Discover Groups

The ECPR Standing Group on (Anti-)corruption and Integrity brings together scholars from different disciplinary, national and cultural backgrounds to further promote and deepen academic knowledge on: (i) corruption, an issue of increasingly significant public and political concern across the globe; (ii) on the strategies and policy solutions that seek to address the problem; as well as (iii) on the evolving concept of public integrity, both as an end in itself and as a corrective to the dominant anti-corruption approaches of the last quarter century that have delivered disappointing results. The perceived stagnation of existing work and approaches, coupled with the ever-increasing recognition that corruption poses a threat to political trust and stability and underlines a growing need to move (anti-)corruption studies in a new direction. There has been a growing number of new developments in this regard, both in policy and research, thereby making the foundation of this group very timely, but there remain core questions that need to be addressed.

Affective polarization is at the crossroad of political science and political psychology. In a broad sense it studies why and in which ways citizens develop hostility towards those who have different political stances and view. Although affective polarization largely focuses on the interplay between actors such as parties and voters, it can also develop across issues that cut through party lines (e.g. measures taken to contain Covid and Brexit). The study of affective polarization primarily engages with voters’ attitudes in connection with their political (and partisan) identity. This view of political as social identity, along with an expressive connotation, is at the heart of the phenomenon, and it is a common feature that underlying its conceptual and empirical study.    

Analytical politics combines systematic theoretical thinking and rigorous empirical testing. One major source of inspiration is the literature on collective choice problems, which examines the relationship between individual and collective interests. Another line of interest is generated by studies that link developments in a formal theory with sound empirical research strategy. We welcome like-minded scholars who would like to use this forum for discussion and exchange of ideas. A number of activities facilitate an exchange, including a newsletter, regular meetings as part of ECPR and other international conferences and a summer school.

The Standing Group aims to strengthen relations between all scholars interested in Central and East European politics. The Standing Group organizes Sections Panels and Workshops at the ECPR events which help to develop specific lines of research on post-communist societies and encourage the formation of specialist research groups and projects. These have generated, and continue to generate, a range of publications.

Citizenship has become one of the most dynamic areas of political contestation due to the social and political turmoil in the context of globalisation, transnationalism, migration and multi-level governance. In this Standing Group, citizenship and its personal, cultural, social, economic and political implications are investigated through interdisciplinary research from multiple theoretical perspectives. We address how citizenship continues to formulate relations between polities and individuals through rights, duties, participation and identities. In the context of increased diversity, less participation and growing political distrust we also explore and research how schools prepare citizens for their civic life in citizenship education.

The ECPR Comparative Political Institutions Standing Group brings together hundreds of researchers interested in how political institutions affect public policy, performance, and the behaviour and attitude of citizens and elites, and how these actors shape political institutions in return. It is covering a diversity of approaches and fields such as comparative politics, political behaviour, and political economy, and a diversity of methods such as observational data analysis, formal modeling, and experiments. We believe that fostering dialogue and collaboration across different perspectives and methodological approaches can help address key problems in the study of political institutions and democratic politics more broadly.

Critical Peace and Conflict Studies is primarily concerned with the quality and nature of peace in cultural, social, economic, and political terms, ranging from the international system to the state and communities. It requires interdisciplinary investigation into peace and conflict dynamics, connecting post-colonial studies, anthropology, sociology, critical geography, critical development studies, and international relations. The Standing Group focuses on local peace agencies, infrastructures for peace and non-violent state formation dynamics. It examines how critical peace agencies can assert itself against different types of power in order to defend needs and rights that may otherwise be ignored in internationally-led peace processes.

The focus of the Standing Group is on innovations that aim at deepening 'thin' representative democracy and their impacts on communities, structures, systems, policies and democratic participation. Despite a fundamental triumph of democracy, several tendencies in contemporary democratic systems give rise to concern, e. g. declining voter turnout and the support for populist parties or policies. Many scholars have called for more participatory forms of democracy where citizens are effectively included in political decision-making. By now, several democratic innovations have been tried out – different forms of citizen deliberation, direct democracy or governance with citizens’ associations. The focus of the Standing Group is to evaluate the benefits, disadvantages and shortcomings of democratic innovations. The SG organizes sections at the ECPR General Conference, and sponsors Workshops at the Joint Sessions.

The Research Network on Differentiated Integration in the EU provides a collaborative network and infrastructure for junior and senior scholars working on different aspects of differentiated integration broadly conceived, including its empirical, legal and historical mapping, its normative theorising and broader reflection on what differentiated integration means for processes of European integration. The group is methodologically plural and welcomes scholars whatever their theoretical or methodological orientations, also beyond the field of political science.

The primary goal of the Standing Group on Elites and Political Leadership (SGOEPL) is to provide a formal framework to communicate, meet, share and disseminate research, ideas and data among scholars whose interests extend to the realm of social and political elites and political leadership. These elites include but are not restricted to executive-level political elites, non-elected elites (e.g. bureaucrats), judicial elites and legislative elites (party leaders, parliamentary leaders and officers), media elites and business elites. SGOEPL is committed to the creation, promotion and dissemination of rigorous, empirically tested research. SGOEPL will draw together scholars researching elites and political leadership to provide an intellectual space for the development and dissemination of scholarly activity across the broad range of leadership and elite study. There are naturally synergies between research on political leadership and elites.

The Research Network on Energy Politics, Policy, and Governance serves as a platform for scholars studying energy policy and related issues within the European context and beyond. Its focus is on the complex nature of energy policy, politics and governance that includes topics like steering energy transitions, assuring energy security or achieving energy efficiency, to mention only some.

The Standing Group serves as a network hub for researchers in the field of environmental politics and facilitates electronic and face-to-face dialogue among scholars working on environmental political topics, particularly in (but not limited to) European countries. The Standing Group promotes the study of environmental politics within the political science community, and supports environment-related workshops and panels at ECPR conferences.