Social relevance has become a key element to assess the social legitimacy of an academic discipline. This contrasts with a widespread sentiment among political scientists about the existence of a relevance gap. The context of multiple crises Europe has experienced since the late 2000s has provided political scientists with a multitude of opportunities to demonstrate the social relevance of their work and the usefulness of the discipline. This introductory article to the special issue aims to offer an explorative framework and a preliminary discussion of empirical examples to assess the phenomenon of political scientists’ relevance in the public sphere during recent turbulent times. The framework (which emphasises three basic dimensions of social relevance – partisanship, visibility, and impact) is used to interpret the main results of the five case studies included in the special issue. Results show that contextual factors (salience of the issue, political and media contexts) influence political scientists’ engagement in the public sphere, the role they adopt and their visibility. The article ends emphasising the importance of collective action within the discipline as an instrument to enhance its social relevance.

Concerns about the use of online political microtargeting (OPM) by campaigners have arisen since the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the international political arena. In addition to providing conceptual clarity on OPM and explore the use of such techniques in Europe, this paper seeks to empirically disentangle the differing behaviours of campaigners when they message citizens through microtargeted rather than non-targeted campaigning. More precisely, I hypothesise that campaigners use negative campaigning and are more diverse in terms of topics when they use OPM. To investigate whether these expectations hold true, I use text-as-data techniques to analyse an original dataset of 4,091 political Facebook Ads during the last national elections in Austria, Italy, Germany and Sweden. Results show that while microtargeted ads might indeed be more thematically diverse, there does not seem to be a significant difference to non-microtargeted ads in terms of negativity. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of these findings for microtargeted campaigns and how future research could be conducted.

This study focuses on social media use of citizens from two groups that are often associated with the rise of social media: populist and postmaterialist citizens. Considering their ideological underpinnings, we theorize that they will make more political use of social media and that this further reifies their political attitudes into voting for populist and postmaterialist parties, respectively. Using unique survey data including the relatively new populist attitudes and political use of social media, we test this theory on the Dutch case. We find that both groups do not read political news or connect to politicians more, but both are more likely to react to political content. Moreover, social media use does not seem to lead to a retention in one’s own ideological funnel signified by populist or postmaterialist voting. Among more postmaterialist citizens, passive social media use even makes it more likely to vote for other parties.

While the stability of legislation is one of the fundamental issues in political theory, comparative and quantitative analyses on the subject are in short supply in the political science literature. In this article, we propose a novel measurement scheme for legislative stability, and we also introduce a Legislative Stability Index (LSI) developed to this end. In terms of empirical evidence, our index relies on the number of legislative amendments adopted within the span of an electoral cycle, as well as the breadth of issues the amendments touch on. It is based on the frequency with which laws are amended after their adoption. Our approach uses a new law-amendment edge-type network for a new Hungarian legislative database. Amendment-type connections are discovered by an automated dictionary-based text mining method. We tested the applicability of our index in various regression models. Results show that the legislative term, the length of the law and the way it was adopted were the most significant variables in explaining variation in the stability of legislation.

In some countries, direct democracy is used successfully to increase legitimacy of decisions or mitigate conflict, and in other countries, authoritarian leaders seem to instrumentalize and manipulate referendums. How can referendum integrity be analyzed? This article presents an empirical instrument to evaluate the variety and integrity of referendums. This encompasses criteria for the analysis of direct democracy. First, we develop a referendum cycle model based on the electoral cycle framework, assessing referendum quality in a number of dimensions from electoral laws and electoral procedures, thematic limitations of referendums, to voter registration, the initiation of referendums, campaign and media coverage as well as campaign financing. The empirical instrument is designed to be used in expert surveys, and piloted in the Turkish constitutional referendum of 2017. The article presents the results of the pilot study, draws out opportunities and limitations of this approach and suggests avenues for its future development.

A long tradition in political science holds that political institutions are designed for the benefit of the politicians who create them. Prominent among explanations for the creation and maintenance of effective judiciaries is the political insurance theory, which predicts higher levels of judicial independence where there is robust political competition. In this article, I consider the implications of political insurance theory for one of the most consequential organizational decisions for courts, the provision of panels or subsets of judges for rendering decisions. Identifying the ability of panels to provide political insurance, I contend that higher levels of political competition motivate the creation of panel systems in national high courts. An empirical analysis using an original dataset on the organic statutes of 106 high courts reveals a positive relationship between political competition and the use of panel systems, while further analysis shows that this relationship is limited to democracies.

Academics are often accused of being secluded in their “ivory towers”, focused on research and teaching but uninterested in, or unable to engage with, the public debate. If this is actually the case, under what conditions and at what particular moment is this likely to change? Following on three relevant dimensions—the visibility of political scientists, their partisanship and their impact in the public sphere—and combining press analysis with original survey data, this article has two main aims: first, to assess Italian political scientists’ (IPSs) social relevance in a period of huge political and institutional conflict such as the constitutional referendum held in December 2016; second, to explore the potential factors leading IPSs to be more or less present in the public debate. For the former, we focus on the public visibility of IPSs during the referendum campaign, as well as on the content of their public interventions, both concerning their neutral/partisan stance and their attitudes towards the constitutional reform. For the latter, we empirically test a few personal and institutional factors that are likely to influence individuals’ participation in the referendum debate.

