Computational Social Science

The term ‘big data’ is on everyone’s lips, with newspapers, journals and books focusing on the subject and debating it keenly. Meanwhile, the public have only recently become aware of how fundamentally the flood of data being produced is creating significant upheaval. But how is big data important for political science? What challenges does it pose?
This anthology collates perspectives from political science on the new developments related to big data in order to contribute to the discussion on what type of changes to the methods, cognitive processes and potential findings of empirical political science research have occurred as a result of digitalisation. In line with the approach adopted by methodologists, it focuses more on the methodological and technical dimensions of big data and new analytics rather than their moral and sociopolitical aspects.