This presentation introduces the analytical framework applied in this symposium for the analysis of publishing trends of European political scientists. Our goal is to ascertain the degree to which the discipline in four contrasting countries (Ireland, Norway, Portugal and Spain) speaks to a wider European or international audience. Is political science insular in these countries, or is it internationalised? On which aspects are the publications similar at the domestic, European and international levels, and on which do they differ? What dynamics have affected publishing habits over time? Is it possible to observe a process of convergence or divergence across levels over time? To face these questions, we set up a cross-national research team composed of graduate students and professors from the four countries, and created a common dataset that collected information on articles published in the highest ranked national, European and international journals between 1999 and 2014. The findings suggest that political science research in these countries has been running in two separate worlds: the domestic and the foreign levels. Also, the analyses point to a divergence between north and south regarding the predominant fields, topics and the interest for Europe, and institutional concentration.

This paper questions how the EU Member States handled the 2015 migrant crisis. The EU Humanitarian Aid Policy allows the coexistence of unilateralism, partial delegation and full delegation. Consequently, each EU Member State can also act autonomously. The paper records first the presence of different behaviours among EU Member States in the field of humanitarian aid. Second, it finds a correlation between states’ concern for the defence of their sovereignty, facing the risk of ‘fragilisation’, and the propensity to solidarity. Third, this correlation between fragility and solidarity has a causal direction that corroborates the research hypothesis according to which the higher the state fragility, the less its solidarity. Fourth, the article categorises the EU Member States into four groups according to their generosity.

African politics long revolved around ‘personal rulers’ who either overstayed in office or were quickly ousted by coups. The multiparty reforms of the 1990s were meant to change and regularise the way in which African rulers access and are removed from office. There is, however, a dearth of systematic data through which the evolution and implications of leadership transitions can be examined. We thus built a comprehensive Africa Leadership Change (ALC) dataset covering all 54 countries in the continent from 1960 to 2015. The dataset provides information for all leaders who held power in the region, the modes of access to leadership and several other key election and regime variables. An exploratory analysis illustrates how Africa’s reforms affected the dynamics and timing of leaders’ replacement, as well as their socio-economic implications. A comparison with existing datasets shows that ALC is more suitable for investigating leadership transitions in Africa.

Whether we like it or not, English has become the lingua franca of political science. The symposium presents three thoughtful essays about the pros and cons of this domination and what can and should be done to mitigate the negative consequences.

We examine and discuss the state of political science in Ireland, using a new dataset on articles published in major domestic, European, and international academic journals by authors affiliated with Irish institutions during the period 1999–2014. Our main findings are as follows: political scientists in Ireland have generally focused more on comparative politics and international relations than on methodology, political theory, or public policy. In terms of methods and authorship, however, there are some notable differences between articles published in domestic, European, and international journals. Qualitative analysis and single case studies have been more commonly employed in national-level publications, while inferential quantitative analysis and large-N data have been more widely used in international-level articles. Gender balance in authorship is now more the norm in national journals than in European and international journals. Finally, Irish political science has undergone significant changes during the period examined. There have been increases in co-authoring and the use of inferential quantitative methods and large-N data which are typically associated with the approaches taken in the major international journals of political science. In this regard, Irish political science has become more ‘globalised’.

This paper maps out the network of researchers on environmental security from the end of the 1980s to 2014, providing a systematic analysis of how the research is organized in this interdisciplinary field. Drawing on the Web of Science database, we generated a co-citation analysis that exhibits the cognitive structure of the field. Twenty interviews were conducted in order to uncover relationships of cooperation, rivalry and conflict so as to understand the structure of academic debates inside the field over time. The research findings highlight that central authors have had a long-lasting influence on the field despite the evolution of their productivity. We also found that the field is composed of six fairly structured groups as well as a few peripheral authors, which can in turn be distinguished by their epistemological and methodological choices, as well as geographical centre of gravity.

