PVS Special Issue 2027: “Methodological Advances for the Study of German Politics”

We invite abstract submissions for a special issue of the Politische Vierteljahresschrift/German Political Science Quarterly (PVS/GPSQ) on Methodological Advances for the Study of German Politics, guest edited by Denis Cohen (University of Mannheim), Theresa Gessler (University of Hamburg), and Lukas Rudolph (University of Konstanz).

The special issue has been accepted by the PVS editorial board and currently comprises eight invited contributions. In line with the journal's semi-open special issue format, we now invite abstract submissions for up to two additional contributions that complement the existing collection.

Scope

German politics has undergone substantial transformation over the past decades, including rising electoral volatility, increasing party system fragmentation, changing modes of political communication, growing regional political divides, and accelerating short-term fluctuations in political preferences and electoral behavior. At the same time, political methodology has evolved rapidly. Advances in statistical modeling, survey methodology, and computational methods have substantially expanded the empirical toolkit available to political scientists. Together, these developments create new opportunities to study increasingly complex political processes with greater temporal, spatial, and substantive precision.

This special issue brings together contributions that demonstrate how recent methodological advances can advance the study of contemporary German politics. Across different substantive domains, the contributions address a shared methodological challenge: how to validly measure, recover, and analyze political attitudes, preferences, communication, and competitive dynamics that are often only imperfectly observable using conventional tools. We welcome contributions that introduce, adapt, or critically evaluate methodological approaches and demonstrate their value through applications to German politics.

The special issue is organized around three broad thematic clusters, and submissions should broadly align with one or more of them:

1. Measurement and modeling of political preferences and party competition, including contributions on electoral behavior, voter realignment, preference measurement via statistical modeling and causal inference.
2. Survey methodology and public opinion research, including contributions on questionnaire design, measurement validity, sampling, panel studies, and the analysis of political attitudes and public opinion.
3. Computational and digital approaches to political communication, including computational social science, text-as-data, machine learning, large language models, digital trace data, and social media.

Submission and Timeline

Please submit an abstract (maximum 250 words) and a brief author biography by July 12, 2026 via our submission portal: https://www.sosci.uni-hamburg.de/pvs/

Authors will be notified shortly thereafter. Selected contributions will be invited to join the special issue. Draft manuscripts will be due in mid-December 2026 and will undergo an internal peer-review process before submission to the journal. Final revised manuscripts will be submitted to PVS/GPSQ for external double-blind peer review by March 31, 2027.

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

If you have any questions—including any uncertainty about whether your research fits the scope of the special issue—please do not hesitate to contact the guest editors at methoden@dvpw.de.