This post is part of the continuing mini-series on RQ–RH–D–M across fields. Its purpose is to provide a compact, practical toolkit showing how research questions, research hypotheses or working propositions, data, and methodology can be aligned in one specific discipline.

Political science is especially suitable for this kind of exercise because it naturally combines institutions, voting behavior, parties, representation, public opinion, governance, public policy, political communication and democratic integrity. It also supports quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods designs, making it ideal for showing how the same political issue can be studied through surveys, administrative data, electoral returns, documents, interviews, media content and integrated designs. In this section, one cluster of examples explicitly covers election forensics as a field-specific application within political science.

In political science, research design is commonly informed by frameworks such as institutional theory, rational choice theory, behavioral approaches, political culture theory, democratic accountability models, electoral behavior models, public policy frameworks, state capacity approaches, contentious politics and governance theory. These frameworks generate questions and hypotheses about voting, participation, trust, policy effects, representation, polarization, compliance, governance performance or political behavior and the relevant constructs are operationalized through electoral returns, survey measures, administrative indicators, text-as-data, observational records, interviews or comparative political datasets.

Note: The entries in the Methodology are intentionally general and indicative. They are meant to illustrate plausible methodological directions, not to exhaust the full range of possible methods, model variants or analytic choices available to the researcher. Researchers are not expected to apply all of the methodological tools listed in column Methodology in a single study. The entries are intended to indicate suitable methodological options or families of approaches from which the researcher selects those that best fit the research question, hypothesis, data, and design.