On 13 January 2016, for the first time in its history, the European Union launched an investigation against one of its full member states, Poland. The dispute is about new Polish laws that allegedly disempower the Constitutional Court and the public media, thus breaching EU democracy standards. The dispute reaches far beyond Poland and questions the further perspectives of integration of the Central Eastern European (CEE) states within the EU. At the same time, it is closely connected with the current multidimensional European crisis. This article argues that the EU-Poland dispute is an outcome of the combination of the specific problems of governance in CEE with a superficial institutionalism of the EU. Poland’s governance controversies show that new attention of the EU to its CEE member states is needed, as they were for many years marginalized because of other concerns such as the economic and financial crises since 2007, the threat of a ‘Brexit’ and currently the refugee crisis. In order to salvage the European integration project, it will be crucial for Europe’s credibility to support the CEE countries to reform their socio-economic systems. At the same time, the case of Poland offers a chance for a debate about how the EU can cooperate more effectively and in extended manners.

This article evaluates the use of audio feedback on assignments through the case study of a politics course and argues that audio feedback provides a more personal feel to feedback. Criticism, it appears, is easier to accept in the spoken word. In addition, the article highlights the chief practical benefit of audio feedback, namely that it reduces the overall time spent by lecturers in providing comments. But while the article is positive in favour of audio feedback, it also discusses some potential challenges that include anonymous marking and the fact that one size does not fit all, with different students preferring different types of feedback. Finally, the article identifies a number of practical tips that relate to the adoption of this method of feedback.

Despite a growing interest in migration questions, it is still not possible to systematically analyse immigration policies across time and a large number of countries. Most studies in this field have heretofore focussed on individual cases. Recently, there have been a series of studies that have proposed policy indices that allow for large-N analyses. It appears, however, that these studies have not always adequately addressed the main challenges of index building, that is, conceptualisation, measurement and aggregation. Moreover, they are for the most part limited to individual policy fields or there is a trade-off between the number of countries and years that are covered. The aim of this article is to present the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project, which proposes a new and comprehensive way to measure immigration regulations. The data set covers all major fields and dimensions of immigration policies for thirty-three OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. This article discusses the way immigration policies have been conceptualised, how policies have been measured and aggregated and demonstrates the potential of such a new data set.

The promises and pitfalls of automated (computer-assisted) and human-coding content analysis techniques applied to political science research have been extensively discussed in the scholarship on party politics and legislative studies. This study presents a similar comparative analysis outlining the pay-offs and trade-offs of these two methods of content analysis applied to research on EU lobbying. The empirical focus is on estimating interest groups’ positions based on their formally submitted policy position documents in the context of EU policymaking. We identify the defining characteristics of these documents and argue that the choice for a method of content analysis should be informed by a concern for addressing the specificities of the research topic covered, of the research question asked and of the data sources employed. We discuss the key analytical assumptions and methodological requirements of automated and human-coding text analysis and the degree to which they match the identified text characteristics. We critically assess the most relevant methodological challenges research designs face when these requirements need to be complied with and how these challenges might affect measurement validity. We also compare the two approaches in terms of their reliability and resource intensity. The article concludes with recommendations and issues for future research.

There is a consensus in recent literature on electoral research that voter turnout rates are declining significantly. We know less, however, about when this decline started and how significant it is. In this paper, we analyse trends in electoral turnout, as reported in the IDEA dataset for 20 stable democracies over the period between 1950 and 2012, which covers 349 elections. The results show that turnout levels were stable until approximately 1980. A significant linear decline can be observed from 1980 onward. Various institutional elements related to turnout levels – such as the closeness of elections, or the effective number of parties – do not explain this spline or the particular curve of the decline. We close with a number of suggestions for future research that may ascertain this relation in more depth.

Active learning techniques tend to emphasize simulations, research projects, and the use of popular media to the relative neglect of problem-based approaches. This paper introduces a new problem-based exercise specifically for teaching international relations (IR) theories that builds on existing problem-based approaches by incorporating analogies and an exemplar-based approach to concept learning. Teaching complex IR theories to students, who are often early in their academic careers, can be a challenge for many academic staff. Our approach uses a carefully structured analogy, based on a dating scenario, to challenge students to explain and theorize the behaviour of the key actors in a way that is transferable to an IR analysis of state behaviour. The exercise yields an intuitive understanding of core theories that facilitates subsequent learning and application.