A global trend of populism affects established democracies in Europe and around the world. Instrumental to this wave is the notion of the People, harnessed by populists’ rhetoric to their political advantage. Yet only little is known on the various, even contradicting meanings of the People in political discourse. Drawing on popular sovereignty theories and representation studies, in this paper I develop a theoretical framework of four key facets of the People—political, national, spatial, and abstract, and their two dimensions—concrete and diffuse. I argue that while elections are associated primarily with the political facet of the People, cross-temporal approaches to electoral representation highlight the People as a multifaceted construct. I explore these theoretical conjectures with computational text analysis of news media coverage of the 2016 American election. I find that the People is a multidimensional construct, with temporal dynamics that connect the political facet with the broader political agency of the People. However, this connection holds only before the 2016 election, and not after them. The results are discussed in relation to populism and the challenges democracies are facing.

The phenomenon known as emergency eLearning saw many institutions of higher education switch from face-to-face learning to virtual or online course delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The transition posed a unique suite of challenges to instructors and students alike, especially in the case of active learning pedagogy. This article reflects on the experiences of a multi-institutional, multi-term pedagogical project that implemented peer review assignments as opportunities for asynchronous but nevertheless active learning. We shared instructor experiences through the course design and application stages of courses in International Relations and political economy, discuss the ability of peer review assignments to create active learning opportunities in online courses, and reflect on our own pedagogical development benefited from the community of practice.

This study provides a novel contribution to the democracy–inequality literature by presenting the belief in democratic redistribution (the view that redistribution is an essential characteristic of democracy) as a conditioning factor. Democracy is expected to reduce inequality when people perceive redistribution as an essential characteristic of it, yet initial analysis shows contrasting results depending on the operationalisation of the indicator. Subsequent findings show, perhaps surprisingly, that democracy is only correlated with lower inequality when more people regard elections and liberties, instead of redistribution, as the essential characteristics of democracy. Democracy is associated with higher inequality when a larger share of the population considers redistribution to be essential to it. It is suggested that in response to the utilitarian view of democracy, authoritarian leaders can gain legitimacy by reducing inequality, whereas elected leaders in a democracy can hold power with little action on redistribution.

Participation in the public debate constitutes one of the most evident avenues for political scientists to demonstrate the social relevance of the discipline. This article focuses on two questions: the types of roles political scientists adopt in their public interventions and the potential tensions between their public engagement and the epistemic norms regulating academic and research activities. We investigate these questions in the context of very salient political debates, involving a high degree of political confrontation, where basic political beliefs, values, identities, and interests are at stake. Focusing on the case of the public debate surrounding the Catalan independence crisis (2010–2018), we demonstrate that in this type of context, (1) political scientists mostly adopt a partisan stance in their public interventions, yet it is also frequent that this is combined with the presence of academic elements in their discourse; (2) demand side factors (media outlets’ editorial lines) reinforce these partisan dynamics. These findings show that opportunities for increasing the social relevance of political scientists in these highly contentious contexts might come at the price of creating tensions that could erode the legitimacy of political science knowledge before the public.

The European Union (EU) integration project is under attack from a reassertion of national sovereignty following Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis examines the impact that traditional forms of sovereignty and national interests will have on the conduct of EU foreign and security policy post-Brexit. We focus on the Brexit challenge to the EU mode of regulation and diplomacy in internal/external policies in Common Foreign and Security Policy, Common Security and Defence Policy, and Justice and Home Affairs. The article also considers key scenarios for future UK-EU security cooperation to inform analysis of likely policy outcomes for the UK and the EU. The article concludes that the EU will have a greater impact through its laws and regulations on the post-Brexit UK than vice versa and that Brexit is not an immediate threat to the EU's regulatory mode of security governance. The new realities of internal/external security governance in Europe post-Brexit will mean weakened EU–UK security arrangements, which will impact the scope and quality of European security cooperation beyond traditional defence. This is both undesirable and potentially dangerous for European security cooperation and for Europe's position in the wider world.

This article aims to address the social and political role of political scientists in Greece, which has been at the centre of the Eurozone crisis, resulting in the most troubled period in the country’s recent political history, namely the campaign week of the July 2015 bailout referendum. To that end, the article relies, on the one hand, on the PROSEPS survey data to identify the extent to which Greek political scientists engage in public debate in general and how they view the social role of their discipline. On the other hand, we used a content analysis of the leading national TV media during the aforementioned week to examine how much Greek political scientists participated in the public debate in comparison with other social scientists, and what were their stances on specific issues and dimensions, such as the framing of the European Union. In addition, we also delve into the stance of Greek political scientists who participated in the public debate regarding the referendum itself. The study results revealed a potential bias; political scientists who pronounce themselves in favour of the status quo seem to receive more invitations to participate in televised debates.

