Here I recount my experience as a three-term Senator of the Italian Republic between 1983 and 1996. It is a personal memoir written with a modest dose of self-praise and nostalgia. I have tried to explain how the Italian parliament works, to analyse the relationships between parliamentarians and parties, with special emphasis on the Italian Communist Party, whose voters sent me to the Senate, and to indicate what I have contributed and what I have learned. For better or worse, throughout that long period, I remained a professor of political science. Hence, I have also made reference to those of my writings that have been directly influenced by my experience of ‘real’ politics, as well as to my efforts to influence ‘real’ politics. Much has changed in Italian politics and my experience, which could not be repeated today, suggests that not much has changed positively.

While some 40 per cent of the students undertaking political science degrees in the UK are women, about three-quarters of those teaching them are men. This article examines why female undergraduates are less likely to go into graduate work in politics, utilising focus groups conducted with groups of male and female students and interviews with the female students in four large UK universities. The research identifies eight key factors that impacted upon our respondents' decisions to undertake further study. The first four affected both men and women, although there were subtle, yet important, differences in how the women spoke about these issues, and can be somewhat loosely categorised as: money; making a difference; lack of information; and self-confidence. The other four factors influenced the women's, but not the men's, views about graduate work and the profession: stereotyping; role models; family commitments, and time constraints. On the basis of our research, we suggest how national political science associations and individual departments might increase the number of women undertaking graduate work.

In a speech to the German Bundestag in 1998, the well-known Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer stressed the role of intellectual elites and especially university professors in making the Holocaust possible. To this, he added the question: ‘If we have indeed learnt anything, it is whether we do not still keep producing technically competent barbarians in our universities’. This article is a reflection on the implications of this question for present-day teaching and research in political science.

Since 2001, the political science associations of The Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium) have sought ever closer cooperation, culminating in the organisation of annual Dutch–Belgian political science conferences. One of the goals of this unprecedented cooperation is to strengthen the visibility of Dutch-language political science, and to keep Dutch alive as a credible language for political science research. At first sight, this form of regional cooperation runs counter to processes of internationalisation and Europeanisation. It can be argued, however, that exactly these regional identities and associations (cf. also the Nordic countries) can counterbalance a one-sided orientation to Anglo-Saxon norms within international political science.

The second winner of the Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award (in 2004) was Professor Erich Weede from the University of Bonn, Germany. The prize, which is sponsored by two sections of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR), goes tri-annually to a political scientist who made major contributions to peace and conflict research in the tradition of Lewis Frye Richardson (1881–1953), a British meteorologist and pioneering scientific analyst of international war. This essay summarises some of the most important insights of the present award holder.

For many years, the dissemination of academic research has been controlled by commercial publishers. However, in light of the continuing inflation of subscription prices for scholarly journals, many academics are investigating open access publishing over the Internet. Although most advanced in the natural sciences, given its essentially political character, open access publishing should also be carefully considered by political scientists (and associated disciplines). This article explores open access publishing and suggests the reputational pay-off of ‘normal’ publishing can easily be maintained in the open access realm.

The article presents an overview of the presence of political science in Italian universities. After a brief historical introduction, detailed figures are given regarding the number and distribution of political scientists in Italy's universities, and the courses currently offered in the field of political science are described and discussed. In the second part of the paper, the authors give their views on the current state of Italian political science, which they consider to be not dissimilar to that of other countries, and they subsequently invite the reader to reflect on the need for an increase in its social status.

Tolerance is a key concept in contemporary political theory and practice. Clearly, it is linked to such difficult classical questions as rights, freedom, state neutrality, the role of autonomy in liberalism, the limits of toleration, etc. However, nowadays, the concept of tolerance also cuts across several important political issues: multiculturalism, pluralism, the ‘rights’ of cultures, interculturalism, reflexivity and dialogue as foundations of democracy, etc. This paper analyses the concept and explores its theoretical difficulties.

This article assesses the evolution of the study of international relations (IR) in France during the twentieth century, before proceeding with an examination of the present state of the field. It is concerned with both substantive issues and institutional developments. It concludes that France has much to offer and is taking its proper place in the international development of the field. An appendix offers a taste of the French IR literature.

Use of the web by political parties and candidates as well as the general public is expanding. However, so far, little serious systematic analysis has taken place to examine the spread of the practice and particularly its consequences for electoral outcomes and voter attitudes. In this article, we identify some of the key reasons for the lack of attention to the ‘cause-and-effect’ questions about Web campaigning and highlight the empirical and theoretical reasons why academic study needs to do more to incorporate it into conventional election studies. We conclude by offering some guidelines for developing the tools and data that are needed for more ‘joined-up’ study of the subject to take place.