Populism has become a resilient political phenomenon. Much of the normative political science on this topic is concerned with the relationship between democracy and populism. At the same time, the characterisation of post-war democracy has emerged as a key focal point in recent contributions to political history. This research note explores how both these developments and their disciplines might benefit from closer collaboration. It highlights, therefore, some of the distinctive features of populism’s relationship with democracy and shows how these might be accounted for by incorporating insights from history. At the same time, it argues that historiography has largely ignored the populist question in the history of post-war democracy and makes some suggestions as to how the history of populism might be included in this research.

This article discusses the potential of case study and process-tracing methods for studying lobbying and framing in the European Union (EU). It argues that case studies and process tracing allow us to explore different sets of questions than large-N and quantitative approaches and to shed light on the mechanisms that contribute to policy change. Through these methods it is possible to study long-term processes and under-researched areas, to analyse the social construction of frames and to single out the conditions that lead to successful framing. In order to show the advantages of case studies and process tracing, illustrative examples drawn from the case study of EU foreign policy towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are provided.

The inverted classroom model (ICM) is an active learning approach that reserves class meetings for hands-on exercises while shifting content learning to the preparatory stage. The ICM offers possibilities for pursuing higher-order learning objectives even in large classes. However, there are contradicting reports about students’ reactions to this kind of teaching innovation. With the ICM making inroads in political science teaching, this paper discusses how students evaluate this method. We report results from an application of the ICM to an introductory international relations course. In our course, students’ reactions to the ICM varied greatly. Using a regression analysis of student evaluation scores, we find that students’ preference for collaborative learning best predicted their preference for the ICM over the traditional lecture format.

Racism and xenophobia are no longer isolated issues affecting only small portions of a society. Rather, these issues are now at the forefront of debate and have assumed a position on the frontlines of political warfare. In 2016, both the UK and the USA found themselves embroiled in bitter battle, a battle wherein the citizens themselves became their own worst enemies. The Leave/Stay campaigns in the UK and the 2016 US presidential campaign precipitated a rebirth of nationalism, reinvigorating entire populations and charming even the casual observer into political action and discourse. Yet in both cases, what began as an endeavour to serve the needs of the citizenry morphed into a battleground of derision and division. As this article reveals, the parallels between campaigns are not merely provocative they are disarming.

The use of simulations in higher education teaching is burgeoning in political science curricula, particularly in international relations and European Union studies. This article contends that most simulations suffer from complexity bias and put too much emphasis on substantive knowledge. Drawing on the author’s experience, two ideal types of simulations are developed. ‘Complex’ simulations focusing on negotiating content and ‘simple’ simulations focusing on negotiating dynamics. It is argued that the transmission of transferable skills is facilitated by multiple repetitions of similar negotiating contexts within the same module. This suggests that instructors face a trade-off between teaching transferable skills and substantive knowledge and should locate their simulations at either end of this continuum. Where students are not native speakers, not yet familiar with specialised terminology or simply unversed in negotiating dynamics, there is a particularly strong argument to make for carrying out simple simulations first, followed by complex simulations later in the curriculum. Finally, opportunities for collaborative research are highlighted. Gathering and pooling data from simple simulations bridges pedagogy and research at minimal additional cost.

Interest group influence represents the Higgs boson of contemporary social research. Scholars have tried to define and measure influence for decades: tens of different definitions are used in the literature and as many methods to measure it can be found. The literature has recently converged towards an agreement on how to study interest group influence: preference attainment. The latter has monopolised the research in the literature in the last years. Yet, a discussion on what preference attainment is, what it does and what it does not is still missing in the literature. This works aims to fill this gap by providing a theoretical and methodological informed discussion on interest group influence and preference attainment. In so doing, I propose a novel method to apply preference attainment in an effective and efficient manner.