Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and over a decade after its reunification, the European Union (EU) is experiencing increasingly more challenges toward its unity. The EU has experienced a number of crises in the early 2000s, the breakaway of one of its members in 2019, and is challenged by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The latter crisis exhibits, on the one hand, the need for social coherence and unified policies, and on the other, has prompted the physical closure of borders, and divergent responses by domestic political elite. One such reaction—the adopted strengthening of power for Hungary’s Prime Minister—has prompted an international outcry and re-heated the debate of the democratic backtracking of some of the new EU member-states. Analyzing the process of European Enlargement and the changing sentiments about European Integration in a number of East European countries, this symposium brings to the fore important questions about the relationship between Eastern and Western Europe. Although there is a general consensus that both the East and the West have benefited and continue to benefit from their reunion, it is nevertheless the case that the quick assimilation of liberal values has led to policies seen as threatening the liberal democracy model of the EU that we need to address in order to preserve the stability of the Union.

This article discusses the extent to which it is possible to label European integration as a new critical juncture of politics in Central Europe by using four Central European countries of Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia as the focus of our investigation. The article presents the historical critical junctures of Central European efforts to liberalise and democratise politics and to create liberal democratic political institutions: the Revolution of 1848, the emergence of independent states in 1918, the Sovietisation of Central Europe between 1945–48 and democratic transition after 1989. We argue that after 2004, when the Central European countries entered the European Union (EU), the claims related to the liberal democratic nature of the EU polity triggered nationalist and illiberal opposition. Therefore, the EU membership has provided a new critical juncture impacting the consolidation or destabilisation of liberal democratic patterns of government. The article further argues that path dependence on the previous critical junctures of Central European politics plays a role in the political development of these countries’ stance on European integration. The authors show that there has been a contradiction between nationalism and liberal concept of democracy since the mid-nineteenth century and that this contradiction manifests in critical junctures based on European integration too.

To many citizens in post-communist states European Union (EU) membership represented a historical–civilisational choice: an end to the Cold War division of Europe and symbolic reuniting of Eastern Europe with a ‘West’ that they had always considered themselves to be part of culturally and spiritually. In fact, in spite of its multiple crises, there continued to be high levels of support for EU membership and ‘Hard’ rejectionist Eurosceptic discourses were confined to the margins of politics. However, the increasing sense of East European cultural distinctiveness, highlighted by the post-communist states’ responses to the European migration crisis, meant that pro-EU discourses were less romantic and more instrumental, driven increasingly by a cost–benefit analysis based on an evaluation of the tangible material benefits that the Union was felt to deliver.

The article discusses some of the paradoxes of minority accommodation in Eastern Europe 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the course of doing so, it focuses on four specific issues: volatility, sequencing, a shift from nationalism (group) to social conservatism (grid), and on the radicalisation of mainstream parties. Volatility is tied to the ebb and flow of shifts in the status quo associated with minority accommodation, which elucidates both why radical right mobilisation accelerates and why it loses steam. The expansion of minority rights leads to political ‘extreme reactions’. Sequencing matters since minority accommodation coincided with democratisation in Eastern Europe, so the struggle over minority rights is confounded with a concurrent regime change. Shifts from group to grid refer to the recent rise in socially conservative issues as sources of polarisation. Finally, extremist parties can threaten democratic pluralism. Nevertheless, large radicalised mainstream parties that control parliaments, not small extremist parties, subvert the institutions of democratic oversight. The threat originates from the mainstream and is exacerbated by the fact that liberal democracy has not ‘locked in’ in most of Eastern Europe.

Qualitative political science research can significantly increase its credibility if researchers take robust steps toward replicability and enhanced transparency. Making explicit decisions on planning and implementing research, together with commitment to comprehensive reporting, improves transparency. Three instruments serve to this objective: in the planning stage, research protocols map prospective actions in the implementation of research. In the implementing stage, research notebooks permit recording all decisions, deviations and events affecting research. Practical and ethical considerations may prevent the full disclosure of these research notebooks, and, hence, carefully drafted research implementation records provide, in the publication stage, a useful instrument to convey this information. Increased transparency (as created by the use of these three instruments) will lead to better options for replicability, and this, in turn, will increase the validity of qualitative research and dispel some of the concerns about its methodological soundness.

