Ever-increasing international migration has challenged the democratic dimension of political inclusion, especially with incorporating non-resident populations into national electoral practices. This has stimulated scholars to examine more closely the processes of emigrant enfranchisement, transnational voting behaviour and non-electoral participation by non-residents. Yet, a lack of comprehensive dialogue exists between migration studies and the literature on political participation. By combining these theoretical avenues, this special issue fills the gap in connecting the trajectories of non-resident citizens, co-ethnics and/or second-generation migrants with (perceived) homeland politics. We focus on specific European country cases both from a cross-regional perspective and by using a case study strategy in homeland and residence country contexts to respond to a set of previously unanswered research questions.

The literature discussing the European Union foreign policies and external actorness has comprehensively analysed the EU abilities, successes and challenges when trying to diffuse its norms, policy practices and institutional solutions to other actors around the world. However, we are missing an independent research agenda discussing how EU external actorness evolves because of such interactions. A reinforced EU external actorness agenda should look at how EU norms and policy practices get to interact with each other. Moreover, it should account for how the agency of non-EU actors contributes to the evolving EU external actorness. This analytical approach has the potential to unpack the EU learning journey when translating norms into new policy practices. The current article showcases the importance of this agenda while proposing an exploratory pilot quantitative methodology based on an EU aid budgets analysis. It hypothesises instances of EU policy interpretation and discusses the case of interregionalism and delegated cooperation as examples of interacting EU policy practices.

In this editorial, we present the new guidelines for research transparency and open data when publishing in European Political Science. These standards are drawn from the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines. In introducing these guidelines, we take an opportunity to reflect on the importance of research transparency, the challenges that it faces, and offer a few suggestions to encourage and foster a culture of open data.

Do citizens and Members of the European Parliament agree on the format and future of the EU? While the literature has emphasized the gap between pro-European elites and increasingly Eurosceptic electorates, this article relies on a novel dataset to explore the implications of measures of such (in)congruence at the EU level. We compare the preferences of elected representatives and of voters on a wide range of issues: democracy at the supranational level, the reform of EU policies, as well as institutions. The empirical analysis relies on a citizen survey and on an MEP survey conducted in the framework of the RECONNECT project. We evidence that the level of congruence varies across issues and that it is the representatives, not the citizens, who drive polarization.

Research on populist attitudes has bloomed in recent years, especially among political science and communication scholars. While this trend is undoubtedly positive to unravel what the causes and consequences of individuals’ populism are, rapid accumulation of knowledge is also challenging, as numerous articles are published simultaneously using diverse theoretical, methodological, and data strategies. This systematic literature review considers all articles stored in the Web of Science and published in English that refer to populist attitudes, without time restrictions (N = 138). After a detailed reading of all articles, we focus on the most relevant findings considering populist attitudes both as dependent and independent variables. Main areas of consensus, disagreements, and guidelines for future research are considered.

Over the last decade, the field of political science has been exposed to two concomitant developments: a surge of Big Data (BD) and a growing demand for transparency. To date, however, we do not know the extent to which these two developments are compatible with one another. The purpose of this article is to assess, empirically, the extent to which BD political science (broadly defined) adheres to established norms of transparency in the discipline. To address this question, we develop an original dataset of 1555 articles drawn from the Web of Science database covering the period 2008–2019. In doing so, we also provide an assessment of the current level of transparency in empirical political science and quantitative political science in general. We find that articles using Big Data are significantly less likely than other, more traditional works of political science, to share replication files. Our study also illustrates some of the promises and challenges associated with extracting data from Web of Science and similar databases.

Portuguese emigration has a long global history and, in recent decades, has increased substantially and diversified its range of destinations. Recent emigration, predominantly to the European Union and Lusophone countries in Africa, complemented the traditional 19th to twentieth centuries’ waves of emigration to the Americas. The Portuguese Diaspora is multigenerational and globally distributed, although diverse. How are those generations of migrants organized within the local spaces of the Diaspora? Based on an innovative survey of more than 500 Portuguese Diaspora organisations, this paper shows how migrant engagement policies and practices are evolving and dealing with the new types of Diaspora relations, organisations and institutions. The main output of this research is an exploratory typology of the contemporary apparatuses of these Portuguese Diaspora systems and their nodes. This typology characterises the modern political engagement of non-resident citizens through their participation in associations and other social networks. With this pioneering paper, we intend to open a discussion regarding the means and forms available to mobilise current and past emigrant groups within a meaningful Diaspora policy.