This Note introduces the Heads of Government dataset, which provides summary information about the ideological orientation of heads of government (left, center, or right, with separately provided information about religious orientation) in 33 states in Western Europe, the Americas, and the Asia–Pacific region between 1870 and 2012. The Note also describes some intriguing empirical patterns when it comes to over-time changes in the political prominence of left-wing, centrist, and right-wing parties.

Social media are the great social leveler – or so some commentators would have us believe. Social media put the power of communication directly into the average person’s hands. They also present opportunities for politicians to improve their contacts with the common person – to directly share their messages with and better understand the concerns of constituents. This study explores whether and to what extent the potential for such citizen–politician engagement is fulfilled. Deploying an original dataset of tweets from politicians in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this exploratory study examines the interlocutors with whom politicians engage reciprocally via Twitter. The results show that a large share of politicians’ genuinely reciprocal exchanges includes average citizens. Although there is much room for improvement, this study suggests that Twitter is indeed opening spaces for citizens and policymakers to engage one another on matters of political import.

As other authors have said, analysing publications is a suitable method for illustrating the development of a discipline because publications are among the most important aspects of a branch of learning. To answer the two major questions posed in the introduction to this symposium – what is published? and who publishes? – we examine the evolution of Political Science in Spain, by focusing on the Political Science and International Relations articles published in top-ranked journals in Spain and at the European and international levels for the period 1999–2014. The relevance of this work is twofold. On the one hand, this symposium focuses on the evolution of the discipline in non-leading countries, providing new knowledge and data, as this has previously been neglected by discipline. On the other, our approach complements previous work that focused on other aspects of the field in Spain, such as institutionalisation and the status of women. In general, our data indicate that Spanish Political Science publications are concentrated at the country level, and there is low presence in European and international journals. Concerning the temporal patterns of publications, little change over time is observed at the national level but at the European and international levels a recent rising trajectory can be seen.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether citizens are more likely to vote in a political system that uses a proportional electoral system if the election is close. The results show that citizens who live in Swedish municipalities in which the competition between the two leading parties is close are more likely to vote. However, the results also show that the vote gap between the two major traditional blocs, the left and the right, is not important for citizens when they are considering whether or not to vote in municipal elections. In the study, a theoretical argument has been formulated which suggests that voters are confused and discouraged when there are many aspects to consider regarding the form of an upcoming coalition government. Accordingly, potential voters see the issue of how the coalition will be formed as too complex, and therefore the vote gap between the two blocs is not an issue that is prioritised by potential voters.

Linguistic diversity and multilingualism have implications for our understanding of politics that should be debated more thoroughly in connection with key epistemological and methodological issues in political science. Finding an appropriate approach to the linguistic frame of all political activities, and of the analysis of these activities, remains a crucial concern for those scholars in our discipline who are convinced that understanding politics requires understanding political culture, and that political cultures tend to overlap to a significant extent with linguistic cultures. From this perspective, the dominance of English in scholarly communication at the global level must be counterbalanced by a strong commitment to fostering and sustaining a multilingual ethos in our immediate academic environment.

This paper focuses on the democratic quality of ‘new’ modes of EU governance. Since these innovative governance arrangements are more likely to demonstrate democratic features of a deliberative nature, the criteria for an ideal type of deliberative democracy are developed based on the well-known work of theorists Jürgen Habermas and Iris Marian Young. The empirical test case of the Industrial Emissions Directive and, more specifically, the selection and deliberation processes of its Technical Working Groups are assessed using these criteria. The research reveals how a particular new mode of EU governance works in practice and how it performs from the perspective of deliberative democracy.

Political science has for some time been afflicted with an existential and empirical angst concerning impact and relevance. This is by no means a new or unique disciplinary pathology, but it is one that has intensified in recent years. The reasons for this intensification have been explored in a burgeoning literature on ‘the tyranny of impact’. The central argument of this article is that a focus on the ‘relevance gap’ within political science, and vis-à-vis the social sciences more generally, risks failing to comprehend the emergence of a far broader and multifaceted ‘expectations gap’. The core argument and contribution of this article is that the future of political science will depend on the politics and management of the ‘expectations gap’ that has emerged. Put slightly differently, the study of politics needs to have a sharper grasp of the politics of its own discipline and the importance of framing, positioning, connecting vis-à-vis the broader social context.

