The Academic Freedom in Constitutions dataset is a new resource that empirically maps constitutional guarantees of the freedom of science, of academic freedom, and of university autonomy in 203 countries, spanning the period from 1789 to 2022. While the topic of academic freedom has been gaining increasing prominence in political and legal research over the past decade, it is so far largely absent from the comparative constitutional literature. However, its global codification process holds interesting insights for the study of international norm diffusion, both with respect to its functional connection to higher education development and its distinct constitutional genealogies. The paper first introduces the dataset and explains how it is different from previous coding efforts, before discussing its significance and potential contributions to the comparative legal literature, political science, and other research.

This article introduces the symposium titled “Political science perspectives on the emerging eco-social policies, politics and polity in the European Union” that brings together the eco-social debate with mainstream theories and concepts from the political science discipline with the aim of encouraging a mutually and reinforcing theoretical and empirical exchange between the two fields. Before presenting the other contributions to the symposium, this article unpacks what “eco-social” is by presenting the existing definitions followed by a bottom-up identification of the “eco-social” essence retrieved through a systematic review of this literature. Furthermore, it takes stock and identifies areas of deficiency of the eco-social literature along the three dimensions of policy, politics, and polity while also outlining potential contributions of political science’s approaches to this field.

All coups seek to topple the political leadership, but they differ in terms of their leaders. While soldiers spearhead a majority of coups, a small number is led by civilians. And whereas high-ranking officers are the largest group among coup leaders, mid- and low-ranking soldiers account for a substantial share of putsches. Several datasets have recently offered data on the identity and political aims of coup leaders, to study the origin and outcome of different types of coups. However, these datasets have important limitations in their scope and how they address differing organizational structures of militaries across countries and time. This article therefore introduces a novel dataset on the identity of the leaders of 474 coups from 1950 to 2020 that distinguishes between coups led by civilians and military officers, as well as between coups by junior, mid-ranking, and senior officers. We discuss how the dataset complements previous data, present patterns across time and space, and show that successful and failed coups by senior, mid-ranking, and junior officers entail different prospects for post-coup democratization. The article underlines the importance for refined empirical measures and theoretical arguments in coup research.

In this article, we argue that, since the publication of the European Green Deal, an EU framework for a just transition is gradually emerging, consisting of legislation, funding and guidelines to ensure that the opportunities deriving from the green transition are exploited, while the related social challenges are addressed. Relying on qualitative research methods, we first identify the features of key EU policy instruments for a just transition and, in particular, the role therein attributed to welfare policies. Second, we provide insights on the political dynamics behind the emergence and design of these policies. Hence, we build a bridge between the eco-social debate and political science, focusing on both EU level policies and politics. We conclude that, while a number of initiatives for a just transition have been elaborated by the EU in recent years, such an EU framework should be further developed, including by focusing more on providing citizens with financial 'buffers' and ensuring consensus on the green transition through social and civic dialogue. Considering the politics behind these EU eco-social policies, we find that their emergence has been characterised by both incremental and transformative elements, while their features have been affected by traditional conflict lines characterising EU politics.

Empirical literature regarding which actors support the most participatory democracy is surprisingly scarce. Discussing the core ideological features of populist and post-materialist-centred parties, we expect that these parties emphasise participatory democracy more than their competitors. Additionally, populist parties should embody a monist demand for greater participatory democracy, while post-materialist-centred (PMC) parties should advocate a pluralist understanding of it. Drawing on party electoral manifestos, we verify these assumptions in several national elections across Europe. Our findings show mixed support for the theoretical expectations. Both post-materialist and populist parties support participatory democracy more than other parties, and their principles diverge. More precisely, our data confirm that PMC parties advocate a pluralist understanding of participatory democracy. Yet populist parties show a fuzzier picture. While populist radical right parties exhibit a monist profile, radical left populist parties are much more in line with post-materialist arguments.

The relevance and impact of political scientists’ professional activities outside of universities has become the focus of public attention, partly due to growing expectations that research should help address society’s grand challenges. One type of such activity is policy advising. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding the extent and type of policy advising activities political scientists engage in. This paper addresses this gap by adopting a classification that distinguishes four ideal types of policy advisors representing differing degrees of engagement. We test this classification by calculating a multi-level latent class model to estimate key factors explaining the prevalence of each type based on an original dataset obtained from a survey of political scientists across 39 European countries. Our results challenge the wisdom that political scientists are sitting in an “ivory tower”: the vast majority (80%) of political scientists in Europe are active policy advisers, with most of them providing not only expert guidance but also normative assessments.

