Many theories of political participation imply that close elections increase voter turnout, but empirical support for this is mixed. One challenge is that close elections occur in unrepresentative places, making it difficult to extend counterfactual inferences across the wider electorate. In this note, I study closeness in an alternative way by leveraging those who move home between elections. With a large‐scale longitudinal survey in Great Britain, comparing individuals who move between safe and competitive parliamentary constituencies, I provide evidence that closeness increases campaign contact but generally fails to affect turnout. British movers are politically comparable to the wider electorate, so the results can be cautiously generalised. This contributes to substantive literature on voter and party‐led theories of participation, while adopting an empirical strategy seldom used in the study of political behaviour.

Current comparative policy research gives no clear answer to the question of whether partisan politics in general or the partisan composition of governments in particular matter for different morality policy outputs across countries and over time. This article addresses this desideratum by employing a new encompassing dataset that captures the regulatory permissiveness in six morality policies that are homosexuality, same‐sex partnership, prostitution, pornography, abortion and euthanasia in 16 European countries over five decades from 1960 to 2010. Given the prevalent scepticism about a role for political parties for morality policies in existing research, this is a ‘hard’ test case for the ‘parties do matter’ argument. Starting from the basic theoretical assumption that different party families, if represented in national governments to varying degrees, ought to leave differing imprints on morality policy making, this research demonstrates that parties matter when accounting for the variation in morality policy outputs. This general statement needs to be qualified in three important ways. First, the nature of morality policy implies that party positions or preferences cannot be fully understood by merely focusing on one single cleavage alone. Instead, morality policy is located at the interface of different cleavages, including not only left‐right and secular‐religious dimensions, but also the conflicts between materialism and postmaterialism, green‐alternative‐libertarian and traditional‐authoritarian‐nationalist (GAL‐TAN) parties, and integration and demarcation. Second, it is argued in this article that the relevance of different cleavages for morality issues varies over time. Third, partisan effects can be found only if individual cabinets, rather than country‐years, are used as the unit of analysis in the research design. In particular, party families that tend to prioritise individual freedom over collective interests (i.e., left and liberal parties) are associated with significantly more liberal morality policies than party families that stress societal values and order (i.e., conservative/right and religious parties). While the latter are unlikely to overturn previous moves towards permissiveness, these results suggest that they might preserve the status quo at least. Curiously, no systematic effects of green parties are found, which may be because they have been represented in European governments at later periods when morality policy outputs were already quite permissive.

In their 2012 publication A Tale of Two Cultures, Gary Goertz and James Mahoney argue that empirical research in the social sciences aiming at causal inference can be differentiated into a qualitative and a quantitative methodological culture. The two cultures differ fundamentally in how researchers approach and implement empirical studies. The argument is well laid out and comprehensively illustrated, but the empirical validity of the two cultures hypothesis has not yet been evaluated systematically. This note introduces a research project that aims to test the two cultures hypothesis via an empirical analysis of how qualitative and quantitative methods are applied. To determine whether there is a qualitative and quantitative method culture, the researchers initially sampled 30 articles from three journals (Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, World Politics) in the 2008–2012 period. Based on this dataset, no evidence was found for the existence of coherent systems of methods practices in political science.

This short article offers a practical introduction to archival research for political scientists working on European politics. Archival documents are increasingly recognized as a relevant data source for process tracing analyses in small-N or mixed methods studies. Previously classified archival documents are exceptionally trustworthy due to their original confidentiality. Their rich and detailed content facilitates the understanding of causal mechanisms. Still, the hurdles for working with archival sources are high for political scientists. Lack of experience, no special training in handling historic documents, and a shortage of textbooks meeting their demands are a few of the problems political scientists planning archival research face. In the article, I highlight the opportunities of archival research and demonstrate how challenges can be overcome. I emphasize that the archival field trip should only be planned once researchers have gained substantive context knowledge. In their preparation, researchers should use all the resources archives offer and develop measurable expectations from theories.

Do academic publication standards reflect or determine research results? The article proposes minimal criteria for distinguishing useful ‘unpublishable’ results from low-quality research, and argues that the virtues of negative results have been overlooked. We consider the fate these results have suffered thus far, review arguments for and against their publication and introduce a new initiative – a journal to disseminate negative results and advance debate on their recognition and use.

There are five levels in social inquiry: ontology; epistemology; approaches; methodology; and methods, which we see as means of gathering information. There is no determinate relationship such that one school will consistently choose the same options all the way down. We can cross between what are often seen as competing world views at various of these levels. Natural sciences have not arrived at a unified field theory and there is no reason why social sciences have to do so.

