Social relevance has become a key element to assess the social legitimacy of an academic discipline. This contrasts with a widespread sentiment among political scientists about the existence of a relevance gap. The context of multiple crises Europe has experienced since the late 2000s has provided political scientists with a multitude of opportunities to demonstrate the social relevance of their work and the usefulness of the discipline. This introductory article to the special issue aims to offer an explorative framework and a preliminary discussion of empirical examples to assess the phenomenon of political scientists’ relevance in the public sphere during recent turbulent times. The framework (which emphasises three basic dimensions of social relevance – partisanship, visibility, and impact) is used to interpret the main results of the five case studies included in the special issue. Results show that contextual factors (salience of the issue, political and media contexts) influence political scientists’ engagement in the public sphere, the role they adopt and their visibility. The article ends emphasising the importance of collective action within the discipline as an instrument to enhance its social relevance.

Academics are often accused of being secluded in their “ivory towers”, focused on research and teaching but uninterested in, or unable to engage with, the public debate. If this is actually the case, under what conditions and at what particular moment is this likely to change? Following on three relevant dimensions—the visibility of political scientists, their partisanship and their impact in the public sphere—and combining press analysis with original survey data, this article has two main aims: first, to assess Italian political scientists’ (IPSs) social relevance in a period of huge political and institutional conflict such as the constitutional referendum held in December 2016; second, to explore the potential factors leading IPSs to be more or less present in the public debate. For the former, we focus on the public visibility of IPSs during the referendum campaign, as well as on the content of their public interventions, both concerning their neutral/partisan stance and their attitudes towards the constitutional reform. For the latter, we empirically test a few personal and institutional factors that are likely to influence individuals’ participation in the referendum debate.

Participation in the public debate constitutes one of the most evident avenues for political scientists to demonstrate the social relevance of the discipline. This article focuses on two questions: the types of roles political scientists adopt in their public interventions and the potential tensions between their public engagement and the epistemic norms regulating academic and research activities. We investigate these questions in the context of very salient political debates, involving a high degree of political confrontation, where basic political beliefs, values, identities, and interests are at stake. Focusing on the case of the public debate surrounding the Catalan independence crisis (2010–2018), we demonstrate that in this type of context, (1) political scientists mostly adopt a partisan stance in their public interventions, yet it is also frequent that this is combined with the presence of academic elements in their discourse; (2) demand side factors (media outlets’ editorial lines) reinforce these partisan dynamics. These findings show that opportunities for increasing the social relevance of political scientists in these highly contentious contexts might come at the price of creating tensions that could erode the legitimacy of political science knowledge before the public.

This article aims to address the social and political role of political scientists in Greece, which has been at the centre of the Eurozone crisis, resulting in the most troubled period in the country’s recent political history, namely the campaign week of the July 2015 bailout referendum. To that end, the article relies, on the one hand, on the PROSEPS survey data to identify the extent to which Greek political scientists engage in public debate in general and how they view the social role of their discipline. On the other hand, we used a content analysis of the leading national TV media during the aforementioned week to examine how much Greek political scientists participated in the public debate in comparison with other social scientists, and what were their stances on specific issues and dimensions, such as the framing of the European Union. In addition, we also delve into the stance of Greek political scientists who participated in the public debate regarding the referendum itself. The study results revealed a potential bias; political scientists who pronounce themselves in favour of the status quo seem to receive more invitations to participate in televised debates.

This article focuses on Finnish political scientists’ contributions to the public debate at a time when the relationship between academia and the government was tenser than usual. More specifically, it addresses the public roles and relevance of political scientists during three salient political crises of the 2010s: the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and the war in Donbass, the so-called European migrant crisis beginning in 2015, and the failure of major Finnish governance reform in 2019. I examine scholars’ interventions into them in a corpus of eighty articles collected from the online journal Politiikasta and use qualitative content analysis to study the polarisation of their views and the style of interventions, including scholars’ relationship with the government. I discuss the visibility and impact of political science in the context of gender and seniority of researchers, the presence of political science in the Finnish media, in general, and against other social-scientific disciplines, and with the other countries studied in this Special Issue.

