Welcome to the website of the Chair of Political Science specialising in Methods
The professorship of Prof Dr Melanie Walter-Rogg offers theory-based, empirically founded and method-oriented teaching and research. An important focus in teaching is on the teaching and application of qualitative and quantitative analysis methods and their combination in application-orientated seminar, qualification and research work. In our undergraduate and advanced methods programmes, we teach knowledge of the classic methods and suitable software packages for social science analysis, but increasingly also methods of computational social sciences.
However, the focus is always on the content-related aspect of the research topic. The methods used provide the tools for answering research questions relevant to political science, but also for achieving important scientific quality criteria such as objectivity, reliability and validity in quantitative analysis and openness, viability, explication, reflexivity, contextualisation and intersubjective comprehensibility in qualitative analysis.
In our research, too, the primary goal is to achieve a verifiable, objective and systematic gain in knowledge on the basis of a method-orientated scientific analysis. In the areas of empirical research into politics, democracy and autocracy, we endeavour to answer a wide range of research questions using a structured, comprehensible approach and to make the results tenable. The teaching and research specialisations of the professorship's staff can be found on the individual profile pages.
