At this year's General Conference of the "European Consortium for Political Research" (ECPR), two team members were represented: Seraphine F. Maerz and Daria Glukhova. Seraphine F. Maerz, along with Lisa Garbe from WZB, chaired an entire section on Digital Authoritarianism (a total of 7 panels on the topic) and presented two papers herself. Daria Glukhova presented the paper titled "Failure to Reform the EU Migration and Asylum Rules: Explaining Divergent Member State Decisions on the CEAS Reform." The ECPR General Conference is Europe's largest annual gathering of political scientists from across the globe.

In the summer semester of 2023, a group of particularly motivated students again completed our research practicum on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). This course offers deep insights into an innovative method, which can be considered the most systematic form of case comparison. QCA is based on set-theoretic principles and allows one to identify necessary and/or sufficient explanatory factors (or various combinations thereof) for particular outcomes.

This format is led by Claudius Wagemann, who himself has been instrumental in the further development and establishment of this now widely used method. He was supported this semester by the QCA- and R-savvy student assistants Christopher Hain and Philipp Schemm. While Prof. Wagemann imparted his theoretical expertise, Christopher helped with the presentation of the R code in the hands-on "Lab Sessions". Philipp, in turn, used his knowledge to assist students with any problems that arose with the R programming language.

As always, the goal of this event was to train the students themselves to become experts in this field and to enable them to make sound use of this versatile method.

As part of our ongoing research project on “Smart Authoritarianism?" – funded by the DFG, led by Seraphine Maerz – we are currently updating and expanding the Telecommunication Ownership and Control (TOSCO) dataset. With the help of Vera Grünewald as well as Tobias Sauer and in collaboration with Tina Freyburg, Lisa Garbe, and several Research Assistants at the University of St. Gallen, the team of Seraphine Maerz expects to release TOSCO V2.0 in September 2023. The TOSCO dataset provides data on ownership of Internet service providers (ISPs) that illustrates how the Internet is strategically built and used by governments and corporations. TOSCO V1.0 and further information about the data is available on our interactive TOSCO dashboard.