Despite the fact that Hungary was less affected by the 2015 migration crisis in objective terms—i.e. the negligible number of immigrants entering and settling in the country in the last years-, the Hungarian government has been pushing an extreme anti-immigration political communication since 2015, which resulted in an intensive and highly politicised public discourse about immigration. This analysis aims at exploring the involvement of political scientists in the online public discourse about the migration and refugee crisis in Hungary between 2015 and 2019. In contrast with other countries, where high salient political crises have stimulated political scientists’ public engagement, this analysis finds that such participation does not apply to the Hungarian case. The low visibility of political scientists is accompanied by the adoption among participants in news portals of either a partisan, pro-government stance or a neutral approach to the issue, while critical positions with the government are almost inexistent. These patterns suggest the influence of both the illiberal institutional turn of the Hungarian media environment and the decrease in academic freedom in the country, as factors deterring public engagement among political scientists in the immigration issue, particularly of those who could adopt a critical position.

Recent trends suggest that liberal democracy in Israel experiences tensions. Although such a crisis calls for the involvement of political scientists in this public debate, the bulk of political scientists has refrained from visible activity. The exception to this rule is the civic studies arena in which a small group of political scientists is deeply and visibly engaged. Civic education, which Israel integrates into the civic studies subject, is a central political socialization tool. As a deep controversy rages in Israel regarding the meaning of the “democratic” and the “Jewish” components of the state’s identity, civic studies arouse strong emotions. This arena enables political scientists, who are divided into the liberal and the conservative camps, to remain out of the limelight of the general public debate about the illiberal turn, while at the same time engaging heavily in its shaping. The civic studies issue constitutes an example of how collective engagement of political scientists on specific policy issues, may constitute an opportunity for these scholars, their visibility and enhance to therefore, their social relevance. A qualitative analysis of the case study of civic studies in Israel demonstrates the various ways of involvement employed by political scientists in the illiberal turn debate.

The promise of algorithmic decision-making (ADM) lies in its capacity to support or replace human decision-making based on a superior ability to solve specific cognitive tasks. Applications have found their way into various domains of decision-making—and even find appeal in the realm of politics. Against the backdrop of widespread dissatisfaction with politicians in established democracies, there are even calls for replacing politicians with machines. Our discipline has hitherto remained surprisingly silent on these issues. The present article argues that it is important to have a clear grasp of when and how ADM is compatible with political decision-making. While algorithms may help decision-makers in the evidence-based selection of policy instruments to achieve pre-defined goals, bringing ADM to the heart of politics, where the guiding goals are set, is dangerous. Democratic politics, we argue, involves a kind of learning that is incompatible with the learning and optimization performed by algorithmic systems.

Comprising 172 years of European history (from 1848 to 2020), the Who governs dataset provides comprehensive and highly detailed information on the partisan composition of European governments, matching these data with information on those aspects of party politics that can either help to understand the dynamics of the governmental arena or are under the direct influence of the composition of governments. Most of the variables represent fundamental and well-established dimensions of party politics, such as the number of new parties or the fragmentation of the party systems, but some, most importantly party system closure, are more novel. Variables have been designed so that they can be applied to a maximum number of cases across time. Currently the dataset includes 68 different historical democratic periods, 753 elections, and more than 1817 parties and 1586 cases of government formation.

The Scholarship on education and practice has recently encouraged the inclusion of writing assignments in the classroom. Writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programmes have been implemented across universities and colleges, promoting structured writing assignments outside of language-based programmes and courses. The collective knowledge on the subject highlights the effectiveness of frequent short assignments as being better for achieving learning goals, in comparison with more traditional, longer term papers often assigned in upper-division and graduate political science courses. This paper outlines our efforts to revise the curriculum in two of the courses in our policy-focused master’s program. In particular, we focus on two types of policy writing, policy memos and infographics. In this paper, we discuss the background of the program and courses, our choices of assignments, and their design and implementation. Further, we present evidence of how these assignments contributed to student learning in the courses.