Assessments of party decline and decline of traditional forms of political participation often rely on the argument of party membership decline. Most studies analysing trends in party membership over time focus on aggregate country-level data at a few points in time. While they allow grasping general membership trends, they are not without shortcomings. This article presents the Members and Activists of Political Parties (MAPP) dataset related to the MAPP project. The dataset makes a large amount of data on party membership available to the larger public. The dataset provides 6,307 party membership data observations (M) covering 397 parties in 31 countries, mostly between 1945 and 2014. The article discusses the existing literature and data on party membership trends, how membership trends have been assessed so far, and the potential added value of the MAPP dataset.

The past two decades have witnessed a burgeoning of scholarship on perceptions of political corruption and their determinants. Yet despite recent advances in understanding these perceptions and their importance to political life, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of how the public understands political corruption. We address this gap by reconstructing the conventional conception of political corruption and by presenting a new empirical tool designed to measure the conceptualizations and conceptions of political corruption held by a given population. We present preliminary findings and explore the relevance of the new tool for elucidating the public’s understanding of political corruption.

Massive open online courses (MOOC) have been considered by some observers as a powerful opportunity to improve distant learning. The Université catholique de Louvain was the first Belgian university to deliver a political science MOOC (Louv3x) in French, entitled ‘Discovering political science’ (Découvrir la science politique). This paper seeks to explore the challenges a pedagogical team faces when transforming a ‘traditional’ political science introductory course into a MOOC. The paper also explores how the use of a MOOC might impact the learning outcome within on-campus and worldwide students.

Recent literature suggests that undergraduate students in political science dread studying methods, especially quantitative methods. Nonetheless, we believe that teaching students the value of quantitative analysis is critical. Going beyond traditional teaching approaches, we use a simulation to conceptualize the logic and process of quantitative analysis. In our simulation, student participants are told they are in a prison with another prisoner, where both have the objective to make the other prisoner crossover, using any strategy. The simulation allows students to generate and test basic hypothesis about students’ characteristics and their strategies, as well as operationalizing variables and quantifying results.

The aim of this article is to examine and quantify the relationship between regular immigration and voting for anti-immigration parties in Italy’s eight Northern regions – from 1992 to 2015 – and in Italy’s forty-five Northern provinces from 2004 to 2015. Firstly, we identified the Lega Nord as Italy’s main xenophobic party, then we used a fixed effects regression model for panel data to test our hypothesis, while controlling for a series of social, political and economic variables. Our results suggest that there is a positive and significant effect: an increase of 1 per cent in the number of new regular immigrants is associated with an increase of more than 2 per cent in the votes given to the Lega Nord; voter-turnout is significantly and negatively associated with Lega Nord’s vote-share, and a high perception of crime – but not actual crime – is positively associated with anti-immigration votes. At the provincial level, we also found a positive association between Muslim foreign population and Lega Nord’s vote-share. These results ought to be considered along with the fact that Northern Italy is highly representative of the wealthiest and most densely populated regions of Europe, suggesting the possibility that similar phenomena could be witnessed in other comparable contexts.

Many conflict-data projects are based on narrow or disjointed concepts of political conflict. They either cover only limited segments of reality or put distinct but related forms of conflict phenomena in conceptual ‘bins’ rather than integrating them into a more comprehensive concept. In addition, conflict intensity is frequently measured by only one indicator, the number of fatalities, which represents only part of the consequences and none of the means of violent conflict. Means and consequences, taken together, constitute the intensity of a conflict. They ought to be combined to arrive at a valid measurement. The Heidelberg approach to conflict research addresses both issues, offering a broad yet differentiated and integrative concept of conflict and a multi-dimensional and multi-indicator approach to intensity. This improves our abilities to recognise and classify conflictive phenomena; to capture conflict-transformation; and to arrive at a valid measurement of intensity. The approach is applied in the new DISCON dataset, comprising data on 155 violent and non-violent interstate, intra-state, and substate conflicts in Asia and Oceania from 2000 to 2014, disaggregated into more than 6300 region-month intensities.