Focusing on the3million—a major organisation that was formed after the 2016 Brexit Referendum to represent EU citizens in the UK, this article explores the role of online communication in supporting civic actors’ lobbying and mobilisation strategies at local, national and international levels. Apart from multi-scalar dimensions of these civic organisations’ work and of the way EU citizens themselves engage, we identify different strategies of impact. These are inter-linked and performed in a nonlinear fashion and include: emotionalising; politicising; channelling; contesting. These findings elaborate on the way multinational diaspora formation and mobilisation in the 21st century should be conceptualised, and their importance for stakeholder empowerment. We argue that contextual factors—both in terms of the socio-political capital of the people engaged in mobilisation and the features and dynamics of opportunity structures in a particular country and historical moment—are important in understanding why civic actors emerge, how they mobilise and the way their status and focus of their work transforms over time. The article significantly contributes to research studying the use of digital communications and especially e-newsletters and e-mails by non-state actors for mobilising and lobbying purposes.

Not only the content, but also the context of election pledges should affect how voters respond to broken and fulfilled pledges. Borrowing from other disciplines, the hypotheses in this study propose that voters with low expectations reward pledge fulfilment more than voters with high expectations, while voters with high fulfilment expectations punish pledge-breakers more severely than voters with low expectations. A survey experiment using real-life political events was designed where 2465 respondents first received information that either significantly raised or lowered their expectations of pledge fulfilment. They were then presented with the actual fulfilment status of the pledge, either confirming or disconfirming their manipulated expectations, and asked to give their perceptions of the governing party’s performance. Interestingly, the findings support the presence of a confirmation, not a disconfirmation bias, suggesting that pledge performance attitudes are formed more similarly to other political attitudes than evaluations of private/public goods or services. Combined with a negativity bias in media coverage of election pledges, this confirmation bias in voters provides a partial explanation of the low esteem voters generally hold of governments’ pledge fulfilment. The results have implications for our understanding of how pledge fulfilment matters to voters, and how governments are held accountable for their performance.

Political theorists and scientists have published extensive scholarship on the political representation of the marginalised. Some notable and widely cited scholars include Jane Mansbridge, Anne Phillips, Iris M. Young, Suzanne Dovi, and Melissa Williams. They have mostly focused on the importance of representation of women and argue that such representation enhances the functioning of representative democracies. This strand of literature has made significant contributions to contemporary research, especially on studies showing how and why political representation matters. Underdiscussed, nonetheless, is how such classic studies should be taught in a classroom in the context of global movements, namely #BlackLivesMatter, #StopAsianHate, and #MeToo, where various marginalised identities intersect when subjected to oppression. We contest and strengthen some of these ideas in extant scholarship promoting diversity politics by taking intersectional and decolonial approaches. We advocate for prioritising intersectionality over diversity and for decolonising teaching political representation by centring the feminist works of BIPOC and Global South scholars. By challenging both the absence of minoritised women as political actors as well as scholars—as a matter of the production of knowledge and as political activism—we create an inclusive learning environment. We enable both the educators and students to reflect on their positionalities and furthermore achieve the long-term goal of equality in the classrooms, political institutions, and beyond.

Theories of policy responsiveness assume that political decision-makers can rationally interpret information about voters’ likely reactions, but can we be sure of this? Political decision-makers face considerable time and information constraints, which are the optimal conditions for displaying decision-making biases—deviations from comprehensive rationality. Recent research has shown that when evaluating policies, political decision-makers display biases related to heuristics—cognitive rules of thumb that facilitate judgments and decision-making—when evaluating policies. It is thus likely that they also rely on heuristics in other situations, such as when forming judgments of voters’ likely reactions. But what types of heuristics do political decision-makers use in such judgments, and do these heuristics contribute to misjudgements of voters’ reactions? Existing research does not answer these crucial questions. To address this lacuna, we first present illustrative evidence of how biases related to heuristics contributed to misjudgements about voters’ reactions in two policy decisions by UK governments. Then, we use this evidence to develop a research agenda that aims to further our understanding of when political decision-makers rely on heuristics and the effects thereof. Such an agenda will contribute to the literature on policy responsiveness.

This article reflects on a pedagogic experiment of engaging with research methods in the teaching of an undergraduate course on “Contemporary Russian Politics” at Newcastle University (UK). We argue that the incorporation of an explicit and systematic discussion and practice of research methods in a Comparative Politics course is important for three interconnected reasons. First, by introducing students to different aspects of the political system and processes of a state or a region, Comparative Politics courses provide a perfect structure for discussing and practicing a variety of research methods. Second, Comparative Politics courses allow us to work with different kinds of data and support our students to become more critically aware data-users. Finally, they provide us with ample opportunity to reflect on identity construction and positionality: how do we interpret the Other—whether it is a state or a region, how do different data and research methods shape our understanding and knowledge of the Other, and how are our understandings of Self linked to our interpretations of the Other?

