MZES-DVPW Conference: Methods of Political Science

We invite applications for the two-day Conference “Methods of Political Science”, to be held at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim, from 27-28 March  2025. The conference will be held in English and in person.

The conference serves as the Annual Meeting of the Section “Methods of Political Science” of the German Political Science Association (DVPW). Thanks to generous funding by the MZES, this year’s event offers many perks, including catering, a fully funded conference dinner, and a travel stipend program for early-career (“Q-Phase”) scholars.

Submissions

We welcome all contributions with a clear focus on political research methods, including on topics of:

• Survey-based research, survey design, and survey experiments;
• Causal inference;
• Mixed-methods research;
• Text as data, large language models;
• Other topics in computational social science;
• Best practices for research;
• Didactics of teaching research methods;
• Innovative applications to substantive research.

While we welcome submissions with a substantive focus, we ask applicants to stress the methodological aspects of their submission in the abstract. We provide an inspiring and friendly atmosphere to discuss early-stage research projects, pre-registrations/registered reports, other work in progress, or polished contributions. Please have a look at last year’s program to get a feeling for the wide range of topics we welcome.

We value and seek to foster diversity within the discipline. Hence, we especially encourage applications from early-career researchers, women, ethnic minority colleagues, researchers with disabilities, and members of other structurally underrepresented groups.

Please submit your proposal via the application portal by 16 December 2024. We will send you our decisions in early January.

Submission tracks

To accommodate both early-stage and advanced work, we offer two submission tracks:

• Paper Track: Papers will be circulated at least one week before the conference and will be assigned a discussant;
• Presentation Track: Present your work without assignment of a discussant and without circulating a paper.

Contact

Please share this call widely. Do not hesitate to contact us at methods-conference@mzes.uni-mannheim.de with any questions you may have. We look forward to your contributions and to seeing you in Mannheim.