The Cologne Center for Comparative Politics is hosting an international workshop on
“Theoretical and Methodological Innovations in Comparative Politics”. The workshop will feature
work of early career scholars and is open to post-doctoral researchers and assistant professors
in comparative politics.

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The workshop will offer four panels on the following themes:

1. Electoral Politics and Representation in Europe
We invite contributions that explore how political parties and elected politicians represent
citizens’ interests in national political systems in Europe and/or the European Union. We are
particularly interested in papers that combine questions related to the responsiveness of
members of parliament, government-opposition dynamics, and the changing nature of party
competition given the presence of populist parties with novel methodological approaches
and/or data analyses.

2. Political Institutions
We invite contributions that investigate how institutions are adopted, how they change, and
what effects they have on representation and decision-making. Papers may relate to
institutions in multilevel and federal systems, especially with regard to processes of
decentralization and centralization.

3. Political Economy
In the last couple of years, research in political economy has increasingly identified and
dealt with a set of fundamental changes in financial and labor markets that can be
conceived as megatrends in the development of contemporary capitalism, such as
financialization, migration, digitalization, and the reconfiguration of growth models.
Contributions should help us deepening our understanding of how these trends affect
economic and political actors or how, vice versa, actors shape them via policy or institutional
change. Individual papers might focus on the micro-, meso- or macro-level, embrace
comparative case studies or econometric analyses and thus scoop the whole breadth of
theories and methods from political science and neighboring disciplines.

4. New Methods for Comparative Research
We invite papers that introduce new methods for comparative politics research. We are
interested in new developments in computational methods (e.g. political text analysis, big
data) to facilitate cross-national/multilingual analyses as well as in methods in qualitative
and multimethod research and their use for causal inference.

The workshop will accommodate about 12 papers and will take place on November 22-23,
2018 in Cologne.

Submission Details:
Authors must be post-doctoral researchers or assistant professors (or equivalent). Interested
researchers are invited to submit their paper proposals, indicating the desired panel and
including an abstract of 500 words, to cccp-workshopuni-koeln.de until June 15, 2018.

Authors of accepted papers will be notified by July 15, 2018. Funds are available to cover
accommodation and travel expenses of workshop participants.

For further questions, please contact the workshop organizers at cccp-sekretariatwiso.uni-koeln.de