Studying a sample of recently published papers in the main Economics journals, I find that these American journals mostly publish work on American data, written by members of American universities. I argue that this state of affairs is not essentially because of a language problem, but is explained by the domination of US universities on the international academic market in Economics. This domination has thus direct consequences for the topics of research, and thus for the accumulation of knowledge, in Economics.

In this article, we present a new dataset containing political science publications on Norwegian, European and international levels by authors affiliated with Norwegian institutions. 564 articles from 1999 to 2014 are coded according to a variety of variables. Using this dataset, we explore questions regarding who publishes and what is published in Norwegian political science. We confirm suspicions that publications in international journals often contain quantitative methods, while publications in national journals use qualitative methods; that it is predominately professors who publish in high ranking international journals and that women are still strongly underrepresented in publications on all levels, despite rise in tenured female academic staff in Norway. However, we see a trend of more mixed-sex research teams on the international level, which can be explained by two interconnected hypotheses: (I) publication on the international level is more prestigious, and will often require collaboration between several researches; (II) there has been a rise in female PhDs while professors are still mostly male. By contrasting findings from Ireland, Portugal, and Spain, we also present the status of Norwegian political science in an international context. We encourage researchers to investigate further the evolution of Norwegian political science using these data.

English’s role as political science’s lingua franca should inspire reflection but not alarm. Greater multilingualism would undercut academic exchange and provide only a mirage of linguistic equality. The profession should nonetheless recognize and work to mitigate advantages held by native speakers.

How was the flow of Portuguese political science publications across national, European and international levels during the last 15 years? Applying the framework proposed by this symposium, our analysis of 182 top ranked articles shows that (i) articles published in top foreign journals present distinctive characteristics as they predominantly rely on the use of quantitative methods, belong to the comparative politics field, confer less attention to democratisation, and are mostly written by mixed teams concentrated in only two institutions; (ii) differently, articles of top national journals present similar features to other local production (predominantly qualitative inward-oriented and written by one male author); and (iii) despite the widespread rapid growth of the discipline in the country, there is no significant change in the nature of these articles within or across the three observed levels during the period of observation.

Current research struggles to illuminate significant learning outcomes of role-play simulations, such as Model European Union (MEU) and Model United Nations (MUN). In this study, we introduce a model for measuring simulation effects, distinguishing between cognitive, affective and regulative learning outcomes. In particular, we introduce the MISS-model (Motivation, Interest and Self-efficacy in Simulations), which enables measuring affective learning outcomes more in depth and connects these with other learning outcomes. To get more insight in how students vary with respect to affective learning outcomes, we apply the MISS-model in a cross-continental simulation context. Study participants included 133 students. Students’ differences were explored using independent t tests, one-way ANOVA and ANCOVA. Results show student variation for all affective learning outcomes and thus support for applying the MISS-model to measure affective learning outcomes of simulations more in depth. Findings are discussed with regard to simulation practice and future research on simulation effects.

In the 20 years after its introduction, the principal-agent model has seen increasing use to study political processes in virtually all policy domains in which the EU is active. Relaxing the strict assumptions that guided the original economic applications has greatly widened the scope for potential applications. This very phenomenon has also created an existential challenge to the model’s contemporary use, which is combining the reductionist aims of the model (from which it derives its strength) with the complex empirical settings to which it is increasingly applied. To facilitate this balancing exercise, we propose a two-step approach to principal-agent analysis, in which the mapping of the principal-agent proof relation is separated from the effective analysis that examines the reasons, modalities and consequences of delegation and control in the EU. In doing so, we show how the principal-agent model can continue to provide new insights at the various stages of the research process.