In January 2004, a French Internet petition entitled ‘Let's Save Research’ (Sauvons la Recherche) became a tremendous success : as of March 2004, 72,000 French researchers had signed the text (Alberganti and Foucart, 2004). The protest focuses on the transformation of 550 permanent research posts into temporary positions. Whilst representatives of the ‘hard sciences’ dominate this protest movement, those working in the humanities are playing a much more marginal role in it. Perhaps this is because budgetary cuts are, indeed, noth ing new for humanities fields such as sociology, history and … political science.

The situation of the latter discipline is catastrophic. Budget cuts had been imposed well before the April 2002 victory of the right-wing coalition in the presidential elections and the subsequent nomination of Jean-Pierre Raffarin as Prime Minister, and included such measures as the deliberate non-replacement of retirees.

The United States-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq in 2003 was to some observers a repulsive act, while to others it was a necessary one. Following weeks of debate between world leaders regarding whether or not Saddam Hussein's regime was hiding weapons of mass destruction, in March 2003 the United States, along with the so-called 'coalition of the willing', initiated a war with Iraq. Despite citizens' rallies around the world against the war, the regime in Iraq was eventually removed from power and replaced by an 'interim' government set up by the US.

Rankings of departments are key Information tools for central administrations of universities, public and private funders of research, and students and faculty. For example, to find out how European universities perform compared to institutions in the United States, the European Economics Association commissioned research into the global ranking of economics departments (esp. Coupé, 2003). Applying a similar method in political science to the dominant method used in the natural sciences and economics - looking at the number and impact of articles published in the main journals in the discipline in a given period - produces quite robust results for our discipline (Hix, 2004). One of the advantages of this method is that it enables comparisons to be made across Europe, between Europe and the United States, and within European countries. The next section explains and justifies the method.

Fundamental reforms of the Austrian university system in recent years represent a radical break with the past, a change of paradigm in the guiding principles and workings of the university and its relationship with its environment. I call this the ‘managerial and entrepreneurial turn’ in Austrian higher education. Nevertheless, these changes did not occur abruptly but in connection with long-term socio-economic trends, international developments and shifts in the ideologies of key actors with in and outside the university system. In the most recent period, a key external influence - the European Bologna process - has played a critical role in shaping reforms.

The seventh congress of the French Political Science Association (AFSP) - held in Lille in September 2002 - provided an opportunity to interview the Association's president, Jean Leca. As a result of this interview, it is now possible to offer EPS readers an overview of French political science, following the articles on the discipline in the Netherlands, in Sweden and in Central and Eastem Europe, that have appeared in previous issues of the journal.

CR - What are the origins of contemporary French political science?

JL - Its genesis can be traced to the end of the nineteenth century with the birth of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (Free School of Political Sciences) created by Emile Boutmy in Paris in 1871. This institution aimed at training a new state elite by teaching a range of disciplines.

When the United States President is called a cowboy, the implication is usually negative. However, this is not the case for George W. Bush. Indeed, Bush Jr. seems to revel in his status as America's cowboy president. This is obvious not only given his penchant for entertaining foreign dignitaries at his range in Crawford, Texas. It is also apparent in the mannerisms that he has adopted and that he believes reflect the wisdom of a simpler time.

Postcolonial studies is an interdisciplinary genre that takes colonialism as its point of departure for examining a range of processes that mark the postcolonial condition. It emerged in the early 1980s from 'Commonwealth literary studies' and has been associated with cultural studies and literature. Although also thought to have originated from development studies, it is avowedly distinct from that area owing to its generally non-materialist approach to globalisation, colonial and anti-colonial histories and theories of resistance.

The history of political science has not yet acquired an established place among the subfields of political science. Still, there is a growing interest in the history of the discipline. Most ofthe existing literature, however, relates to the histories of American and European political science (Crick, 1959; Somit and Tanenhaus, 1967; O'Furner, 1975; Collini, Winch, and Burrow, 1983; Ricci, 1984; Seidelman and Harpham, 1985; Anckar and Berndtson, 1988; Farr, 1988 and 1990; Ross, 1991; Easton, Gunnell, and Graziano (eds), 1991; Easton, Gunnell, and Stein (eds), 1995; Silverberg (ed.), 1998). Even a cursory examination of this literature reveals that some authors prefer writing such history from the point of view of what happened when, how, and why. Others experiment with generalisable reflections derived from historical findings, and a minority concentrates on the effort of understanding and interpreting the texts and ideas produced by the practitioners of political science.