Research has found that as the effective number of political parties increases, people are more likely to delay their voting decisions. Yet, since voters have different political predispositions, theory suggests that the effects of fragmentation are not equal for all, but stronger for non-partisans and low interest voters. The analysis of survey data from 24 countries shows that party fragmentation does increase the probability of a late voting decision of all partisan and non-partisan voters at all levels of political interest. A more detailed measure of time of voting decision, however, evidences that partisans and voters with high political interest are less influenced by the number of parties. All in all, these findings highlight an understudied consequence of party fragmentation: it impacts the time of voting decision for most voters in democracies.

In recent years, the debate over the need to address ecological and social concerns has grown substantially. Phenomena such as the Gilets Jaunes in France or the ecological versus social disputes in industrial sites (such as, for example, the ILVA steel plant in Taranto) have constituted a trade-off in terms of potentially conflicting policies, making the understanding of the various underlying preferences very important. Furthermore, growing environmental concerns have challenged more traditional views anchored on the predominance of social and employment concerns. The article, in line with the research questions raised in the introduction of the Symposium, intends to contribute to the above-mentioned debate addressing the following questions: did the European Union take an ‘eco-social’ path? If so, how and why? The article illustrates the growing intertwining of social and environmental policies at the EU level and tries to explain its genesis by focusing on the role of the various actors involved. The main argument is that the European Commission, and in particular the President of the Commission, developed an eco-social agenda in order to obtain further institutional (i.e. internal) and socio-political (i.e. external) legitimation.

The development of generative artificial intelligence raises justified concerns about the possibility of undermining trust in democratic processes, especially elections. Deep fakes are often considered one of the particularly dangerous forms of media manipulation. Subsequent research confirms that they contribute to strengthening the sense of uncertainty among citizens and negatively affect the information environment. The aim of this study is to analyse the use of deep fakes in 11 countries in 2023, in the context of elections and to indicate potential consequences for future electoral processes, in particular with regard to the significant number of elections in 2024. We argue that a so-called “information apocalypse” emerges mainly from exaggeratedly alarmist voices that make it difficult to shape responsible narratives and may have the features of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, we suggest to use the term “pollution” instead and improve scientific and journalistic discourse that might be a precondition for reducing threats that touch on social reactions to deep fakes and their potential.

In democracies, elections in which voters elect their leaders and hold them accountable are the most important part of the democratic process. This study is about the people who work on the frontline of democracy and who play a major role in elections, namely poll workers. Surprisingly little is known about how poll workers evaluate elections, and we provide a detailed analysis of poll workers' views of how elections work in Sweden. We do this by reporting and analysing the results from a survey conducted among poll workers in Sweden shortly after the 2022 election. The results show that although many types of polling station-related problems were rare, some problems occurred to a greater extent than we expected. It is also clear that many of the problems had a negative impact on the poll workers' evaluations of the quality of the voting process.

Women’s underrepresentation in top political science journals has been a central concern of both the American Political Science Association and the European Consortium of Political Research, which have promoted studies to assess the extent and features of the gender gap. However, so far in Southern Europe, research on this topic has been scarce. Our work adds to the literature by presenting new data on three journals: the Italian Political Science Review, the Spanish Political Science Review and South European Society and Politics. The research has three main goals: to gauge the gender gap in the three journals; to examine whether gender influences publication preferences; and to investigate how career intersects with gendered publication strategies. The analysis is built on a database of almost 800 articles and about 1400 authors, published in these three journals in 2011–2022. Our main findings are that South European journals reveal a gender gap similar to other international journals, where just one-third of authors are women; that this publication gap is accompanied by gendered publication strategies; and that the routes men and women follow to succeed in academic publishing diverge at every career stage. Finally, we argue that women's preferred strategies may not offer the optimum path to career success.

Research problems are crucial in the sense that they provide new research with purpose and justification. So why, despite the abundance of guidance available from an extensive methods literature, do graduate students often struggle to develop compelling research problems? This article argues that the process of developing research problems epitomises the insecurity of doing research. We focus in particular on the anxiety that graduate students often seek to avoid or alleviate through a range of counterproductive coping strategies. The existing literature on research problems focuses predominantly on the technical aspects of doing research while neglecting how anxiety might affect the research process. This article seeks to rectify this shortcoming by providing advice on how graduate students can face such anxiety, and how professors can assist them in this endeavour. Drawing on theories about identity and anxiety, the article explains the allure of coping strategies such as gap-filling, while arguing that anxiety is not necessarily a negative emotion to be avoided at all costs, but integral to learning and creativity. It concludes by suggesting that compelling research problems can be constructed through the formulation of narratives that try to embrace anxiety, instead of seeking premature resolutions.

This collaborative piece provides our collective thoughts and experiences on teaching related to Hyflex and Hybrid environments within higher education (HE) institutions across countries. The piece is the evolution of discussions which started at the ECPR’s TLP Conference in Bratislava (and online) in June 2022 on this topic of hyflex and hybrid learning, and the changing HE environment we are all seeing and experiencing. We offer our thoughts and experiences, but also ask colleagues within our discipline to consider the questions and implications of many of the choices being made for ourselves as teachers, and for our students in the evolving learning environment in this period coming out of the pandemic.

