It’s been a week since the INAS 2026 Conference for the International Network of Analytical Sociologists concluded at Nuffield College, Oxford University. As always, it’s been an incredibly knowledgeable and inspiring conference full of people I know and hold dear as colleagues.
This year was my first as a Postdoc, and the first for which I managed to receive my first ever grant money. But there was also a first in terms of what the conference focused on. In this article, I want to reflect a bit about a thematic change in what the conference offers that I am extremely happy about, and what this can mean for analytical sociology and the field of political sociology in general.
As a political sociologist, I am typically a bit outside the bulk of the analytical sociology network. Although there are quite a few scholars who perform political sociology, that part of sociology was never a big focus at INAS conferences. I typically contributed to the network sessions, since a lot of my work revolves around network analysis (a label which I was at first not fond of, but now count as one of my strengths). But there was never a dedicated political sociology track.
That changed this year. For the first time during my time in the INAS network, a conference featured not just a dedicated session on political sociology (in which I presented), but two more sessions, one on political polarization and one on “Public Opinion and War” (especially interesting since I have a track record in peace and conflict research). This was a great feeling, since this finally acknowledges what I and many of my colleagues do.
These three sessions, and the discussions surrounding the presenting participants’ work, were an inspiring opportunity for some networking and to gather new ideas. It made me proud to finally see this part of analytical sociology be made more visible in the context of analytical sociology.
And indeed, after having defended my dissertation and having been able to contemplate what I actually did during my time as a PhD student, I feel that there is more that analytical sociology can do for a sociological analysis of political phenomena.
On my way back from Oxford, and the following days, I have spent some time revisiting the classics of political sociology, and noticed two angles from which analytical sociology can enrich a social scientific understanding of politics. First, much of the political sociology of the past has been quite qualitative. While a qualitative approach to politics is inevitable for a proper understanding of what motivates people to behave in specific (political) ways, it falls short of enabling a micro-level understanding of social interactions.1
A second insight this generated is that there are two ways of doing political sociology.
How political sociology is predominantly framed (especially in the seminal work by Clemens, 2016) is that it is a way of exploring the same phenomena as “regular” (due to lack of a better word) sociology, but focusing on their political dimensions. And several of the works presented at INAS 2026 fall into this category. We had presentations focusing on the social origins of who votes for social democrats vs. far-right populists; polarization in Spanish politics around a conservative and a progressive bloc; or social mobility as a predictor of support for redistributive politics.
But there is a second way to do political sociology: Focusing on classical political scientific research questions, but making visible the social processes undergirding policymaking. This is one line of work that is inherently qualitative, since this involves developing a deep understanding of how political discussions happen, and who contributes to what degree to these discussions. And this is something that is done only to a certain extent. I have revisited one of the seminal works in political sociology, “Bringing the State Back In” (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, 1985), and found that they, too, place a bigger focus on the social mechanisms of power.
In short, there are two ways of understanding political sociology. The first lays emphasis on the sociology part and seeks to analyze political dimensions of social phenomena. But the second lays emphasis on the political part and seeks to analyze social dimensions of political phenomena. And it is here that scholars of analytical sociology can make a difference for our understanding of politics.
Around the world, people are wondering why politics works the way it does. The current United States government is just the most egregious example for what can happen if democratic processes lead to the election of inherently antidemocratic presidents (Ziblatt and Levitsky, 2018), but comparable processes are happening in many other places. The Sweden Democrats are pushing the inclusivity of the Swedish parliament to its limits, while the far-right AfD in Germany currently leads most of the polls (Ginzel, 2026). Democratic observers in many countries observe these trends with great concern.
Explanations for what is happening are few and far between. A lot of scientific focus has been laid only on the AfD itself and why people vote for it, but research on the decline of social democratic and conservative parties are more indirect. One can certainly make some indirect assumptions on party politics which can be seen as removed from the immediate concerns of citizens and voters (see, for example, Mudge, 2018), but there is little direct analytical evidence.
This is where a political sociology of the latter kind can make a difference. By understanding the social processes that lead to sometimes unexpected political outcomes, analytical sociology can help make sense of what is happening to many originally stable democracies around the world. Fundamentally, I believe that shifts to the right or the successes of right-wing parties are emergent outcomes that are brought about by individual interactions that lead to sometimes unintended outcomes. It is easy to place blame on some actors, but I strongly believe that analytical sociology can deliver an objective and scientifically accurate explanation for the processes we are witnessing.
I am excited to see where this trend of making political sociology visible in analytical sociology will lead to.
References
- Clemens, E. S. (2016). What is political sociology? Polity Press.
- Evans, P. B., Rueschemeyer, D., & Skocpol, T. (Eds.). (1985). Bringing the state back in. Cambridge University Press.
- Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Crown Publishing.
- Ginzel, L. (2026, June 23). Forsa-Umfrage: AfD liegt in bundesweiter Umfrage fünf Prozentpunkte vor der Union. Die Zeit. https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-06/wahlumfrage-forsa-afd-vorsprung-union-sonntagsfrage-fdp-spd-linke-gruene-bsw
- Mudge, S. L. (2018). Leftism reinvented: Western parties from socialism to neoliberalism. Harvard University Press.
To be absolutely clear: With this I do not mean to denigrate the importance of qualitative work. I recognize that some readers of this will inevitably feel as if I’m “the quant guy” dismissing qualitative scholars. But to the contrary, without qualitative methods and research, I would not be able to perform text analysis, which is an inherently qualitative endeavor. Without a qualitative understanding of the texts I push into my quantitative models, I would not be able to produce any meaningful results. So for the record: I cherish my qualitative colleagues and will continue to base my work on their excellent work. ↩