A joke about economists can also be applied to theorists: ‘A theorist is someone who cannot see something working in practice without asking whether it would work in theory’. Less strange but more problematic is the case in which something works in theory but not in practice. Unfortunately for the theorist, then, the old rule applies: ‘When theory conflicts with empirical research, the problem usually lies with the theory’ (Marwell and Oliver, 1993: 39).

In the case of the theory of rational choice we can say that it is very popular, but that its large claims have been subject to severe criticism. Especially in the fields of political science and sociology, rational choice is often interpreted as a product of ‘economic imperialism', not as an external inspiration. The essence of the critique consists of the simple but crucial observation: human behaviour is not rational. At least not always.

Government officials and legal scholars broadly agree that the US-led war in Iraq had the blemish of being neither backed by a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) mandate nor by a broad multilateral coalition. As regards the offender, even legal scholars disagree, arguing either that a deadlocked UNSC failed and the US 'did indeed have all authority it needed' (Glennon, 2003), or that, in the absence of UNSC approval, US use of force amounted to 'a war of aggression' (International Commission of Jurists, 2003). Both conclusions are based on the assumption that the pursuit of power was the prime motivation for UNSC member states. In this article, I take a different stance.

We are living at a time of great unrest, conflict and doubt about our political frames of reference - of confusion regarding the present and disorientation regarding the future. The rapid changes in disciplinary boundaries that we have witnessed in recent years are giving rise to new scenarios and perspectives . Inquiring into how we should approach these new contexts thus seems imperative as far as the innovative potential of the discipline itself is concerned. Increasingly, there is a widely held view that theoretical reflection and the political decisions that are made here and now are of vital importance, since the design of the political society of the future is at stake.

It is now widely acknowledged that women are under-represented politically a round the world, and that this under-representation is problematic. Women constitute 15 per cent of the members of parliaments globally, ranging from 48.8 per cent in Rwanda and 45.3 in Sweden to none in Bahrain and Kuwait. This under-representation is thought to matter by different people for different reasons. The most frequently articulated reasons within the gender politics literature focus on three issues : the development of a just and equal society is hindered; women's interests remain unfulfilled; and democracy is likely to become atrophied (Phillips, 1995 : 62-83). The ‘justice’ argument implies that numerically equal rep resentation of women and men in legislatures is itself an indication of parity, regardless of the beliefs of those present or the policies enacted.

For students of EU public policy, the Union's reaction during and after the Iraq War may represent the same story of impotence that has historically plagued Europe when trying to present a united front during major world crises. The EU had been divided over the Iraq sanctions issue for quite some time and the divisions became deeper as the US put increasing pressure on Saddam Hussein's regime. With the US pushing for decisive action against Iraq's perceived lack of compliance with UN resolutions, the EU froze and failed to promote an alternative strategy acceptable to the rest of the global community.

When Carole Pateman influentially mapped the development of feminist political theory in the late 1980s, she suggested that it starts with feminist interpretations of the classic texts, moves on to extend the range of questions asked, and culminates in a distinctive feminist theory (Pateman, 1989: 2). Others suggested that it was more helpful to see these as ideological perspectives rather than chronological stages: as Sandra Whitworth (1994: 75-88) argued in the mid 1990s, liberal feminists seek to add women in, radical femtnists assert a feminine perspective, and postmodern feminists deconstruct the fiction of the category of ‘woman’.

This three-fold schema of ‘adding women in’, ‘extending the boundaries’, and ‘reconceptualising the core concepts’ may have been a useful schema for understanding the development of feminist political theory.

In recent years, countries around the world have pursued numerous in novations in political participation. The most common reforms, from a global perspective, have been provisions for the increasedrepresentationof women. Today, nearly all countries have pledged to promote gender-balanced decision-making (United Nations, 1995), and more than eighty have witnessed the adoption of quotas for the selection of female candidates. These provisions include reserved seats, which set aside a certain number of seats for women; political party quotas, which aim to increase the proportion of women among party candidates; and national legislative quotas, which require political parties to nominate a certain percentage of women among their candidates.

A lively debate about the contours of contemporary political science in Europe unfolded in the initial issues of European Political Science among a group of scholars who represent the diversity of the study of politics in Europe today. At the core of the discussion was whether political science in Europe is developing into a strong and autonomous discipline. Missing from the debate was any significant treatment of the contributions of feminist scholarship to the state of the discipline in Europe, past, present, or future. Brief remarks from Sapiro and Siim, both experts of gender and politics, do clearly indicate that ‘political research on gender’ (Siim, 2001) is a part of European political science, and constitutes one ‘of the particular strengths of global intellectual leadership already exerted from Europe’ (Sapiro, 2001); however, the general frame of the debate failed to give credit to a new area of European political science, Feminist Comparative Policy (FCP).