aims & objectives

policy statement

European political science curricula tend to under provide for training opportunities in methods and techniques. Very often, students are encouraged to cater in neighbouring disciplines for their methodological needs, for example, in sociology, psychology and economics. As a consequence, the type of training they receive is often less turned towards the specific needs of political scientists than could be possible. For example, methodology is often reduced to large-N quantitative analysis, thereby inducing a one-sided emphasis on statistical methods. Many research questions dealt with in political science do not lend themselves easily to quantification and to the extent that this is possible, researchers often lack the possibility to draw random samples from large homogeneous populations. Instead, political scientists use a wide variety of methods for drawing inferences from data, encompassing statistics but not reducable to it.

aims

The ECPR Summer School aims to provide tools necessary for a broad range of research situations relevant for political scientists. The selection is based on the idea of six core dimensions of variation:

1. The macro-micro distinction: Does the research interest focus on individuals or social aggregates?
2. The distinction between large and small numbers of cases: Does the research aim at summarising over a large numbers of cases, or does it intend to account for specific traits of a particular phenomenon?
3. The distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods.
4. The examination of both ontological and epistemological "camps" in order to overcome traditional divisions.
5. The differentiation between methods for data collection and those for data analysis.
6. The importance of the choice of method required for cross-sectional or longitudinal data.

The ECPR Summer School course topics are selected so as to achieve some broad variation across as many of these key dimensions as possible. In addition, communication between participants of the ECPR Summer School, is also fostered through some plenary lectures and debates during the summer school, as well as through the "Monday mix" (which allows participants, on Monday 3 August, to attend a sequence of up to 4 different introductory course lectures). This should help to increase alertness of junior researchers to other perspectives and possibilities, a virtue which cannot blossom in monocultural settings.