality from a liberal perspective. Before his PhD studies, Lucas worked for nine years as a lecturer of Moral and Legal Philosophy at three Brazilian law schools (Uniavan, Sinergia, and Univali). He also published in various Brazilian peer-reviewed journals, such as the Brazilian Journal of International Law and the Brazilian Journal Law and Politics (“Revista Eletrônica Direito e Política”).