This paper focuses on the role played by civil-society organisations in three policy sectors – environmentalism, regionalism and anti-racism – at different territorial levels. The paper describes routes of Europeanisation, and highlights the crucial role of mediators between national and European levels of governance in building alliances and transnational networks.

Problem-based learning has a long history of successful use in disciplines such as business, law and medicine. In 2005, a team at the University of Huddersfield received government funding to develop the technique, and a range of related resources, for teaching politics. This article describes the experience of putting these resources into practice with a range of different student cohorts.

European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights rulings create a form of transnational social citizenship. European judicial activism appears reminiscent of US politics, but is rooted in distinctively European commitments to solidarity. Yet because rights rely on domestic programmes, social citizenship remains vulnerable to retrenchment. This article argues that reforms threaten to transform European social citizenship into a civil citizenship that moves Europe closer to the minimalist US model of social protection.

The ‘scholarship of engagement’, derived from work undertaken by the Boyer Commission in the US, emphasises the possibilities of enhanced undergraduate learning through research, yet in the UK this idea is less developed. Moreover, although the study of politics and international relations lends itself well to the use of placements to develop this model of learning, there are few examples of this in the UK. This article presents findings from a major research project, the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics, examining the ways in which placement learning can affect the student experience.

The British system of quality assessment of research in universities, known as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), has recently been the subject of major public policy review and debate. The system of research quality or performance assessment has been running for over twenty years, although many of its facets have changed as has the increasingly marketised political economy. Nevertheless, the UK RAE has been the prototype for the growth and development of such systems internationally, although how different countries have conceived of such forms of review has varied greatly. The question of the relationship between research quality in higher education and the public funding of research lies at the heart of what has become a contentious and acrimonious debate in the UK. While these issues can be seen as fundamentally about social and economic matters, in fact the social sciences as an organised group of subjects or interests have not played a key role in the public arena. This article outlines the contours of the recent debates in the UK, by comparison and contrast with the ways in which such systems of performance and quality assessment have been debated inter alia in Australia, New Zealand, France and the Netherlands. In essence, the issues have centred upon questions of measurement of performance known as metrication, and bibliometrics versus social judgments about research quality.

Challenging the contention that statistical methods applied to large numbers of cases invariably provide better grounds for causal inference, this article explores the value of a method of systematic process analysis that can be applied in a small number of cases. It distinguishes among three modes of explanation – historically specific, multivariate and theory-oriented – and argues that systematic process analysis has special value for developing theory-oriented explanations. It outlines the steps required to perform such analysis well and illustrates them with reference to Owen's investigation of the ‘democratic peace’. Comparing the results available from this kind of method with those from statistical analysis, it examines the conditions under which each method is warranted. Against conceptions of the ‘comparative method’, which imply that small-n case-studies provide weak grounds for causal inference, it argues that the intensive examination of a small number of cases can be an appropriate research design for testing such inferences.

The following transcript from an interview with the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso (conducted in July 2007), illustrates how bridge-building between the academic and policy worlds can bring profit to both sides. Barroso discusses his time as a student and teacher of political science at the University of Geneva, Georgetown University, and in his native Portugal, as well as his active membership of the European Consortium for Political Research, and how his academic experience shaped both his world view and political career.

Sartori (1970) warned a long time ago of the danger of concept stretching for effective and cumulative theory building. Such concept stretching has happened with regard to deliberation, which has become a very faddish term. For theoretically well-founded empirical research it is better conceptually to distinguish clearly between strategic bargaining and deliberation, although in the empirical political world the two concepts are usually heavily intertwined.

Science shows that 50 per cent of births in urban areas are male while 50 per cent in rural areas are female, and that this is a universal social pattern. Research on 4,473,559,500 live births in OECD countries, 1950–2000, demonstrates beyond all doubt that the party control of local councils has a statistically significant impact on sex at birth, as well as age at birth, sex of mother, and whether Lloyd George knew the mother.

This article considers the transformation of higher education in Europe and the challenges it has to face in particular in the field of research. The article argues that national systems have developed from very different traditions but that they are now confronted with similar issues and problems. There is an ongoing process of Europeanisation from the bottom (networks, benchmarking) and from the top (Bologna process, European Commission). But the challenge of the future is the need to play at a ‘global’ level and to compete worldwide with the best university systems.

A Ph.D. is not a qualification to decide a country's foreign policy, but it should not be a disqualification from communicating with people whose choices are not entirely rational. Founders of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) learned to do this in occupied Europe during the Second World War. I learned it in libraries and working on newspapers. So, instead of talking about Iraq in an Oval Office meeting with President Bush I offered a parable about Northern Ireland, supported by quotations from Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin.

Steiner's principal objection to our paper is that deliberators in a committee are permitted to speak strategically whereas deliberative theory requires ‘that actors do not lie but are truthful and authentic in their statements’. In this response we observe that such a prescription is relevant only to the extent that individuals might be expected to behave otherwise. Our paper explores conditions under which deliberators' strategic (descriptive) incentives are aligned with the (prescriptive) advice to tell the truth.

The academic field of Public Administration is quite diverse in Europe, ranging from applications of basic public law on the one hand to analyses of the ‘hollow state’ on the other (where it is difficult to find any clear-cut ‘public’ organisation). Nonetheless, in the light of societal changes towards late modernity, post-modern conditions and globalisation, there are some common challenges that sooner or later may knock at the door of all universities teaching Public Administration: how might we best conceptualise Public Administration as a field?; what are the field's relations to practice?; how can we best teach our field in a globalising world?; how adequate are our theories?; and how can we reach out and meet the demands to come down from our ivory tower?

Deliberative democrats enjoin participants in ideal speech situations never to lie. But game theorists show that people can have purely truth-based motives for strategically misrepresenting information they hold privately when they are deliberating with others. If deliberative democrats want to ensure that every participant in the deliberation fully and truthfully reveals to one another all private information that they hold, that sets some stringent requirements for the nature of the group that deliberates together.

The Research Assessment Exercise and its successor – the Research Excellence Framework – are examined as contemporary examples of a perversion of academic discourse in British universities that threatens to spread to the rest of Europe. It is claimed that conventional political science is of limited use for understanding the true inanity of such bureaucratic initiatives and instead fiction and psychoanalytical theory are proposed as highly useful intellectual resources with which to understand the truely perverted essence of research bureaucracy. The work of literature-inspired writers such as Žižek, Kafka, Sloterdijk, and Hašek is used to illustrate this claim.