Following the establishment of citizenship as a compulsory component of the National Curriculum for pre-16 year-olds in England in 2002, attention has turned to the role that universities can play in cultivating civic values. Against this background, the POLiS project has been developing, piloting and evaluating free-to-access, web-based learning activities that aim not only to teach students about current academic debates on citizenship, but also to challenge them to consider their own role as citizens. This article describes the ambitions and principles of the project and the educational context within which it has evolved before turning to an analysis of the lessons that can be learnt from our experience for those wishing to promote the teaching of citizenship in higher education.

The Politics Active Research Learning Environment (PARLE) was a £250,000 project to develop multimedia learning materials aimed at politics postgraduate students. Although the project fulfilled all its ambitions, a number of lessons have been learned that might inform others wanting to use the multimedia route for their teaching. This paper considers some of the mistakes made, how they could have been avoided and lessons for the future production of collaborative projects such as PARLE.

The creators of The Simpsons have constructed a model of society, one which due to the show's longevity and popularity can be used by the teacher of politics to illustrate key points of the curriculum. This article suggests three such uses of The Simpsons, namely the depiction of gender in society, the nature of politicians, and what can and cannot be banned with regard to public health.

Problem-based learning has a long history of successful use in disciplines such as business, law and medicine. In 2005, a team at the University of Huddersfield received government funding to develop the technique, and a range of related resources, for teaching politics. This article describes the experience of putting these resources into practice with a range of different student cohorts.

The ‘scholarship of engagement’, derived from work undertaken by the Boyer Commission in the US, emphasises the possibilities of enhanced undergraduate learning through research, yet in the UK this idea is less developed. Moreover, although the study of politics and international relations lends itself well to the use of placements to develop this model of learning, there are few examples of this in the UK. This article presents findings from a major research project, the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics, examining the ways in which placement learning can affect the student experience.

Sartori (1970) warned a long time ago of the danger of concept stretching for effective and cumulative theory building. Such concept stretching has happened with regard to deliberation, which has become a very faddish term. For theoretically well-founded empirical research it is better conceptually to distinguish clearly between strategic bargaining and deliberation, although in the empirical political world the two concepts are usually heavily intertwined.

Steiner's principal objection to our paper is that deliberators in a committee are permitted to speak strategically whereas deliberative theory requires ‘that actors do not lie but are truthful and authentic in their statements’. In this response we observe that such a prescription is relevant only to the extent that individuals might be expected to behave otherwise. Our paper explores conditions under which deliberators' strategic (descriptive) incentives are aligned with the (prescriptive) advice to tell the truth.

Deliberative democrats enjoin participants in ideal speech situations never to lie. But game theorists show that people can have purely truth-based motives for strategically misrepresenting information they hold privately when they are deliberating with others. If deliberative democrats want to ensure that every participant in the deliberation fully and truthfully reveals to one another all private information that they hold, that sets some stringent requirements for the nature of the group that deliberates together.

This article takes issue with Steiner's polemic against the usage of ‘deliberation’ in rational choice scholarship. I show (i) that the reproach that rationalists do not allow for preference change is mistaken; (ii) that Steiner does not sufficiently distinguish between normative and positive contributions and (iii) that he shields his preferred model against systematic comparisons with strategic models of deliberation. In my view, we need more competing model evaluations rather than misleading attacks against imagined heretics.

It has been nearly two decades since Gabriel Almond observed that political scientists tend to sit at ‘separate tables’. Surprisingly, there has been no attempt to ask extensively among the members of the profession what they actually believe about its essential meaning, purpose, and trajectory. This paper is based on a questionnaire sent to faculty in more than 500 political science departments worldwide. Respondents were asked to define political science, to list three works that best represent political science as they understand it, and to give their views regarding what political science will be over the next twenty years.

The first part of this contribution provides a short overview on the state-of-the-art of Internet use in political science. In the second part, a few trends are outlined that will have an impact on the field, followed by a more detailed discussion of possible implications of electronic publishing. In the conclusion, a few recommendations to political science professionals are spelled out recommending how the field should react to this development.

National political science associations in Europe face several important challenges. The growth of politics as a discipline means that they have become expanding organisations, attempting to cope with ever-larger memberships and remits. This article examines the particular challenges confronting the Political Studies Association of the UK, as it attempts to represent its members' interests. The particular challenges for the Association identified in this article are protection of research, amid concentration of funding, curriculum convergence via the Bologna process and the creation of horizontal links across Europe with other political science associations.

The institutional development of political science in Croatia began in 1962 with the establishment of the Faculty of Political Sciences as the first academic institution of its kind in the then communist Central and Eastern Europe. Until the 1990s, this development was underpinned by two major factors. The first was the feud between the partisans and the opponents of political science as an independent discipline, which resulted in a compromise: the faculty was instituted as an organisation for the interdisciplinary study of economics, sociology, philosophy, history and political science. The second factor was the dominance of Marxist political science whose goal was to turn itself into an ‘anti-bourgeois’, that is, anti-Western political science, even into a sort of an anti-political science.