This article discusses the problems and opportunities facing any ‘young’ political scientist working – or wishing to work – in Spanish universities. Starting with a brief description of the delayed development of political science in Spain, it then explains some of the problems facing those seeking jobs in research, before analysing the ongoing reforms of the university recruitment process and the consequences for political scientists. Although there remain many problems in Spanish university recruitment procedures, such as a tendency towards hiring internal candidates at the expense of ‘outsiders’, there are signs that reform is bringing about a slow improvement, and is gradually ensuring a greater degree of excellence.

The phrase sciences politiques was first used by Condorcet, and taken up as political science by Jefferson and Hamilton. The American Framers and their critics had to make up political science as they went along, in order to argue for (or against) a federal constitution from first principles. To do so, they drew on Scottish and French social science. We trace the influence of Scots thought (especially that of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith) and French thought (especially that of Condorcet) on the first generation of political science.

Beginning his career as a structurally oriented area specialist in Italy in the mid-1960s, Sidney Tarrow moved on to a paired comparison of France and Italy, then to more process-oriented work on social movements and contentious politics, and finally to European and transnational contention. In this article, he traces his theoretical development as a series of missteps, which – like a hiker crossing a turbulent stream – took him from one slippery rock to another.

Achievement of the full set of EU objectives in the long run requires basic and critical research in the social sciences and the humanities. A European Research Council (ERC) may offer economies of scale, the alleviation of coordination problems, and the provision of public goods or ‘club goods’ to the social sciences and humanities. It should focus on data sharing and large comparative projects; raising public awareness of the value of the social sciences and humanities, and funding basic and critical research in these disciplines – not just research offering immediate-term extrinsic pay-offs. In order to function properly, such a body should develop standards of assessment and peer review processes that are appropriate for research in the social sciences and humanities. An ERC must receive ‘fresh money’; it must minimise transaction costs – both to attract good applicants and to fund as many of them as possible – and, by giving priority to academic excellence over Lisbon relevance and geography, it must maximise its credibility as a supporter of high-quality research. At a time when competition is supposed to foster excellence in research, academies and private funding bodies must continue to be competitors of the European Research Council.

To explore the transatlantic emigration of the ‘comparative method’(s) is to recover the range of European work – in institutional history, comparative legislation, and the theory of the State – that scholars in the nascent American science of politics drew on in the late nineteenth century. Their nascent science was, however, not merely derivative, and in the changing practices of comparative study from the mid-1880s through 1900 a distinctive American ‘political science’ began to emerge.

This article argues that after the initial expansion of departments and postgraduate courses during and after the mid-1990s in Greece, we are now witnessing the first signs that the academic environment is unable to absorb young academics entering the field. A long ‘waiting list’ of young PhDs, combined with a lack of public funding for new posts, creates a rather negative picture for the future of young Greek political scientists.

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.

We describe the current career system for young political scientists in Germany academia. The situation is still dominated by the apprenticeship model in which young PhD graduates undertake a second supervised piece of research. Recently introduced junior professorships are still too few and far between to have a major impact and represent only a half-hearted effort. The current system is still unattractive, unproductive, and uncompetitive. A lecturer tenure-track system would shift insecurity to the beginning of a career and would have built-in incentives and resources for young political scientists to engage in high-quality research.