1This issue of the BMS includes two research articles, one in French and one in English, both treating sociological methodology questions closely related to political science. The issue also includes two ongoing research notes, one in French and one in English, both reporting on meetings of methodological interest. The first research article is Claire Durand’s "Election Poll Methodology and the 2007 French Presidential Elections – Chronicle of a Recurring Problem", which examines the 2002 error in predictions that had dramatic consequences and asks what influence did those elections have on French opinion poll research. The answer seems to be that the problem of estimating the extreme right vote remains in its entirety and that polling institute methods have not greatly changed.

2In the second research article, Karl M. van Meter and Mathilde de Saint Léger’s "Co-Word Text Analysis Applied to Political Science: 2006 International Political & 'Parapolitical' Headlines", a system of text analysis by co-occurrence of key words, Calliope, is applied to a 2006 data set of daily headlines and titles of media reports, producing three two-dimensional "strategic diagrams" and graphs over time of "emerging" and "declining" key words. These results permit original and intriguing analyses and interpretations of these 2006 events.

3The first ongoing research note – Johannes Angermüller, Laurent Jeanpierre and Caroline Ollivier-Yaniv’s "Analyzing Discursive Practices in Social Science – The CEDITEC Symposium at the University Paris XII on 27 April 2007" – examines the convergence between discourse analysis and certain currents of qualitative social science. The first part looks at what happens when social actors express themselves during surveys; and the second part concerns certain analytical, conceptual and technical tools generated by the sciences of language and text analysis software used in current sociology.

4The second ongoing research note is an extended report on the "International Conference on Methodology of Longitudinal Surveys (MOLS), 12-14 July 2006", chaired by Peter Lynn at the ISER-University of Essex. The BMS collected material from the Web sites of MOLS 2006 and the International Statistical Institute to constitute this extended conference report.