This paper is in line with research that analyzes the careers of European parliamentarians, adopting a comparative and cross-sectional approach and taking into account previous and subsequent political experiences in a multilevel perspective. Indeed, we propose a comparison between two similar cases, namely two southern European countries that have a quasi-federal system or are affected by an important regionalization process – Spain and Italy – and we examine a rather long time period ranging from the IV to the IX EP legislature. Our dataset consists of 508 observations, 195 relating to Spanish members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and 313 to Italian ones. By relying on the recent systematization, we propose to classify MEPs’ career models – which are our dependent variable – into four types: the EU shorter-termers, the ‘stepping stone’ MEPs, the EU long-termers, and the ‘multilevel surfers’. A multinominal regression analysis was conducted to understand which political factors (party affiliation of MEPs, length of previous career, critical European Parliament [EP] elections) may have a specific impact on each career type. We found that, after the 2014 EP critical election, the probability of MEPs engaging in the EP decreases, as they are more likely to develop a short-term career model than a long-term one. In addition, previous national experience and a regional executive career are the best predictors of a multilevel career.

While ‘hard-right’ has gained traction in scholarship and newsrooms, its conceptual vagueness and practical effects have remained underexamined. Drawing on Framing Theory and Agenda-Setting Theory, this article offers the first systematic, crosspublication study of how seven leading English-language outlets – The Guardian, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Politico, The New Statesman, The Economist, Reuters, and The Financial Times – employed the term between 2022 and 2025. A qualitative content analysis of 140 articles demonstrates that ‘hard-right’ functions as an umbrella label that conflates distinct far-right currents, while framing devices selectively highlight certain traits and agenda-setting practices that elevate the term’s prominence in headlines and summaries. Although outlets vary in their use of contextual qualifiers, all exhibit comparable patterns of misclassification, label inflation, and strategic ambiguity. It can be argued that the strategic use of vague terminology can soften the far-right’s image and bolster their electoral appeal. The findings demonstrate the urgency of adopting established political science typologies and clearer editorial guidelines to safeguard analytical precision and democratic accountability in media coverage.

Chinese analysts have paid close attention to the concept of European strategic autonomy (ESA). This is largely motivated by China’s long-held vision of a multipolar world wherein Europe is defined as one major pillar. To better reveal the Chinese understanding of ESA, this research adopts a combination of bibliometric analysis and documentary analysis of Chinese scholarly literature. Two takeaways can be drawn from this study. Firstly, China’s perception or expectation of ESA in terms of goals, scope, and approaches differs considerably from Europe’s practice. Secondly, China’s attitude toward ESA has evolved over time and across different domains and has grown increasingly ambivalent. Although the overall China-EU relationship is unlikely to experience a sharp turn in the near future, Chinese policymakers should be more realistic and better prepared for major changes because the EU has been readjusting its China policy in its quest for ESA.

Digital technologies provide a novel environment for political activities and, more specifically, for interactions between citizens and political actors. The scholarly literature on these topics is flourishing. On the one hand, studies of political communication emphasise the changing nature of election campaigns and the reshaped relationship between leaders and supporters. On the other hand, the literature on political parties examines the organisational implications of such a digital shift in more detail. Against this backdrop, this study investigates the opinions and participatory attitudes of party members towards the new digital participation opportunities that their party organisations provide. To do so, we rely on original individual survey data. More specifically, we will use data derived from a survey administered to Partito Democratico members in Italy at the beginning of 2022 (approximately 4000 respondents). Precisely, we aim to identify the profiles of party members according to their (degree of) digital activities by controlling for variables such as length of membership, levels of intraparty activism, and evaluation of intraparty democracy. Moreover, we investigate the changing relationship between members and their party organisations in the new digital ecosystem.

In an era of globalization, incumbents face strong incentives to attribute poor economic performance to external actors. While motivated reasoning explains how partisans update blame toward domestic incumbents, it remains unclear whether such blame is genuinely redirected to external actors beyond voters’ political control. Moreover, externalizing blame may signal limits to democratic accountability, with potential consequences for democratic belief. This article advances an asymmetric blame-shifting argument and tests it with two pre-registered survey experiments conducted on Amazon MTurk following the 2022 US midterm elections (n = 802; n = 999). Exploiting President Joe Biden’s attribution of rising inflation to Vladimir Putin, the experiments show that blame-shifting cues polarize partisan evaluations of the domestic incumbent: Democrats reduce blame toward Biden, while Republicans intensify it. In contrast, blame attribution toward the external actor remains largely unchanged across both studies. Study 2 further provides limited but suggestive evidence that exposure to external blame narratives may weaken democratic belief among opposition partisans. Together, the findings indicate that elite blame-shifting operates asymmetrically, which intensifies domestic partisan polarization without redistributing blame across borders, and such asymmetry may further erode democratic legitimacy.

