Anniversaries are milestone events. They invite those involved to celebrate their achievements, but also reflect about the past, present and future. The 20th anniversary of European Political Science (EPS) is such a landmark. It marks a success story; the development from a news style magazine to a major political science journal. Over the past 20 years, EPS has developed into an outlet in which political scientists exchange about their profession, best practices in teaching and learning, as well as shared authoritative research. We have shaped many professional discussions such as debates about gender equality or the relevancy of political science and have become an authoritative voice in the deliberations of innovative teaching techniques such as simulations or role plays. And in our research section, we have covered the big events in Europe and beyond such as the War in Iraq, Brexit and the European Refugee Crisis. We can be proud of what we have achieved in the past 20 years. However, we are not without challenges, which include among others practicing greater diversity in terms of authorship and the types of articles we publish. This anniversary issue is a first step in this direction. By discussing the political science profession in Europe and beyond, it includes a balance of authors from different parts of Europe and the world, a gender balance in contributors and, above all, it raises some of the largest challenges we, as a discipline, will have to tackle in the next 20 years. These include academic freedom, inequalities in the profession and the relevancy of political science as a discipline.

This article maps the state of political science since the turn of the millennium. It begins by reviewing the influential description of the discipline in Robert Goodin’s (2011 [2009]) introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Political Science. It then introduces an alternative approach, based on citation indexes, to generate a comparative list of influential authors for the same time period. After comparing Goodin’s list with our own, we use the same method to generate a list of the most influential books and articles of the 2009–2018 period and describe how the discipline has changed over the intervening decade. Two of the more interesting findings include the continued importance of books (in addition to articles) in political science citations and an apparent trend towards increased pluralism in recent years.

What contributes toward academic productivity and impact in political science research publications? To consider this issue, Part I of this article describes the core concepts and their operationalization, using the h-index. The study theorizes that variations in this measure may plausibly be influenced by personal characteristics (like gender, career longevity, and formal qualifications), working conditions (academic rank, type of department, and job security), as well as subjective role perceptions (exemplified by the perceived importance of scholarly research or teaching). Part II sets out new evidence used for exploring these issues, drawing upon the ECPR-IPSA World of Political Science survey. This study gathered information from 2446 political scientists in 102 countries around the globe. Part III presents the distribution and analysis of the results, as well as several robustness tests. Part IV summarizes the key findings and considers their broader implications. In general, several personal characteristics and structural working conditions prove significant predictors of h-index scores, whereas motivational goals and role perceptions add little, if anything, to the models. Thus, who you are and where you work seems to predict productivity and impact more than career ambitions and social psychological orientations toward academic work.

In this study, I investigate the evolution of authorship diversity in the scientific journals of three major pan-European professional associations of political research (ECPR, EPSA and EISA), since their first issue until 2020, through an analysis of the bibliometric information of each published item. Established between 1973 and 2019, the seven periodicals under scrutiny (European Journal of Political Research, European Journal of International Relations, European Political Science, European Political Science Review, Political Research Exchange, Political Science Research & Methods and Global Affairs) cover a wide spectrum of political science and offer a convenient gateway for exploring various disciplinary dynamics, with a focus mostly on comparative politics, international relations and political methodology. The dataset includes 5281 articles and 4533 unique authors affiliated to 1029 unique institutions from 73 countries. The analysis shows that, while currently more diverse than ever, all these journals still have a large Western European and/or US core. Research is overwhelmingly produced in OECD member states and about half originates in countries where English is an official language. Although collaborations are increasingly frequent and seem to become the norm, scholars affiliated with Central and Eastern European institutions, as well as women authors are still heavily underrepresented.

European Political Science (EPS) has been a leading political science journal since its launch in 2001. This article examines the contribution of European Political Science over its 20-year history. The bibliometric analysis draws on Web of Science data and VOSviewer software. These tools help detect collaboration networks, bibliographic coupling and co-citations to identify the most relevant topics and knowledge appearing in European Political Science. The evaluation of EPS reveals four areas of interest: migration, education, comparative politics and democracy. Recent interests include the current debate on populisms, social media and political parties, with antecedents and implications that transcend national boundaries.

Over the past twenty years, the field of “gender and politics” has flourished in European political science. An example of this is the growing number of “gender and politics” scholars and the increased attention paid to gender perspectives in the study of the political. Against this backdrop, we take stock of how the “gender and politics” field has developed over the years. We argue that the field has now entered a stage of “consolidation”, which is reflected in the growth, diversification and professionalization of the subfield, as well as in the increased disciplinary recognition from major gatekeepers in political science. But while consolidation comes with specific opportunities, it also presents some key challenges. We identify five such challenges: (1) the potential fragmentation of the field; (2) persisting hierarchies in knowledge production; (3) the continued marginalization of feminist political analysis in “mainstream” political science; (4) the changing link between academia and society; and (5) growing opposition to gender studies in parts of Europe and beyond. We argue that both the “gender and politics” field and political science in general should address these challenges in order to become a truly inclusive discipline.

