Rankings of departments are key Information tools for central administrations of universities, public and private funders of research, and students and faculty. For example, to find out how European universities perform compared to institutions in the United States, the European Economics Association commissioned research into the global ranking of economics departments (esp. Coupé, 2003). Applying a similar method in political science to the dominant method used in the natural sciences and economics - looking at the number and impact of articles published in the main journals in the discipline in a given period - produces quite robust results for our discipline (Hix, 2004). One of the advantages of this method is that it enables comparisons to be made across Europe, between Europe and the United States, and within European countries. The next section explains and justifies the method.

The seventh congress of the French Political Science Association (AFSP) - held in Lille in September 2002 - provided an opportunity to interview the Association's president, Jean Leca. As a result of this interview, it is now possible to offer EPS readers an overview of French political science, following the articles on the discipline in the Netherlands, in Sweden and in Central and Eastem Europe, that have appeared in previous issues of the journal.

CR - What are the origins of contemporary French political science?

JL - Its genesis can be traced to the end of the nineteenth century with the birth of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (Free School of Political Sciences) created by Emile Boutmy in Paris in 1871. This institution aimed at training a new state elite by teaching a range of disciplines.

The history of political science has not yet acquired an established place among the subfields of political science. Still, there is a growing interest in the history of the discipline. Most ofthe existing literature, however, relates to the histories of American and European political science (Crick, 1959; Somit and Tanenhaus, 1967; O'Furner, 1975; Collini, Winch, and Burrow, 1983; Ricci, 1984; Seidelman and Harpham, 1985; Anckar and Berndtson, 1988; Farr, 1988 and 1990; Ross, 1991; Easton, Gunnell, and Graziano (eds), 1991; Easton, Gunnell, and Stein (eds), 1995; Silverberg (ed.), 1998). Even a cursory examination of this literature reveals that some authors prefer writing such history from the point of view of what happened when, how, and why. Others experiment with generalisable reflections derived from historical findings, and a minority concentrates on the effort of understanding and interpreting the texts and ideas produced by the practitioners of political science.

A joke about economists can also be applied to theorists: ‘A theorist is someone who cannot see something working in practice without asking whether it would work in theory’. Less strange but more problematic is the case in which something works in theory but not in practice. Unfortunately for the theorist, then, the old rule applies: ‘When theory conflicts with empirical research, the problem usually lies with the theory’ (Marwell and Oliver, 1993: 39).

In the case of the theory of rational choice we can say that it is very popular, but that its large claims have been subject to severe criticism. Especially in the fields of political science and sociology, rational choice is often interpreted as a product of ‘economic imperialism', not as an external inspiration. The essence of the critique consists of the simple but crucial observation: human behaviour is not rational. At least not always.

When Carole Pateman influentially mapped the development of feminist political theory in the late 1980s, she suggested that it starts with feminist interpretations of the classic texts, moves on to extend the range of questions asked, and culminates in a distinctive feminist theory (Pateman, 1989: 2). Others suggested that it was more helpful to see these as ideological perspectives rather than chronological stages: as Sandra Whitworth (1994: 75-88) argued in the mid 1990s, liberal feminists seek to add women in, radical femtnists assert a feminine perspective, and postmodern feminists deconstruct the fiction of the category of ‘woman’.

This three-fold schema of ‘adding women in’, ‘extending the boundaries’, and ‘reconceptualising the core concepts’ may have been a useful schema for understanding the development of feminist political theory.

A lively debate about the contours of contemporary political science in Europe unfolded in the initial issues of European Political Science among a group of scholars who represent the diversity of the study of politics in Europe today. At the core of the discussion was whether political science in Europe is developing into a strong and autonomous discipline. Missing from the debate was any significant treatment of the contributions of feminist scholarship to the state of the discipline in Europe, past, present, or future. Brief remarks from Sapiro and Siim, both experts of gender and politics, do clearly indicate that ‘political research on gender’ (Siim, 2001) is a part of European political science, and constitutes one ‘of the particular strengths of global intellectual leadership already exerted from Europe’ (Sapiro, 2001); however, the general frame of the debate failed to give credit to a new area of European political science, Feminist Comparative Policy (FCP).

In the preceding section, Amy Mazur outlined the main features and strengths of Feminist Comparative Policy. This new perspective provides a systematic way of analysing policies and their impact on gender relations, and thereby offers important contributions to the analysis of the state and to political science in general. However, feminist political science is far from a homogenous field. To paraphrase currently unfashionable past revolutionaries, a thousand methodological flowers blossom within feminist analysis as elsewhere in political science. This section intends to contribute to the ongoing dialogue between different perspectives, disciplines, and sub-fields within as well as outside of political science, as recommended by Birte Siim (2001) in an earlier contribution to EPS, by outlining key debates and methodological controversies within feminist political theory on the state. Particular attention will be given to the methodological contributions of discourse theory to feminist political theory as well as to empirical analysiS of gendered state action and policies.

In the foregoing sections, Amy Mazur and Véronique Mottier discuss feminist methodologies in feminist comparative policy (Mazur) and in feminist political theory (Mottier). The aim of this piece is to apply some of their methodological insights. The article will briefly analyse some feminist discourses on the state in Finland and Britain and the ways in which these discourses influence feminist engagements with the state. As such, the piece captures the idea that the state has become an important focus of feminist theory, as argued by Mazur and Mottier. More specifically, the article combines three aspects that are increasingly central for feminist political analyses: the contributions of comparative theory (Mazur) and discourse analysis (Mottier), and the importance of contextual theory (Siim, 2001).

The methodological split in political science between different schools, for example between ‘rationalists’ and ‘social constructivists’, has been challenged by feminist political research. The European criticism of the American model of political research can be read as a methodological critique of ethnocentrism and ‘methodological individualism’. Comparatively speaking there is at least a normative vision of a more genuine methodological pluralism in European political science. The articles in this symposium present methodological pluralism as one key principle in feminist political research, which can serve as a basis for a dialogue between feminist research and mainstream political science. They illustrate that there is a conversation in feminist political research between an empirically grounded political research, cross-national analysis sensitive to context, and discourse analysis inspired by post-structuralism.