Model European Union (MEU) is a simulation of European politics that aims to familiarise young Europeans with the decision-making process of the European Union (EU). Participants simulate the cooperation between the Commission, the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of the EU in the ordinary legislative procedure. About 190 people annually participate at MEU Strasbourg, which takes place on the premises of the EP. This article uses quasi-experimental panel data from surveys with participants of MEU 2012 to test the impact of the simulation conference. While most empirical research on the effects of political simulations addresses the educational effectiveness of classroom simulations, this article tries to answer a research question with a new focus on political attitudes: Do EU simulations influence European identity and political support of the EU?

The article analyses publication patterns according to gender in three Political Science and International Relations journals based in Britain (Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, and Review of International Studies). Examining publications from 1991 to 2011 in terms of authorship, seniority of author, and number of citations and responses, our findings suggest that women are less likely to be published as sole or lead author than their male counterparts are but that they are just as likely to be cited. Furthermore, since 2000, women are now over-represented in comparison with their presence within the discipline in publications that have at least one female author.

Empirical human rights researchers frequently rely on indexes of physical integrity rights created by the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) or the Political Terror Scale (PTS) data projects. Any systematic bias contained within a component used to create CIRI and PTS carries over to the final index. We investigate potential bias in these indexes by comparing differences between PTS scores constructed from different sources, the United States State Department (SD) and Amnesty International (AI). In order to establish best practices, we offer two solutions for addressing bias. First, we recommend excluding data before 1980. The data prior to 1980 are truncated because the SD only created reports for current and potential foreign aid recipients. Including these data with the more systematically included post-1980 data is a key source of bias. Our second solution employs a two-stage instrumented variable technique to estimate and then correct for SD bias. We demonstrate how following these best practices can affect results and inferences drawn from quantitative work by replicating a study of interstate conflict and repression.

This symposium has highlighted that some positive change has been achieved for women’s status in the profession. The authors are cautiously optimistic. At the same time, we argue that this does not allow for complacency and we suggest a number of positive strategies that may also be beneficial.

Over recent decades, comparative political scientists have developed new measures at a rate of knots that evaluate the quality of democratic regimes. These indices have been broadly applied to assess the quality of democracy cross-nationally and to test the generalisability of theories regarding its causes and effects. However, the validity of these inferences is jeopardised by the fact that the quality of democracy is an abstract and contested concept. In order to address this eventuality, researchers constructing indices measuring the quality of democracy as well as researchers applying these indices should critically examine the quality of the indices. Owing to the absence of a standardised framework that is both suitable for the evaluation of contested concepts and that includes explicit coding rules so as to be directly applicable, this article seeks to fill this gap. The application of our framework is demonstrated by an evaluation of the Sustainable Governance Indicators, the Global Democracy Ranking and the Democracy Barometer. As indicated by our evaluation, the framework is a practical tool that helps to assess the conceptual foundation, validity, reliability and replicability of indices. In addition, it can be used to study the quality of indices in a comparable manner.

Analyses of local campaign effects are dominated by aggregate-level analyses of constituency activity. Though individual-level data are available on whether voters are (or remember being) contacted by parties during campaigns, their analysis is fraught with difficulties, not least the extent to which memory of campaign contact is itself conditioned partly on party allegiance, creating a circularity in the analysis of the impact of party contact on vote choice. To some degree, this can be (and has been) dealt with in a regression framework. However, this does not fully deal with the potential difficulties. Ideally, experimental approaches are needed to tease out definitively the effects of campaign exposure on individual’s election decisions. However, these present practical difficulties. In this paper, therefore, we utilise quasi-experimental difference-in-difference and propensity score matching methods to estimate campaign effects at the 2010 British General Election from individual-level data.

Resilience has become a central concept in academic and political debates about government policy over the last decade or so. In a complex, global and interconnected world, resilience appears to be the policy buzzword of choice, assumed to be the answer to wide-ranging range of policy issues. In his book Resilience: The Governance of Complexity, David Chandler takes on the concept of resilience and the ways in which it is used by policymakers and academics. In their discussion of the book, Julian Reid and Philip Hammond critically engages with some of Chandler’s conclusions while approving of other aspects of the book. They query the relationship between the concept of resilience, the concepts of biopolitics and neoliberalism, and the possibility of critique. The debate about resilience thus sits at the heart of contemporary politics, and the debate links concerns of scholars in a number of sub-disciplines within political science.

