The purpose of the article is to assess the risks and opportunities of entry into the political science profession in Italy. Part one contains some brief reflections on the discipline and its institutionalisation. Part two offers an overview of the main features of the recruitment process and its national peculiarities. Part three looks into the current problems facing young Italian scholars who wish to become academics. Part four concludes with some suggestions to young political scientists who have much hope but also many doubts about how to cope with permanent uncertainty regarding their career development.

Since the re-election of George W. Bush in November 2004, there has been a renewal of optimism about the state of the transatlantic relationship. This meshes easily with those in the academic community who believe that the relationship has always been – and remains – far stronger than some argued before and after the Iraq War. This comfortable view is challenged here and, based upon an analysis of both domestic and international factors, the article insists that even though the relationship will persist, difficult times lie ahead in the European–US relationship. The future is likely to see more strains across the Atlantic not less.

This paper proposes a re-reading of Bernard Crick's The American Science of Politics, challenging the notion that it articulated an English aversion to political science per se. When reconnected with its author's evolving thinking in the 1950s and 1960s about the nature of political concepts, the unique character of politics, and the responsibilities of the political scientist, the book can be seen as an attempt to promote a neo-republican conception of the discipline's identity, with a particular accent upon the importance of civic education.

Political science in Europe has been shaped by a great variety of national academic traditions and university systems, its relationship to neighbouring disciplines, and contending meta-theoretical approaches. In addition, since World War II, major external influences have come mainly from the US. Against this background, the special role of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) is briefly discussed and evaluated. The conclusions point to some significant differences in emphasis between European and American political science and highlight the increasing relevance of such differences in the European but potentially also worldwide context.

This article analyses the recruitment criteria, career patterns and social hierarchies of Dutch political science. Dutch political science is highly internationalised and outward-looking. About one-fifth to one-third of most departments is non-Dutch and English language courses are common. Two MA programmes are offered solely in English, and Dutch political science was among the first comprehensively to introduce the BA/MA system. Research is also internationally oriented. Promotion is increasingly based on merit although there are few women in the higher ranks. Working conditions are generally fine and young scholars enjoy a relatively high level of autonomy and reasonable rates of pay. The major hurdle is achieving a permanent position.

This article reviews the general characteristics of the ‘crisis’ faced by the EU when confronted by the George W. Bush administration in the US, and considers it in relation to the EU's capacity for collective international action. On the basis of a range of examples, it appears that the EU's foreign policy ‘crisis’ was limited to one end of an extensive spectrum, and that in other areas there is considerable evidence of success in maintaining solidarity and proposing alternative policies. The article concludes by proposing an approach to EU collective international action that can account for and accommodate this unevenness, and which might be applied to EU–US relations more generally.

Realists and liberals dispute the post-war record of the transatlantic alliance. Yet, the crisis over Iraq has prompted consensus on the notion that transatlantic relations will ‘never be the same’. This article offers two central arguments. First, the US-European alliance was transformed, long before the Iraq crisis, by the end of the Cold War. Second, convergence on ends for the international order remain obscured by transatlantic disputes over means.

In place of origins, disciplinary historians might better approach European–American political science, over the course of its three centuries, as a dynamic system of complex actions. Transactions are aspects or phases of this dynamic system, and they underscore that disciplinary historians' interpretations take place in the history of which they are about. Examples of these transactions since the eighteenth century are in evidence in the preceding five papers, either expressed or when reinterpreted as done here. Transactional historiography deserves further elaboration on the eve of a global political science.

This article explores the employment opportunities, working conditions and the salary one can expect to encounter when starting out as a newly qualified academic in Ireland or the UK. The article evaluates these issues through a personal perspective and concludes that that's life! If one wants to break into academic life in either Ireland or the UK one should not expect a smooth journey, however, it is well worth it.

Most European universities lag behind the best universities in the Anglo-Saxon world. A key challenge is to raise resources per student in Europe to US levels. The Lisbon agenda demands fundamental reform of the European university system in order to enhance efficiency, yet avoid grade inflation, to foster more competition, to allow for much larger private contributions accompanied by income-contingent student loans, and to attract larger numbers of foreign students. European universities will be pushed to compete with each other, to offer better incentives and to generate substantially more income. Universities will be stimulated to provide sufficient diversity and quality to meet the demands of a growing and diverse student body. Their ambition should be to educate the best minds in society irrespective of whether their parents are rich or poor, academically inclined or uneducated. A shift from grants to loans and an increase in tuition fees are justified by high returns. Reform should lead to a better and more equitable system of European universities.

The discipline of political science ought to be reoriented to capture the realities of multi-level politics, to understand better the dispersion and complexity of political authority, and to ameliorate its tendency towards fragmentation into separate sub-fields. International/supranational arenas and arenas within states intertwine. The EU, for one, is not something that is separable from the nation state. This article calls into question the appropriateness of the traditional division into ‘national’ and ‘international’ in political science.

The European Union (EU) and the United States are the world's largest and most-interconnected economies. In the 1990s, they engaged in a series of joint initiatives designed further to liberalise the transatlantic marketplace through cooperation in trade and regulatory matters, including pursuant to the 1995 New Transatlantic Agenda. From 2000 to 2004, however, political tensions between the US and Europe intensified, as conflicts arose over the war in Iraq, the International Criminal Court, and the Kyoto Protocol, triggering fears that political turmoil could disrupt the mutually beneficial transatlantic economic relationship. Despite the political challenges, the transatlantic economic relationship has demonstrated extraordinary continuity and resilience amid the discord. The US/EU economic relationship has been subject to intensive disputes in areas such as steel, airplanes, and genetically modified foods, but there is little sign that the election of George W. Bush or the 2003 invasion of Iraq was responsible for these tensions, which arose primarily from pre-existing divergent domestic political pressures. This relative insulation of the economic relationship from the dispute over the Iraq war, however, does not imply that power politics is unimportant in the economic realm, and indeed we argue that outcomes in the economic realm are shaped significantly by differences in US and EU market and institutional power in different sectors.

The article analyses the various logics of different types of decision-making processes: war, strategic bargaining, deliberative negotiation, deliberation, voting, trial, investigation and subsumption. The logics specify relationships between decision situations or constellations of preferences, the character and results of the processes, and problems that may arise. Furthermore, the article presents typical decision-makers and arenas, the bases of legitimacy, and political systems where the respective forms of decision-making are dominant.

The Japanese political science community has grown considerably in recent years and has succeeded in achieving internationalisation. However, there exists a significant generation gap concerning views on science, in particular, concerning the role of values in the social sciences. This has led to contrasting assessments of the history and achievements of political science. This article provides some information concerning political science and the community of political scientists in Japan, knowledge of which is lacking in Europe.

An interpretive approach to political science provides accounts of actions and practices that are interpretations of interpretations. We develop this argument using the idea of ‘situated agency’. There are many common criticisms of such an approach. This article focuses on eight: that an interpretive approach is mere common sense; that it focuses on beliefs or discourses, not actions or practices; that it ignores concepts of social structure; that it seeks to understand actions and practices, not to explain them; that it is concerned exclusively with qualitative techniques of data generation; that it must accept actors' own accounts of their beliefs; that it is insensitive to the ways in which power constitutes beliefs; and that it is incapable of producing policy-relevant knowledge. We show that the criticisms rest on both misconceptions about an interpretive approach and misplaced beliefs in the false idols of hard data and rigorous methods.