This article examines the Portuguese maritime epic through the discourses of gatekeepers, particularly members of the Portuguese parliament. The study positions the maritime epic as a crucial element of Portuguese identity and self-esteem, central to an ongoing culture war over the past and the contestation of official narratives. The analysis reveals that, while the maritime epic serves as a ‘lieu de mémoire’ for collective memory, it is increasingly contested by decolonial movements and actors. The findings indicate (i) a left–right polarisation and (ii) a more nuanced, depolarised stance among mainstream political actors, characterised by two distinct approaches: a voluntarist perspective, advocating for revising the narrative, and an antivoluntarist stance, expressing caution regarding the terms of the debate.

This research investigates Russian public sentiment towards its leadership during the Russia–Ukraine war (2022–24), contrasting it with prewar approval trends (2019–21). Using Gallup data, the study challenges the notion of a straightforward ‘rally ‘round the flag’ effect, revealing a decline in leader approval post-invasion. Through regression analysis and expert interviews, factors such as war-related information exposure, perceived corruption, military confidence, and demographic variables are examined for their influence on public opinion. The findings indicate negative correlations between leader approval and military confidence/media freedom, with declines disproportionately observed among the male population, younger demographics, and individuals with higher education. This study suggests that the ‘rally ‘round the flag’ effect is limited within the Russian context, highlighting the need for nuanced approaches to understanding public opinion during geopolitical crises. It further provides insight into the relationship between media censorship, public corruption, and approval of Russian leaders. The study concludes by exploring the implications of these trends for potential postwar challenges facing the Russian administration.

Very few political science graduates go into politics. While choosing a different career track may be a matter of personal preference or context, the extent to which political science prepares students for political careers is questionable. This article seeks to explore that question by analysing how political science prepares students for activities within political parties. It draws upon semi-structured interviews conducted with political science students or recent graduates who are party members in Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. We find that political science courses have a positive impact on students’ activity as party members through providing them with a comprehensive theoretical basis and a holistic knowledge approach. However, access to the practical aspects of politics is limited in university courses, leaving students and graduates feeling unprepared for political careers. These observations are valid across the board, with few specific country-specific nuances.

Vaccine hesitancy was a major concern during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a significant percentage of healthcare workers (HCWs) proved to be hesitant too. Various governments, including that of Greece, reacted aggressively, imposing mandates stipulating dismission of HCWs from work unless vaccinated. Hesitancy was understood as a case of moral failing and against the principle of ‘do no harm’. In this article, we deploy hermeneutics policy analysis based on interviews and analysis of texts to challenge this view. On the basis of qualitative analysis of transcripts of press conferences organized by the Greek Ministry of Health and 74 interviews with hesitant HCWs, we show that government’s and HCWs’ understanding of the risk of infection and the associated threat posed to the public health system were starkly different. For HCWs, hesitancy was linked to distrust toward political institutions, which should be treated in a different manner from a case of moral failing of HCWs. We argue that, rather than mandates, persuasion is a better strategy, since hesitancy raises the question of trust toward the politicoscientific establishment. Therefore, reforming science advice institutions so that they make use of local expertise and engage civil society is key. We focus on Greece, as we consider it to be an interesting case of a newly established science advice system with a distinctive character that we term the ‘look from inside’, based on the model of ‘ethical chief scientist,’ which makes it a brilliant case study for others considering building or reforming their systems.

The ideological fragmentation of women’s organizations is central to debates about the unity and effectiveness of global feminist activism. Existing datasets capture organizational presence and networks, but they neglect ideological orientations of women’s organizations. This article introduces the FEMPOWER dataset, covering the period 1980–2023 for around 9,000 women’s organizations active worldwide. FEMPOWER provides yearly country-level data on organizations’ size, reach, strategies, and ideological orientations, including neoliberal versus social justice, sameness versus difference, and intersectionality. Descriptive analysis illustrates regional and temporal variation in fragmentation as well as comparisons with other datasets from the same research domain. The dataset enables researchers to systematically examine how ideological fragmentation influences women’s empowerment and transnational feminist mobilization.

