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| 26-29 August 2025 Aristotle University Thessaloniki, Greece |
This past August, we gathered in at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki for the ECPR General Conference. This year’s Section was co-organised by Glorianne Wilkins and Ed Handby. The Section featured a wide range of topics, across a diverse set of panels as well as plenty of walking to take in the sights and sounds of Thessaloniki. On behalf of the organising team, it was great to see the continuing development and expansion of the presence of methodologists at the General Conference, which will only continue through the Joint Sessions and next years General Conference.
Alongside the presentations and socialising, the Standing Group also made plans and prepreations for the next round of ECPR events. The Standing Group will be submitting a workshop proposal for the Joint Sessions to be held in Innsbruk, Austria. Marina Vahter and Sune Lægaard will be orgainsing this proposal. Secondly, the 2026 ECPR General Conference will be held in Kraków, Poland. Esma Baycan-Herzog and Ed Handby will be co-organising the Section for ECPR 2027.
The 2025 General Conference was the perfect opportunity to launch a new prize – the Best Paper at the General Conference. Participants and members of the audience were asked to nominate a presentation to the judging panel of Jonathan and Esma. They are happy to announce joint winners for the inaugural prize: Sania Ismailee and Lucas de Melo Prado.
Lucas’s paper, presented at the 2025 ECPR General Conference, proposed a transparent and objective methodological framework for evaluating justifications of inequality based on liberal criteria.
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This framework includes a classification of different types of social inequalities and a list of liberal claims used to justify them. The justificatory claims are organised according to their argumentative strength and their relationship to core liberal concepts. Both the classification and the justificatory claims of inequalities form a codebook, with precise definitions and examples designed for the qualitative coding and analysis of data. Moreover, Lucas’s paper outlines the ten theoretical and empirical steps he followed to develop and apply this framework of liberal claims of inequality. This ten-step procedure was conceived to be a replicable model, offering a pathway for researchers to create similar frameworks for other topics or other ideological and theoretical approaches. Lucas’s work, therefore, provides a practical tool for the analysis and evaluation of political rhetorics of inequality, as well as a methodological contribution to normative theory, particularly considering the methodological turn in the field. |
Sania Ismailee’s research focuses on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) debate in India from a political theory perspective. The UCC debate revolves around replacing India’s diverse, religion- and tribe-based family laws with a single, uniform code for all citizens (state-enforced).
Despite the fact that diverse religious family laws are discriminatory toward women, a dominant view among Indian political theorists is to oppose a UCC.
Sania’s research closely examines this puzzle. Her paper, “Contextualism in Indian Political Theory: Lessons from and for the Family Law Reform Debate,” offers a novel critique of how Indian political theorists engage with the UCC debate through contextualism. She identifies two crucial “contingent contextual considerations”—the rise of Hindutva nationalism and its impact on Muslim minorities—as the starting points for this conversation. By using Sune Lægaard’s concept of “critical distance,” Sania proposes a principled engagement with the family law reform debate in India. Her research has broader implications for how political philosophy is practiced in India and for theoretical engagements with religious family laws beyond the pervasive framework of multiculturalism.
Together with the other political theory standing groups in the ECPR, we are launching the Onora O’Neill Book Prize in Political Theory. This prize recognises and celebrates the best book in political theory released in a given year, not just first book! The jury for the prize will be comprised of two members from each of the four theory standing groups. A call for nominations for members of the jury was sent out by Jonathan earlier in September.
On Friday October 3rd, our Chair, Jonathan Floyd, will be giving a one-day workshop on methods and methodology in political theory in Dublin, jointly hosted by University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, and organised in turn by Peter Stone (Trinity) and Alexa Zellentin (UCD).
Turner, Ben. 2024. “Situating realism, the ethnographic sensibility, and comparative political theory within the methodological turn in political theory.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 27(1): 387–406.
Edmund Handby is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research examines methodological questions in the history of political thought, empirically informed political theory, and politics, philosophy, and economics. His work has appeared in The Journal of Politics, the European Journal of Political Theory, and The Journal of the Philosophy of History.
Glorianne Wilkins is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Theory at the University of Potsdam. Her thesis is on “Uncertainty and Decision Making in a Political World.” Her research engages with the theoretical disciplines of political philosophy, political epistemology, and liberal democratic theory. She is particularly interested in the nature of unquestioned assumptions as it relates to particular concepts taken as fundamental to contemporary politics: truth, (liberal) democracy, among others. Through her research she considers how engaging with these concepts and their assumptions can inform how we make decisions under greater conditions of uncertainty.
Sania Ismailee is an Assistant Professor at the School of Law, BML Munjal University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political philosophy, law, and religion. Sania’s research interests also include critically examining the methodology of Indian political theory debates. Her dissertation examined normative justifications around diverse religious family laws in India (the Uniform Civil Code Debate) from perspectives on secularism, gender justice, and religious freedom. She was a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Researcher at Columbia University and a Commonwealth Split-Site Fellow at the University of Oxford. Sania has published on the Karnataka hijab controversy, comparing V. D. Savarkar’s and B. R. Ambedkar’s comments on Muslims, affective approaches to justice, along with several book reviews on religion and political theory.
Lucas de Melo Prado is a PhD candidate at University College Dublin, specialising in applied political theory and distributive justice. His current research examines the last seven presidential elections in the USA and Brazil to evaluate candidates’ rhetoric of inequality from a liberal perspective. Before his PhD studies, Lucas worked for nine years as a lecturer of Moral and Legal Philosophy at three Brazilian law schools (Uniavan, Sinergia, and Univali). He also published in various Brazilian peer-reviewed journals, such as the Brazilian Journal of International Law and the Brazilian Journal Law and Politics (“Revista Eletrônica Direito e Política”).