The current study followed the need for more research concerning the understanding of the relationship between simulation design and self-efficacy in negotiating development within role-play simulations of political decision-making. More specifically, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of social persuasion as a source for self-efficacy in negotiating with simulation design elements. The research was conducted in a three-day simulation about the EU decision-making process. By means of daily diaries and semi-structured interviews, critical incidents about the emergence of social persuasion influencing self-efficacy development were defined. Data were analysed by applying thematic content analysis. Findings show that social persuasion was largely facilitated by the simulation design that offered possibilities for informal contact.

In this article, we argue that current societal struggles about whether and how eco-social policy and politics should be implemented to tackle the interlinked challenges of climate change and inequality are an expression of the main societal conflict of our times: the social-ecological transformation conflict. We identify four lines of conflict in the social-ecological transformation and explore how they are related to classes and mentalities. In the theoretical part, we conceptualize classes in social space and mentalities through a Bourdieusian relational approach. We also discuss the location of the four lines of conflict in social space. In the empirical part, we analyze survey data from Germany. Firstly, we find eight mentalities among respondents reflecting their views on various eco-social topics. Secondly, we construct the social space with socio-economic variables for the economic and cultural capital of the respondents. Thirdly, we plot the mentalities in the social space. The results show that the cultural middle class is in favor of eco-social policy, while the upper class and the economic middle class prefer green growth and ecological modernization. The lower-class fractions are skeptical of any transformation because they distrust institutions and cannot bear the transformation costs.

Altmetrics are an emerging form of bibliometric measurement that capture the online dimension of scholarly exchange. Against the backdrop of both a higher education landscape increasingly focused on quantifying research productivity and impact, as well as literature emphasising the need to address gender bias in the discipline, we consider whether and how altmetrics (re)produce gendered dynamics in political science. Using a novel dataset on the Altmetric Attention Scores (AAS) of political science research, we investigate two questions: Do AAS vary by gender? And how do AAS relate to gendered social media dynamics? We find that AAS reproduce gendered dynamics found in disciplinary publication and citation practices. For example, journal articles authored exclusively by female scholars score 27% lower on average than exclusively male-authored outputs. However, men are also more likely to write articles with an AAS of zero. These patterns are shaped by the presence of high-scoring male “superstars” whose research attracts much online attention. Complementing existing scholarship, we show that the AAS closely overlaps with virality dynamics on Twitter. We suggest that these gendered dynamics may be hidden behind the seemingly neutral, technical character of altmetrics, which is worrisome where they are used to evaluate scholarship.

This article reports on a starter exercise that trains beginner interview skills without overloading a course with a single project. The exercise is a response to three developments: first, interviewing skills are undertaught in most political science programmes; second, productive elements of online teaching ought to be integrated in campus-based courses; and, third, experiential learning is possible in virtual spaces. Students are exposed to interviews as a methodology through a lower pressure experience. Replacing two classes, students take part in a series of short, student-led but instructor-organised structured group interviews with practitioners. Students then progress to develop their own independent interviewing skills, including identifying informants, in later courses. Survey data collected from students suggest that applying course concepts was one of the top learning outcomes. Surveys and focus groups also illustrate that the exercise made students see an issue differently and they intend to continue learning about the subject armed with new information. This teaching format is practical for a wide range of themes in political science where experts can be interviewed and students will leave such courses with a question-oriented analytical approach, better equipped to interpret answers, and ready to more extensively engage with interviews in their lives.

We surveyed political scientists to learn more about how they approach the peer review process. We are motivated by two aims. First, to advance our understanding of how fellow political scientists approach the task of reviewing articles for publication, and the values they bring to bear on that task; second, and consequently, to provide clearer guidance to prospective authors on what to avoid or emphasize as they prepare manuscripts for submission. In this article, we present the results of our survey and make some suggestions for those submitting articles in future.

In the light of the climate crisis, ‘green transitions’ are inevitable to address the environmental harm caused by fossil capitalism. The article argues that the pathway of such green transitions is closely interrelated with welfare setups, as the answer to the questions ‘who wins, who loses; who supports, who opposes the green transition—and why?’ is strongly dependent on the welfare setup of a given economy. The welfare state not only stabilises the economy, prevents deprivation and balances class interests, it also structures interest constellations, material living conditions, and cultural lifestyles. Hence, which ‘green social risks’ need to be addressed, which social groups will seek to have a voice in a green transition, which transition routes are seen as legitimate, and which societal cleavages emerge around the transition—all these factors are shaped by the welfare setup of a country. Drawing on comparative welfare state theory, the article provides an analytical starting point for considering country-specific factors of green transitions and thus, outlines the potential of this political science research strand for debates on eco-social policy, politics, and polity.