Welcome to the Institute of Political Science!

With currently six professors and some 20 lecturers and research fellows, the Institute of Political Science at TU Darmstadt ranks among the bigger political science departments in Germany and can cover all the major sub-fields of the discipline. Although its student body is continuously growing academic life at the Institute still is markedly different from the situation at the notorious German ‘mass universities’. According to surveys, our students particularly enjoy their close contact to instructors and the mentoring system, in which every incoming student picks an academic advisor.

Academic research undertaken at the Institute enjoys an international reputation, not least because of a number of projects we implemented with international partners. For many years a joint focus of our research activities has been the exploration of new forms of governance, from the local to the global level. Other common research interests are in the areas of European studies and normative democratic theory. In 2007, the Institute placed a successful bid in the German federal competition for funding excellent research, as part of the cluster of excellence “Formation of Normative Orders”, hosted by Goethe University Frankfurt. It has been equally successful in attracting funding from the excellence initiative of the state of Hesse, with a research focus on the “Intrinsic Logic of Cities”.