This study examines political media consumption among non-resident citizens, and whether following politics in traditional and social media in their country of residence and origin has a mobilizing effect on voting in origin-country elections. The topic of our study is inspired by the trend towards increased enfranchisement of external citizens, improved methods for participation from abroad, and the transformation of the media landscape with enhanced possibilities for external voters to follow politics in their country of origin. Based on a survey directed towards a stratified random sample of Finnish external citizens in 15 countries, we find that politically oriented media consumption in the country of origin substantially increases the likelihood of participating in origin-country elections and that this effect holds for traditional media channels as well as for social media. A corresponding mobilizing effect is, however, not found for following politics in the country of residence. This demonstrates the value of relevant information for political participation.

Despite increasing access to high quality television (TV) series in the golden age of television, political scientists (and especially scholars of comparative politics) have not systematically considered the possibilities that television series might offer for instruction. This article aims to fill this gap by illustrating the opportunities for teaching political science using TV series and outlining ways of integrating television series into the classroom using selected clips, screening full episodes, or using an entire series as a text. We then illustrate these methods by discussing ways that television series might be used in a typical introductory course on European politics.

While traditional and non-traditional issues of security are at the very top of the policy agenda, security studies has been subject to much criticism. These concerns have often been framed in terms of challenges to the field’s relevance. This paper seeks to further the debate on relevance in security studies. Specifically, the paper examines the field in three major dimensions of relevance: responsiveness, diversity, and intellectual pluralism. Unlike previous disciplinary investigations, which have solely focused on United States (US) security studies, this paper examines trends pertaining to relevance in security studies in the USA as well as in Europe. The paper finds some evidence of responsiveness, a slight trend toward a more equitable share of female authors, and conflicting evidence when it comes to intellectual pluralism. The paper suggests that the field appears more as a ‘broad church’ than ‘irrelevant cult’ when its output in the USA, as well as in Europe, is taken into account.

Employability is one of these concepts that polarises opinion. There are those who see it as an integral part of student education and learning, and those who see it as undermining conventional academic study. In this paper, we argue it is a key part of student learning experiences and use a case study of a particular module—'Politics in Action'—to highlight the potential benefits to students. This should be seen in conjunction with the rest of a degree programme, where employability maybe embedded but not prioritised. Student feedback reinforces the potential benefits of prioritising employability in one part of a degree programme, while acknowledging the beneficial spillover into other areas of study. There is, however, potential resource cost in adopting this type of approach to delivering such a bespoke module. It is far from being a conventional module, but the impact and benefits to student learning and understanding are clear.

Between 2010 and 2019, five Eurozone governments in economic difficulty received assistance from international lenders on condition that certain policies specified in the Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) were implemented. To what extent were those conditions implemented? After conditionality, to what extent have governments rolled back changes pursued under external constraint? Do we find variation across governments regarding implementation and reversals, and if so, why?. This paper presents a database allowing the answers to those questions, the Data Base on EcoNomic Adjustment Policies (ENAP) database. We codified all policies and reforms included in the MoU’s, and whether those were subsequently fully or partially implemented. We also codified all decisions taken by bailed out countries since the beginning of the financial crisis and verified whether those had been kept or fully or partially reversed until December 2019. For each condition or policy, a series of explanatory variables were coded: policy sector, type of reform, timing and type of reversal, origin of reversal and number of veto players. The ENAP shows that in all countries, MoU’s were largely implemented and are resilient.

There are many ways of quantifying the success of political science departments, all of which have advantages and disadvantages. The most relevant international rankings consider factors such as research quality, research quantity, or academic reputation. None of the established rankings consider how frequently departments place their alumni into the academic job market. As this criterion should arguably be among the most important ones for prospective graduate students, this paper analyzes original data on the educational background of faculty members (N = 3548) at highly reputable political science departments in North America and Europe to create an up-to-date ranking based on academic placement records. The insights from this article provide guidance to undergraduate and graduate students when considering different options for the pursuit of a Ph.D., and hopefully also motivate departments to place greater significance on their placement records through increased transparency. In addition, the data highlights the large gender gap in placement success across all departments.

Over the past decades, diasporas’ engagement in homeland elections has become a highly salient issue, especially given the widespread implementation of enfranchisement policies for citizens living abroad. Spain stands out in the European context with its long emigration history, its sizeable population abroad, and the enactment of the so-called ‛voto rogado’ (‛begged vote’) system that hindered external voting by requiring non-resident citizens to submit a separate voter registration application to become eligible for casting the ballot in Spanish elections. Yet, little is known so far about the voting patterns of Spaniards abroad. This article aims to fill this gap by examining the electoral (non)alignment between resident and non-resident voters in the Spanish general elections held over the past three decades. We argue that a comprehensive assessment of electoral (non)alignment must consider two different analytical layers of turnout and party choice. The article shows that changing electoral rules on extraterritorial voting, the increasingly diverse profile of Spaniards abroad, and Spanish parties’ strategies towards the diaspora interact to account for differences in overseas Spaniards’ turnout rates and party choices when compared to resident voters.