About us

Jagiellonian Center for Quantitative Research in Political Science was established in June 2012 on the initiative of the Jagiellonian University Faculty of International and Political Studies.

The idea of the Center has its roots in the activities of the team of mathematicians and political scientists who created the ISQAL database system. Their success led to the institutionalized cooperation between the staff members of two different JU faculties. The role of the Center is to initiate and conduct empirical research on law and politics, using mathematical methods, especially from the field of statistics and game theory. It also aims to support all initiatives for interdisciplinary empirical research into politics.

The research activities of the Center are being carried out on two levels: the Center's own research, conducted by its Team of Researchers and the coordination and infrastructural support provided within the framework of the network collaboration. The current three-year Research Strategy of the Center is primarily focused on conducting quantitative analyses of law-making bodies' activity.

The present research includes the project: Cohesion of parliamentary groupings in Polish Sejm in its 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th term and the preparations to start two other projects: Party discipline in open ballots and Institution of legislative amendment in Polish law-making process. The projects are being prepared by two independent teams, but, due to the common collection of data, there is much synergy between them. The gathered raw data are stored either in the ISQAL system, or in (special cases) separate databases.

Furthermore, the Center, in collaboration with the Foundation "Ośrodek Badań nad Prawem i Polityką" (Law and Politics Research Center), runs the Platform of Empirical Political Science project, funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. It aims at creating a portal that would enable digital data exchange between the academic institutions engaged in empirical political studies.