In authoritarian contexts, the organization of academic knowledge and scholarly practices is often shaped by both formal policies and subtle social mechanisms, including disciplinary norms, faculty networks, and informal negotiation strategies. Within this framework, autocratic governments frequently restructure social and political science education, designating it as a ‘sensitive field’ to prioritize ideologically sanctioned topics and embedding regime-aligned imperatives within academic institutions. This paper examines Iran as a case study to explore the effects of state-led Islamization policies (of humanities and social science) on political science curricula, research orientations, and institutional practices. Drawing on a systematic analysis of undergraduate curricula and academic research agendas, with a focus on published papers in Iranian political science journals, the paper demonstrates that these transformations reduce disciplinary diversity, marginalize comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, and constrain the role of political science as a site of civic and intellectual engagement. Rather than a neutral adaptation of academic fields, the Islamization of political science in Iran represents a deliberate strategy of knowledge control aimed at aligning education with authoritarian governance. The findings highlight how such interventions narrow the possibilities for academic inquiry and reshape the societal functions of higher education, contributing to broader debates on authoritarianism, curriculum design, and the global politics of knowledge production.

Scholars have proposed integrating deliberative democracy processes and new technologies within party structures to address the legitimacy crisis of political parties. However, for established political groups, this is not an easy road to take. The paper delves into these issues by presenting the case study of Agorà Democratiche within the Italian Democratic Party (PD), the major center-left party in Italy. Agorà aimed to engage party members and like-minded citizens in shaping the party’s agenda through deliberative assemblies. This adoption by Agorà introduced a new form of political participation that led thousands of citizens to voice their opinions. However, it encountered several challenges. The paper argues that democratic innovations do not always yield the desired outcomes for political parties. Participatory and deliberative processes might be hard to implement in established political groups that are accustomed to old political schemas. More specifically, I pinpoint four main obstacles encountered by Agorà Democratiche: the ‘culture of verticality’ within the party, an unfavorable external context, the lack of institutionalization of the programme, and the ambiguous role played by technology. If not handled carefully, new technologies and deliberative processes can worsen the existing crisis within political parties by falling short of expectations and further undermining the organization’s credibility.

This research note presents BLUE_EP, the first dataset of municipality-level results of European Parliament (EP) elections. Our dataset covers the 2019 and 2024 EP elections and provides results for approximately 90,000 Local Administrative Units (LAUs) in the EU27 and 500 parties or lists in each election, along with a classification of all parties into political groups and broader political families. The dataset was constructed by collecting, harmonizing, and merging 27 national datasets, closely following the standard European and national GIS typologies for LAUs. To the best of our knowledge, BLUE_EP is the first dataset to support a uniform, Europe-wide analysis of local voting behavior in EP elections. To showcase the usefulness of our dataset, we combine BLUE_EP with European Commission data on population demographics and degrees of urbanization. Using the combined datasets, we provide fine-grained evidence for a widening urban-rural gap in voting behavior between the 2019 and 2024 EP elections.

The European Council is one, if not the, key institution of the European Union (EU). Coming together for the first time about 50 years ago, in March 1975, the European Council comprises notably the Heads of State or Government of the EU member states, thus linking national and European levels. It takes important decisions in various policy areas and has regularly expanded the EU’s agenda and competences. In recent years, the European Council has acted as the prime crisis manager. At the same time, because of its requirement for consensus and its own small internal capacities, it is vulnerable to blockades and depends on other EU institutions for the preparation and implementation of its decisions. This article analyzes the European Council as key actor in the EU’s multi-level and multi-institutional system of governance. Comparing and bringing together different theoretical perspectives, it critically examines its various roles, functions, and shortcomings. Contrary to the predominant view, the European Council – despite its intergovernmental composition – tends to strengthen the EU’s supranational procedures. With this institution becoming ever more important and visible, the paper also suggests avenues for the further study of the European Council.