The sub-field of political party research is an interesting case study of the broader development of the discipline of political science over the past 20 years as it demonstrates the reflexive and evolving relationship between politics researchers and the organizations that they study. Party research has moved on from crises of existence, to studying the resilience and adaptation of these organizations with new and evolving methodologies that have taken party research into the twenty-first century and fostered more collaborative, specialist and increasingly internationalized relationships within the research community. In the last two decades, expectations around research engagement and impact have heightened in response to changes in the research funding environment and the political pressure to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the discipline has intensified. The increasingly heterogeneous, specialized and quantified nature of the subfield has enabled party scholarship to find impact and relevance through the provision of technical advice to parties and policymakers, thereby affecting how parties organize. However, while political party researchers have been able to engage audiences outside academia with this specialized and technical advice, the sub-discipline has shifted away from some of the “bigger picture”, normative questions surrounding the role of parties in modern representative democracies.

Latecomer political science communities have faced multiple challenges in the past decades, including the very establishment of their professional identities. Based on the case study of Hungary, this article argues that publication performance is a substantial component of the identity of the political science profession. Hungary is a notable example among Central and East European (CEE) political science academia in the sense that both the initial take-off of the profession and then its increasing challenges are typical to the CEE region. In an inclusive approach, which encompasses all authors published in the field between 1990 and 2018, as well as their publication record, the analysis demonstrates that political science has undergone major expansion, quality growth and internationalisation but these performance qualities are unevenly spread. These reflect important aspects of the profession’s identity. This agency and performance-based approach to identity formation might well be used to build up identity features elsewhere and also in a comparative manner.

Having experienced a late institutionalisation as an academic discipline in the 1990s, during this century the political science community in Spain has struggled to converge with other fully established counterparts in Western Europe. In this article, we analyse and evaluate how successful these efforts have been concerning internationalisation. The article sheds light on the factors that explain this development. Using data from PhD dissertations defended since 1990 and articles published on SSCI journals since 1985, we demonstrate that the institutional reforms affecting higher education in Spain during the early 2000s, and the austerity measures introduced in the first part of the 2010s to address the economic crisis, together with the evolution of the particular ecology of the discipline, introduced greater competition into the Spanish political science academic market. This, in turn, triggered internationalisation of political scientists in Spain, particularly among the younger cohorts.

This article discusses the integration of scholars from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) into the broader field of European political science. Evaluating data from 2000 to 2020, we ask whether CEE scholars managed to “close the gap” stemming from the initially underdeveloped state of post-communist political science. We contend that the results are rather mixed: CEE scholars have been increasingly present, yet achieved only very limited access to the top levels and mostly remain in a position of dependency. Using the case of Czechia, we discuss the factors that have likely contributed to the perpetuation of this state of integration with limited convergence.

This article discusses the impact of political transformations on political science in Turkey during the Justice and Development Party (AKP) period from 2002 to the present, with a particular focus on the experiences of political scientists. After first taking power and in accordance with its concerns about attaining domestic and international legitimacy, AKP launched a democratization process by implementing several reforms leading toward EU membership. During this process, the boundaries of politics were broadened, enabling political discussion of certain taboo topics. However, this trend was reversed after AKP’s authoritarian populist tendencies strengthened. The party’s growing anti-intellectualist stance has also made scholars the target of the government’s populist discourse. These circumstances make it critical to examine the challenges Turkey’s political scientists experience since their discipline is directly influenced by the boundaries of what is political. This study therefore explores these challenges through ten in-depth interviews conducted with political scientists. It finds that political scientists mostly engage in self-censorship to protect themselves under Turkey’s populist authoritarian atmosphere, which has narrowed down in-class discussion and research agendas leading to the impoverishment of the discipline in Turkey.

Over the last 20 years, the notion of relevance vis-à-vis political science became not only a subject of academic debates but also a domain of practice, largely due to the developments in the research funding, increasingly referred to as the 'impact agenda'. In this article, we explore how the growing focus on socio-economic impact as the assessment criterion of research funding shapes the discipline of political science itself—its knowledge production, dissemination and the emergent forms of accountability of political scientists. The article presents the results of a major international study that has examined the emergence of ‘impact agendas’ across 33 countries. We report on the changing idea of relevance of political science through the lens of its strategic ambiguity and historical evolution. We then explore these broader trends through an in-depth analysis of the UK as an ‘extreme case’ and a blueprint for funding system reforms. These developments, we argue, are not a mere funding policy innovation but rather a paradigm-level change, reshaping the position of political science in society as well as the types of scholarship that are possible and incentivised.