Bridging Boundaries: The State of the Art in Empirical Gender and Politics Research

Quantitative and multi/mixed methods are increasingly vital in unpacking the political dimensions of gender, yet a persistent gap remains between cutting-edge methodological developments in this field and their uptake in gender and politics research. Gender scholars utilise surveys, experiments, survey experiments, text-as-data approaches, large language models, and other innovative quantitative and qualitative methods. Whereas qualitative research is well established in our field, we lack institutionalised spaces for the quantitative and multi/mixed methods community that encourage specialised methodological reflection and innovation. At the same time, mainstream political methodology has tended to neglect questions of gender, intersectionality, and inequality. This proposed section seeks to bridge these gaps by providing a dedicated platform for empirical, methodologically innovative research at the intersection of gender, politics, and quantitative as well as multi/mixed and qualitative methods. The section builds directly on the 2025 workshop Bridging Boundaries: Advancing Gender and Politics through Quantitative Methods. That event brought together a diverse group of scholars across European institutions, career stages, and methodological traditions to reimagine how we use data and numbers to study gendered political life. The success of that workshop demonstrated a clear demand for community, exchange, and visibility in this under-recognised but growing area of scholarship. Our section aims to extend this momentum into the broader ECPG community and to solidify an emerging network of scholars working at this intersection. At the same time, we want to provide a platform for rigorous empirical qualitative researchers to discuss methodological advances in research methods and enhance their dialogue with quantitative and multi/mixed methods scholars within the field of gender and politics. We also encourage panels that explore innovations in qualitative methodologies, such as ethnography, participatory action research, archival and discourse analysis, visual and digital ethnography, or de/post-colonial and intersectional methodologies, and how they can be fruitfully connected with or contrasted to quantitative approaches. We invite papers and panels that engage with questions such as: • How can mainstream methods be refined to better account for gendered political behaviour, representation, and institutions? • What are the methodological implications of operationalising gender and intersectionality in survey, experimental, and computational designs? • How do gender biases manifest in algorithmic decision-making, large language models, or text-as-data approaches? • What are the conceptual and methodological blind spots of quantitative research on gender and politics? • How can qualitative and quantitative approaches complement each other to enhance our understanding of gender in politics? • What can gender and politics research contribute to ongoing debates about transparency, measurement, and ethics in political science? We particularly welcome contributions that: • Present novel empirical work using quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods and/or new datasets; • Tackle measurement challenges around non-binary gender, sexuality, or intersectionality; • Interrogate the epistemological and ethical assumptions behind standard quantitative practices; • Reflect on the politics of data collection, visibility, and voice. We aim to create a space that is intellectually rich, practically useful, and inclusive, especially for early-career researchers, scholars from underrepresented regions, and those new to quantitative methods. Ultimately, this section is not only about advancing methods for studying gender and politics: it is about making the politics of methods visible. Building on our well-established qualitative research community, we seek to strengthen the quantitative backbone within the ECPG. Thereby, we also contribute to reshaping the broader political science discipline to be more inclusive, reflexive, and innovative.