Letter from the editor : data constraints and the future of political communication research

Abstract

In recent years, political communication researchers have faced many challenges, including reduced academic freedom (Kinzelbach et al., 2025), insufficient funding for our field´s core themes (Benton, 2025), and limited data access, materializing as an “APIcalypise” (Bruns, 2019). These challenges are often interconnected. For instance, when the political climate is less supportive of academic and scientific advancement in general, public policies and regulation are less likely to pressure platforms to grant researchers access to data. Nevertheless, gaining access to data represents one of the most fundamental cornerstones of academic research. Even with funding, we cannot gain insights into the questions we are interested in without access to data. In many countries around the world, a lack of funding and restricted academic freedom are daily realities for many researchers since many years. Nevertheless, they find the courage to continue researching their interests. This issue focuses on the theme “Political Communication Research under Data Constraints” because the matter of accessing data is actually about having the raw material as scholars.