Taking stock of the recent growth in engagement between cities and global governance, this article questions whether such developments align with the historical and political tenets of municipalism. It asks: does the ‘rise of the city’ as a global political actor advance the municipalist project, despite the fact that it takes place in, and ostensibly follows the rules of, the state-led system? To evaluate this, it conceptualises municipalism as a multifaceted project encompassing institutional, normative, and technical dimensions, rooted in principles of decentralisation, local democracy, political participation, and transnational solidarity. The article then empirically analyses the growing engagement of cities in global governance, specifically in relation to the United Nations’ global agendas. It finds that while cities have gained visibility and influence, their institutional role so far remains largely consultative and informal, falling short of municipalist aspirations for formal recognition and decision-making power. Normatively, efforts to embed principles such as decentralisation and local democracy at the global level have faced significant resistance from states. In contrast, the technical dimension – manifested in city networks and policy-oriented cooperation – has expanded substantially, though often in depoliticised and technocratic forms. The article concludes that contemporary city activism reflects only a partial and uneven realisation of municipalism, with its political ambitions constrained but its technical practices flourishing within existing global governance structures.

We are witnessing experiments with political forms of life not seen for nearly a hundred years. Political forms of life are not limited to preferences for particular policies. They entail competing visions for political form itself—an arrangement of power as democracy, socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, or some combination thereof—and a way of life that goes with it. My analysis centres on my own political experiment: a classroom-based citizens’ assembly that I see as a microcosm of this wider phenomenon. This experiment reveals a shared desire among participants to exercise authorship over political arrangements, even as they divide between democratic enthusiasts and sceptics. It is this very authorship that liberal democracy has denied people, even when governments have instituted their own citizens’ assemblies. These citizens’ assemblies seek to expand participation on policy creation while ultimately constraining people to answer predefined questions, leaving the liberal-democratic structure of political decision making intact. I propose that contemporary movements, including authoritarian and other anti-democratic tendencies, can be understood partly as responses to liberal democracy’s reluctance to cede authority over political form. The result is a proliferation of “political experiments” through which individuals and groups attempt to reclaim that authorship.

Winston Churchill’s line—that democracy is “the worst form of Government” except all other forms that have been tried—concedes that liberal democracy cannot normatively satisfy us. In the absence of compelling positive arguments, liberals retreat to the Churchill line. But the Churchill line operates by comparing democracy with other, even worse forms of government. In the older embedded democracies, there is no recent direct experience of other forms of government. The Churchill line therefore requires a “specter regime”—a repugnant, yet viable foreign authoritarian regime that can serve as a foil. Without the USSR, it is difficult to find such regimes. Efforts to make China, Russia, and Iran into specter regimes carry enormous costs. But without positive arguments, these costs become hard to avoid.

In this introduction to the Special Issue “Religion and Democratic Theory,” we sketch how political theory can contribute to understanding contemporary political challenges in the context of religion and democracy. We outline the contributions to this Special Issue in terms of their main claims.

The articles by Kees van Kersbergen and Daniele Caramani constitute an impressive joint plea in favour of descriptive analyses within comparative politics. They also warn, less convincingly, against an alleged obsession of the discipline with variation that, according to them, does not do justice to the similarity of many cases. This response demonstrates that limiting the analysis to similar cases creates the risk of engaging in the hapless exercise of explaining the constant. Augmenting the role of description without simultaneously advancing sound theoretical models furthermore leads to theory-free data mining exercises. I argue that all empirically oriented fields in political science could profit from what I call ‘causal description’ and hence the in-depth univariate analysis of the dependent variable.

Although American political science is, as Bernard Crick emphasised, in many respects a distinctly American science of politics, its evolution has been deeply informed by European ideas. This was quite obviously the case during the nineteenth century, when the German concept of the state dominated the discourse of the field, as well as in the early part of the twentieth century, when English scholars made significant contributions to the theory of democratic pluralism. By the middle of the century, German émigrés had contributed to a fundamental transformation in political theory which challenged the mainstream vision of political enquiry; but what is less well understood is the extent to which the reaction to this challenge in behavioural political science was also based on ideas that were the product of the European exodus.

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.

Political theory, with its abstract reasoning and unfamiliar vocabulary, is a subject that students are often apprehensive about. Whilst popular culture has been employed extensively in the teaching of other areas of political science, such as international relations, I seek to draw attention to its comparative under-use in political theory and argue that it is a highly effective teaching tool for this subject. I use the autoethnographic method to make my case, drawing on my years-long experience in the university classroom, and take this position for three key reasons: the familiar nature of popular culture allows students to more easily acclimate to the political theory classroom, it renders abstract political theory concrete, and provides a useful arena in which to better test the logic of political theory arguments, enhancing student criticality.

This article seeks to explore democratic theory by focusing on the example of agonistic democracy, in which contest between citizens is valued for its potential to render politics more inclusive, more engaging, and more virtuous. Using Connolly and Tully's inclusivism, Chantal Mouffe's adversarialism, and David Owen's perfectionism, the article discusses democratic theory as a critique, a series of normative proposals, and a potential bridge between political theory and public policy. It is this bridge that enables democratic theory to pull together critical and normative discussions with those surrounding public policy and institutional design.

The article introduces a discussion on approaches to the history of political thought based on a panel at the ECPR General Conference in Potsdam, 2009. After reconstructing the three classic approaches, the Cambridge School, the ‘Begriffsgeschichte’, and Foucault's Genealogy as well as more recent developments in the field, the authors outline a scheme for further methodological and comparative research. They also emphasise the importance of historical approaches for political theory and political science.

Despite the creation of ever more journals in the field of political theory, all so far seem to have found their distinctive niche. By and large, competition between journals has proven beneficial for the discipline, opening up new areas of research and stimulating innovation. As with other goods, product differentiation, quality control and association with a major distributor are the keys to success.