This paper sets out the need for, and potential offered by, introducing social media into teaching global challenges. We argue that teaching on global challenges should involve teaching with, through, and about social media as a place of politics. This paper suggests that using social media in our teaching can help to equip students with critical digital literacies as a set of skills for engaging, understanding, and analysing digital materials. We also argue that digital spaces can offer real potential to open dialogue and thought on global challenges in our classrooms. The article presents reflections from our own classroom experiences to think through how social media offers the potential to re-work hierarchies and unpack knowledges of world politics that are taken for granted. In doing so, we are engaged with wider academic discussions on how digital pedagogies are connected to and can enact critical pedagogies. Finally, the article sets out a research agenda that can take this forward to better understand how students learn through social media and how we can best incorporate this into our teaching as a discipline.

The 2023 revision of the EU Horizontal Guidelines introduced a dedicated framework for sustainability-oriented cooperation agreements, marking the first systematic attempt to integrate environmental objectives into EU competition law. Yet, almost two years after they entered into force, DG COMP has not received a single request for informal guidance under the new provisions. This policy commentary explains this apparent policy failure by reconstructing the process through which sustainability concerns entered EU competition policy after the 2019 European elections and the European Green Deal. Drawing on historical-institutionalist process tracing, we show that the resulting adjustments were shaped by political urgency rather than gradual policy learning, and that the 2023 Guidelines reflected cautious compromise rather than transformative change. We then analyse why uptake has remained negligible: multinational firms face steep cross-border enforcement risks, particularly from jurisdictions such as the United States, where sustainability agreements can trigger antitrust liability. We conclude by assessing the EU’s strategic options (retreat, international convergence, or domestic regime stabilisation) and argue that the last of these offers the most realistic path.

With the expulsion of the Central European University (CEU) and the establishment of public trust foundations, the academic world in Hungary has come under pressure unprecedented in the European Union (EU). The measures taken by the Orbán government have been decried as an assault on academic freedom, undermining the fundamental values of the EU. While the European Commission is obligated to uphold European values as per the treaties, its capacity to do so with regard to academic freedom has been underwhelming. In this paper, I argue that the EU is institutionally handicapped in its approach to protecting academic freedom because of, firstly, a lack of competences in the field of higher education and, secondly, an insufficient definition of academic freedom in EU law. By finding innovative ways to link the protection of academic freedom to its competences and by institutionalising an operational definition of academic freedom, the EU could better protect academic freedom and universities in general in its Member States.

Following the ongoing debates on (1) editorial bias and the degree of internationalization of journals in different fields and (2) internalization of (European) political science, this paper aims to descriptively analyze the composition of editorial teams and editorial boards of all 187 political science journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Although there are significant differences between individual journals, the analysis revealed an overwhelming Anglo-American dominance in both editorial teams (with an average of 60.6 per cent) and editorial boards (58.6 per cent) across the entire list of journals, reproducing the patterns of dominance and dependence. In addition to the global level, the analysis focuses more closely on the European environment and confirms the conclusions of some previous studies that the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region remains largely (semi-) peripheral in European and global political science. Based on previous research, we can infer that a higher level of editorial diversity would lead to increased diversity in published content, encompassing a wider range of methods, topics, theories, and cases. In conclusion, the study suggests (1) weakening possible biases by building more diversified editorial teams and boards and (2) continuing to analyze specific manifestations of bias in political science journals.

In a time of polycrisis, internal contestation, and strained transatlantic relations, European identity is timelier and more relevant than ever. Do EU public policies operating in a multilevel governance system contribute to European identity-building, and what can jeopardise the process of identity formation at the level of policy elites? The article adopts a social constructivist and discursive approach and brings to the fore the lacking process of EU socialisation via discursive practices as a key reason leading to failed identity-building. Focusing on EU Cohesion Policy in Wales (UK), Crete (Greece), and Silesia (Poland), the analysis employs primary data and grey literature sources, along with 64 semistructured elite interviews, to show that, despite key differences among the three cases, Cohesion Policy has not contributed significantly to European identity-building among policy elites at different government levels and among the public. This is because the coordinative discourse about EU policies is dominated by ideas about economic goals and practical aspects of policy-making, while the respective communicative discourse is controlled by domestic political elites and the media and is ultimately determined by broader national/regional political cultures about the purpose and limitations of EU membership. Overall, the article contributes to the literature on European identity-building, EU socialisation, and discourse by arguing that the way EU public policies are designed, implemented, and communicated do not favour the achievement of political goals, such as the cultivation of a shared European identity.