Research on interest groups has evolved from a focus on small-N studies to larger-N studies in the past 15 years. While both European and American research has become more sophisticated and aware of methodological aspects, there is yet no specialized literature on methods regarding how to study interest groups. Only few studies discuss the methodological implications of interest group studies, as well as the transferability of methods employed in other areas of political science to this research area. The contributions in this symposium focus on major problems and topics in interest group research and elaborate methods to deal with them: (1) the identification of the relevant interest group population, (2) the analysis of interest group strategies such as access, (3) the identification of interest groups positions and frames, and (4) the measurement of interest group success and influence. The introduction outlines these research problems and describes how the contributions to this symposium address them. The aim of the symposium is to increase awareness of the intricacies of these research problems, outline suitable practices to handle them, and stimulate debate on these methodological aspects.

By looking at political thought in historical periods that mirror our own, we can discern patterns of thought which clairvoyantly recognise the new and fearfully retreat to established patterns of thought. Sixteenth-century thought confronts us with the search for newly emerging political orders. Focusing on four thinkers, this paper explicates the emerging pattern. It reflects on the contemporary relevance of sixteenth-century thought and the relevance of the history of ideas.

This article surveys two concomitant developments in European political methodology. First, we point to a recent methodological convergence across Europe and the Atlantic. Second, we note a broadening methodological divide between explanatory and interpretive approaches to political phenomena. This survey provides a backdrop for introducing a new ECPR Standing Group in Political Methodology as an outlet for new methodological techniques and a venue for exchange across Europe's broad methodological spectrum.

The article introduces a discussion on approaches to the history of political thought based on a panel at the ECPR General Conference in Potsdam, 2009. After reconstructing the three classic approaches, the Cambridge School, the ‘Begriffsgeschichte’, and Foucault's Genealogy as well as more recent developments in the field, the authors outline a scheme for further methodological and comparative research. They also emphasise the importance of historical approaches for political theory and political science.

In the first half of the essay we summarise the main contributions in the essays in this issue by Coleman, Colomer, and Taagepera, and identify key commonalities in their suggestions for making political science more ‘scientific’. We argue that most of their concerns are well taken, but that the remedies they propose may not be applicable in all domains within political science. In particular, it is largely in the area of voting and elections, where clearly demarcated input and output variables can be identified, that their suggestions seem the most applicable. In the second half of the essay we trace the rise and fall, over the past 100 years, of movements in the US to make political science more scientific. We conclude by identifying similarities between these essays and the recent EITM movement in US political science.

Democracy measurement is an ever growing and increasingly important research area. Nevertheless, lively discussions concerning the qualities of different measurement approaches are seldom combined with an adequate perspective on the underlying methodological framework. This article argues that a substantial theoretical perspective is only a sufficient condition for improving contemporary democracy measurement. Theoretical considerations have to be accompanied by an equally well-developed measurement concept. On the basis of examples taken from prominent approaches, potential for improvement becomes obvious. Any improvement is not just an end in itself but necessary if these measures are used as variables in all areas of research.

Although having been practised in the Social Sciences for decades, it was only in recent years that process tracing has gained prominence in methodological debates in political science. In spite of its popularity, however, there has been little success in formalising its methodology, defining its standards, and identifying its range of applicability. This symposium aims at furthering our understanding of the methodology by discussing four essential aspects: the underlying notion of causality, the role of theory, the problem of measurement in qualitative research, and the methodology's relationship with other forms of qualitative inquiry. It brings together methodological and substantive articles by young European scholars and summarises a round-table discussion with Peter A. Hall held at a workshop at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, in November 2010.

The present study uses naturally occurring conversational data from various dialects of Spanish to examine the role of second-person (T/V) reference forms in the accomplishment of social action in interaction. I illustrate how the turn-by-turn progression of talk can occasion shifts in the linguistic means through which speakers refer to their hearers, an interactional commonality between dialects (and possibly languages) that are otherwise pronominally dissimilar. These shifts contribute to the action of an utterance by mobilizing the semantic meaning of a pronominal form in order to recalibrate who the interactants project they are, and who they project they are to one another—not in general, but rather at that particular moment in the ongoing interaction. The analysis posits a distinction between identity status and identity stance to argue in favor of a more microlevel conceptualization of identities and contexts as emergent features of moment-by moment discourse, co-constructed through the deployment of grammatical structure.