In this study, I examine what characteristics affect early voting in Sweden, and a large-N study of all of Sweden’s 290 municipalities for the four most recent elections is conducted. The results show that the level of early voting is higher in municipalities where the average income is higher; where the level of older people is higher; where the level of the electorate born abroad is higher; in rural municipalities; and in municipalities where the number of early voting sites per one thousand eligible voters is higher. If the goal of the municipalities is to increase early voting, any policy recommendation that is based on the results of this study should ensure that there are numerous early voting sites in the municipalities and if there are not, the municipalities should consider increasing the number of early voting sites they provide.

Recent studies directing attention to how people perceive and define politics have provided valuable contributions to our knowledge of what people do and do not think of as politics. Taken together, the results suggest that individuals’ conceptualisations of politics tend to vary. Considerably less is known, however, about how conceptualisations are related to behaviour. This study aims to fill that gap, by testing the hypothesis that those with a wider conception of what constitutes politics are also more likely to participate in political activities. Drawing on data from a survey administered to students at a Swedish University, the key result shows a clear and positive correlation between conceptualisations of politics and political participation, suggesting that the more issues that people perceive as politics, the more likely it is that they are involved in varieties of political participation. Furthermore, the relationship was still present during analyses including other well-known predictors of participation. This indicates that conceptualisations of politics seem to capture variation in individual political participation better than traditional predictors such as political interest, internal political efficacy, and political awareness. It further suggests that perceptions of politics constitute a distinct political orientation, above and beyond these well-known important factors for understanding political participation. Overall, these results are a first indication that future studies of political participation should not neglect. We therefore suggest that the field of political participation should incorporate indicators of both conceptualisations of politics and political participation.

Systematic and openly accessible data are vital to the scientific understanding of the social, political, and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article introduces the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP), which has generated a unique, publicly available data set from late March 2020 onwards. ACPP has been designed to capture the social, political, and economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the Austrian population on a weekly basis. The thematic scope of the study covers several core dimensions related to the individual and societal impact of the COVID-19 crisis. The panel survey has a sample size of approximately 1500 respondents per wave. It contains questions that are asked every week, complemented by domain-specific modules to explore specific topics in more detail. The article presents details on the data collection process, data quality, the potential for analysis, and the modalities of data access pertaining to the first ten waves of the study.

This paper advocates a holistic approach to assessing international relations in undergraduate education, which revolves around: (a) essays and (b) active learning-related tasks, such as simulation reflective statements/reports and performance. The paper argues that, on the one hand, academic essays are far from irrelevant and it is difficult to overestimate their practical significance. On the other hand, active learning-related tasks are best utilised as a supplementary assessment, expanding the students’ range of transferable skills. The assessment structure advocated in this paper results from a holistic approach to assessment design, which includes teacher’s own experience, familiarity with pedagogical scholarship and input from students. This last element is the least common even though it makes sense to understand how students see their own assessment. To that end, the paper shares the results of a pilot project run at one of the UK universities, which engaged students as partners in rethinking their assessment.

The Higher Education landscape is constantly evolving. Larger and more diverse student cohorts, the growing demands for flexibility and accessibility, but not at the expense of quality, have been driving universities to reimagine learning spaces by using the affordances of digital technologies. While there is an abundance of literature on individual experimentation with blended learning formats at course level, there are far fewer accounts of institutional implementation. This article analyses four cases of institutionalised blended learning implementation at European universities, with a disciplinary focus on political science and international relations. By exploring the strategies, structures and support (Graham et al. in Internet High Educ 18:4–14, 2013), we aim to understand at what stage in the institutionalisation process each case can be situated. Based on our research, we identify five critical factors for a mature blended learning institutional implementation: an integrative approach, a gradual development model, a rigorous evaluation process, strong relations with the university and openness towards cooperation.