As the term ‘soft power’ in international relations (IR) has been coined by Joseph Nye a quarter of a century ago it has gained a great response and initiated numerous debates. A high quality education sector is one of the important factors that contributes to a country’s soft power. Despite that, as shown in the article, education has not been adequately covered in the existing IR literature. The article addresses this lacuna by offering an attempt to conceptualise and operationalise the educational aspect of soft power. First, with cases from the People’s Republic of China and Finland, it provides various examples of growing internationalisation of education, and analyses possible soft power gains from education. Second, the article provides a theoretical conceptualization of educational soft power, and presents three mechanisms that it can work through: as a carrier of genuine values, as a resource that countries possess, and as a tool in achieving certain goals. All three mechanisms also show how increasing internationalisation brings more direct connections between education, international relations, and foreign policy.

There is no shortage of political science literature on field research regarding issues of research design, methodology, and data evaluation. Yet, the practical and organisational intricacies that precede successful fieldwork are frequently overlooked. This lack of methodical advice may be due to the impression that field research is highly contextual, and so case-specific that general guidelines, which apply to all field research endeavours alike, are inconceivable. While we acknowledge the organisational complexity of field research, we disagree with the notion that the preparatory dimension of fieldwork is by necessity unique for every undertaking. Rather, recommendations for common challenges that occur during the preparation and organisation phase of a field trip can be identified and formulated. Consequently, we present and discuss ten organisational ‘do’s’ preceding successful field research. Current graduate students and future field researchers will regard these ten pointers as useful hints in the organisation of their own endeavour. While the list is by no means exhaustive, the ten recommendations will lower the organisational entry costs of aspiring field researchers, and enable them to hit the ground running upon arrival in the field.

Political scientists often need to evaluate whether samples are comparable, for example, when analysing different countries or time points or when comparing data collected using different methods. A necessary condition for conducting such meaningful cross-group comparisons is the establishment of measurement invariance. One of the most frequently used procedures for establishing measurement invariance is the multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. This method was criticised in the literature because it may suggest that a model fits the data although it may contain serious misspecifications. We present an alternative method to test for measurement invariance using detection of local misspecifications and illustrate its use on two data sets assessing value priorities that are often analysed in political science and collected using paper-and-pencil and web modes of data collection.

As many Ph.D. candidates appreciate, the reality of maintaining productivity during the course of your candidature often proves to be challenging. This article aims to provide a fresh way to view your Ph.D. candidature to aid productivity and learn skills which can be transferred over to future employment as an early career academic. The article presents a set of sub-skills and perspectives to deconstruct the task of writing a thesis and to establish skills which can benefit your future academic career.

This article contributes to our understanding of merits and weaknesses associated with the subnational comparative case study. Despite its methodological strengths and the increasing importance of subnational units in politics, the subnational comparative case study remains underutilized in comparative politics. The root cause of the method’s merits lies in the substantive importance of subnational units in politics; at the same time, however, the difficulty of abstracting theory from local specificities hinders the wide utilization of this method. Through examining some important studies in comparative politics and Chinese politics that use comparative case studies, I identify problems in case selection and in achieving generalizability in research design of subnational comparative case studies.

In this book review symposium, Jan Biba, Jeffrey Edward Green and John P. McCormick take on the work of democratic theorist, Nadia Urbinati. In Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth and the People, Urbinati argues for what she calls a ‘diarchic’ conception of democracy, whereby opinion and will formation must not collapse into one another (hence diarchy rather than mono-archy). This has implications for how we think about issues such as representation and pluralism. It also means that Urbinati is sceptical of populism, whether of the left or the right. The problem with populism is that opinion and will formation collapse in the figure of the people. Accordingly, for Urbinati, the people can and should be understood as a plurality, as never one with itself and only existing through representations of it. Her argument also has implications for the question of equality. As she argues, in a diarchic version of democracy, political equality is to be valued very highly, and she argues for the importance of campaign finance reform. Thus, with Urbinati’s diarchic democracy we get a conception of democracy that is liberal, pluralist and representative, but also highly critical of actually existing forms of democracy.

Undergraduate research, the practice of teaching students by engaging them in a research project, has a long record of achievement. Research-based evaluations show it is likely to have a range of positive educational and career outcomes for students. Many examinations of these benefits apply to STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). This article sets out one approach to undergraduate research in political science, based on an apprenticeship model. Using a small survey of all those who have followed the GV314 course at the London School of Economics since 2004 the article finds evidence that the benefits of undergraduate research appear to be quite striking outside STEM subjects too.