One of the key challenges graduate students face is how to come up with a good rationale for their theses. Unfortunately, the methods literature in and beyond political science does not provide much advice on this important issue. While focusing on how to conduct research, this literature has largely neglected the question of why a study should be undertaken. The limited discussions that can be found suggest that new research is justified if it (1) fills a ‘gap’; (2) addresses an important real-world problem; and/or (3) is methodologically rigorous. This article discusses the limitations of these rationales. Then, it proposes that research puzzles are more useful for clarifying the nature and importance of a contribution to existing research, and hence a better way of justifying new research. The article also explores and clarifies what research puzzles are, and begins to devise a method for constructing them out of the vague ideas and questions that often trigger a research process.

The study analyses the stock and the change of social capital in Greece at the onset of the economic crisis and tests for the effect of soft social capital elements on civic participation scores. Public servants are analysed separately as a potentially distinct group of citizens in terms of their civic engagement profile. At the empirical level, we identify social capital via the measurement of six main constructs, namely, social trust, social altruism, equality, tolerance, humanitarianism (soft social capital elements) and civic participation (a hard social capital element). Data are drawn from the European Social Value surveys Rounds 4 and 5. Results show that the country experienced a statistically significant decline in its social capital level during the 2008–2010 period, although public servants show higher (albeit also declining) levels of social capital. More importantly, soft social capital constructs do affect civic participation scores for the society as a whole but not for public servants.

Migration challenges how we think about justice and state sovereignty. This is no less the case for political theorists, and this review symposium focuses on the work of one of the foremost political theorists working on these questions today. In his latest book – Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Migration – David Miller argues for a realist approach to migration, an approach that takes into consideration not just what we ought to do, but also the actual possibilities of implementing justice. In this regard, the relationship between (im)migration and state sovereignty and democracy is central. Miller’s approach is a ‘political’ one that seeks to take into consideration the fact that we live in political communities with (more or less) shared values, and that these political communities cannot easily be disentangled from the liberal democratic institutions of these states. In their reviews of Miller’s book, Sarah Song, Annie Stilz and Kieran Oberman all take issues with particular aspects of Miller’s approach, while also accepting the general thrust to think about migration in the context of state and popular sovereignty.

We introduce a web application, the Case Selector (http://und.edu/faculty/brian.urlacher), that facilitates comparative case study research designs by creating an exhaustive comparison of cases from a dataset on the dependent, independent, and control variables specified by the user. This application was created to aid in systematic and transparent case selection so that researchers can better address the charge that cases are ‘cherry picked.’ An examination of case selection in a prominent study of rebel behaviour in civil war is then used to illustrate different applications of the Case Selector.

This article examines four lines of scholarly difference in European Union (EU) studies – meta-theoretical, (sub)disciplinary, epistemological and methodological – and whether these are linked to the geographical and institutional affiliations of the authors operating in the field. The study uses a novel dataset based on a quantitative content analysis and human coding of 1597 articles in leading journals dealing with the EU published in the period 2003–2012. The article shows that USA-based scholars score on average – though in many cases, not significantly – higher when it comes to indicators of a comparative politics approach to the EU, use of a rational choice, positivist and statistical vocabulary, and articles coded as quantitative. However, on most of these indicators scholars in some European countries, and especially some institutions, score significantly higher, suggesting that we should disaggregate ‘Europe’ when discussing scholarly differences in the field.

Liberal democratic states have three kinds of duties towards migrants and refugees. First, they should enhance their own citizens opportunities of free movement through entering reciprocity-based agreements with other states that are sufficiently similar or with whom they share a political union. Second, they should admit economic migrants if there are expected benefits for the receiving country, the sending country and the migrants themselves. Third, they have to allow for family reunification and to contribute to refugees protection because of their commitments to universal human rights. States can contribute to the latter goal by taking in refugees or by supporting other states that do so. In the international state system, a fair distribution of both types of burdens among all states cannot be secured. In the European Union, however, the principle of sincere cooperation and the need for coordination of refugee flows in the Schengen area of internally open borders combine a normative commitment with self-interests of states to overcome this prisoners’ dilemma. All the more tragic is the blocking of European solutions by unwilling member states who are ready to sacrifice European integration because they are not ready to accept their duties towards refugees.