Recently the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference 2025 was held in Thessaloniki. During the Conference Lucy Kinski and Clint Claessen had the opportunity to present two papers from the European Research Council (ERC) project INCONEX, which shared initial findings.

The first paper, Conceptualizing representative absence: What, how, when, and why? argues that representative absence is not just the opposite of presence. The paper was part of a panel on presence and absence chaired by Lucy Kinski, which also included exciting papers by Alex Magas on the paradoxes of trans visibility and Clementina Gentile Fusillo on her fourfold conceptualization of representation.

The paper Between presence and absence: Social classes and vulnerable groups in parliamentary debates was presented in an exciting panel organized by Stefanie Walter and shared first results from the project on how to capture presence and absence of social groups with text-as-data methods. The team would like to give a special thanks to Hajo G. Boomgaarden for providing a great discussion during this panel.