One of the structural problems of introductory lectures is that students’ learning progress is primarily assessed by taking a final exam. Weekly preparation and reading are driven only by self-motivation. Can a student’s decision to complete her weekly assignments be influenced by a simple reminder? In a pre-registered experimental design, we test if personalised reminders from the instructor delivered via text messages contribute to learning outcomes. We assess formative learning via regular quizzes at the beginning of each class, and summative learning via grades in a final exam. We do not find statistically significant differences in learning outcomes, and discuss how design features potentially drive this result. In the conclusion, we stress the importance of experimental design in assessing innovative and new learning techniques.

This article compares political science to another discipline, with which it has much in common. That discipline is architecture. The political-science-as-architecture analogy has a long history in political thought. It also has important implications for the ends, means, and uses of political science. It follows from the political-science-as-architecture analogy that political science is necessarily a heterogeneous and pluralistic discipline. It also follows that political scientists have a common purpose, which is to conceive of institutional structures that allow humans to live together in societies, just as the purpose of architecture is to conceive of physical structures in which humans can live together.

Democratic theory argues that individuals should have their policy preferences equally represented in politics. Research on opinion congruence has often found, however, that political parties’ views are more likely to align with those of higher-income and higher educated citizens. We argue that this conclusion does not account for heterogeneity among parties. Based on an integrated dataset containing the positions of over 1,700 Belgian citizens and 11 Belgian parties on over 120 policy statements, we examine how opinion congruence inequality between privileged and underprivileged people varies between parties. We find that left-wing parties align more with underprivileged citizens than they do with privileged citizens on economic issues, while the opposite holds for right-wing parties. On cultural issues, however, both left- and right-wing parties better represent the preferences of privileged people. The exception is the radical right party Vlaams Belang, which on the cultural dimensions better represents the views of underprivileged voters.

This symposium adds to the growing literature on gender differences in authorship and reviews written by male and female scholars in major European political science journals. The contributions capturing European Union Politics (EUP), the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS), West European Politics (WEP) and Southern European Society and Politics (SESP) confirm the male dominance in articles published and reviews written. The articles also illustrate that the gender gap in publishing mainly results from a submission gap with male scholars outnumbering female scholars at submission stage. For reviews, there is a double gender gap. Female scholars are less solicited for a review, and if asked to review for a journal, they are more likely to decline the review invitation.

In a 2021 Special Issue in European Political Science, Anika Gauja and Karina Kosiara-Pedersen review the sub-field of party politics research. In doing so, they argue party politics scholarship reflects the broader development of the political science discipline, illustrating the evolving relationship between politics researchers and the organisations they study. In this reply, we argue that the party politics sub-field reflects the wider discipline in another crucial respect—it continues to marginalise gender politics scholarship. We demonstrate that a gendered lens fundamentally transforms key questions in the field around what party politics scholars study, and how and why they conduct their research, with relevant consequences for whose work is included. In failing to engage with this scholarship, “mainstream” party politics scholars are (re)producing unequal power relations and hierarchies within the discipline, while also depriving themselves of the capacity to address fully key questions of representation, democracy, continuity and change.

This article focuses on Finnish political scientists’ contributions to the public debate at a time when the relationship between academia and the government was tenser than usual. More specifically, it addresses the public roles and relevance of political scientists during three salient political crises of the 2010s: the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and the war in Donbass, the so-called European migrant crisis beginning in 2015, and the failure of major Finnish governance reform in 2019. I examine scholars’ interventions into them in a corpus of eighty articles collected from the online journal Politiikasta and use qualitative content analysis to study the polarisation of their views and the style of interventions, including scholars’ relationship with the government. I discuss the visibility and impact of political science in the context of gender and seniority of researchers, the presence of political science in the Finnish media, in general, and against other social-scientific disciplines, and with the other countries studied in this Special Issue.

Based on data on 67,000 articles published in 100 high-impact journals in the twenty years between 2000 and 2019, I analyse the scientific contribution of European political science scholarly communities in the global context. The scholars contributing to the global scientific production are largely concentrated in a few countries, with the US and UK alone accounting for more than half of the articles published in high-impact journals. However, the tendency is towards increasing diversity in the geographic basis of the international scientific production; and European countries are central to this change. Contributing to international collaborative publications has been a key engine of the increased scientific production of scholars based in Europe. This was a generalised global tendency, and a spectacular one for certain national scholarly communities. The network analysis of international collaborations points to the consolidation of three clusters within a growing and increasingly dense network. The US, followed by the UK, are central to a global cluster of collaborations. European countries are primarily clustered in two groups: a larger and growing cluster; and a smaller but even more integrated, highly productive and connected cluster of scholars based in seven northern European countries. All bibliometric indicators consistently point to a generalised growth in the output and internationalisation of the scientific contribution provided by the European political science community.