The implementation of the Bologna Declaration differs considerably across participating countries. This is most true with regard to the introduction of a two-tier study system. The varying rates of development within Europe present a unique opportunity for countries to learn from one another. This article focuses on the alternative design options available, on the one hand, and the concrete experiences with the implementation of these options at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, on the other.

The case of Prof. İştar Gözaydın is one of the most visible and tragicomic examples for academics who have been victimized in Turkey by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. Gözaydın was not the first one and perhaps will not be the last because the authoritarian mindset that encapsulates the academics and scholars started long before the foundation of AKP, despite the fact that it was deepened and broadened by it. This article aims to explain the intense recrimination of academics by a repressive and hegemonic political power in Turkey in the second decade of the 2000s. It also tries to shed light on the essential weakness of the authoritarian strong state practices on the face of academic freedom.

Historiographers of linguistics have typically claimed that by the 1970s, generative grammarians were organizationally dominant in the field of linguistics in the United States. I demonstrate that such is not true. To support my assertion, I present evidence based on who held LSA offices in the 1970s and 1980s, on what was published in the journal Language, on presentations at LSA meetings, on the composition of summer Linguistics Institutes, on grants awarded to linguists, and on jobs advertised in the field. My explanation for the lack of generative dominance is based on various factors, including the immaturity and diversity of the field of linguistics, on generative grammar not being a grant-dependent enterprise, and on the attitude toward the LSA exhibited by Chomsky and many of his closest co-thinkers.

The limited literature on offshore industrial relations in Britain and Norway has focused on the deviant nature of such arrangements compared to national traditions. The ‘newness’ of the sector and the special nature of the oil industry have been used to explain the deviance. This study, instead, controls for such factors and shows how contrasting patterns of adaptation can be related to system properties. Industrial relations in the two countries can be viewed as ideal-type approximations of pluralism and societal corporatism. Within the tradition contrasting pluralism and neocorporatism, the dominant perspective has deliberately excluded cultural aspects, stressing instead structural form. The article argues for the reintroduction of culture and shows how British and Norwegian offshore developments reflect fundamentally different orientations towards industrial relations. Culture is not, however, conceptualized as ideosyncratic characteristics of the two countries. It stems instead from different histories of labour-capital relations.

Within the mixed economy of care in the United Kingdom there are debates about the ways in which impact can be evaluated, in order to shape funding and policy decisions. One of the tensions evident in this debate is whether the evaluation approach should reflect the perspectives and goals of the voluntary organizations and their members, or whether evaluation should reflect the wider goals of the whole system of provision. The former runs the risk of being insular and self-congratulatory, while the latter may be inappropriate and dismissive of achievements. This paper explores this tension by reporting on a study that used Appreciative Inquiry to evaluate 10 small-scale not-for-profit schemes for older people. The data indicated some unexpected and long-term impacts that demonstrated the distinctiveness of the sector. Subsequently the findings were mapped on to the “impact grid” developed by Wilding and Lacey (2003). While this was straightforward at the levels of individuals and interorganizationally, it was more difficult at the sector/community level, suggesting that more work needs to be done to bring these two perspectives together.

Ensuring universal access to scientific research and upholding the principles of keeping data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable is of paramount importance to the democratization of science. However, upholding these principles becomes increasingly complex with the increasing scope of data collection, the more different types of data we collect (e.g., survey, text, or institutional and country-level macro data), and the more research teams are involved in data collection. In the domain of democracy research, scientists across Europe are therefore joining forces to launch the research infrastructure monitoring electoral democracy (MEDem), which aims to establish itself as an open platform where the fragmented crowd of researchers in the various research fields can coordinate and develop common standards for data collection both retrospectively as well as prospectively to make their data interoperable, and (comparative) democracy research more productive. Moreover, MEDem will help make democracy research data and findings accessible to the general public (e.g., citizens, journalists, and policymakers).

1. Introduction. The diversity and the scope of the responses to my target article (Kissine 2021) demonstrate the great potential linguistic research has for the field of autism. These responses also reveal, albeit sometimes implicitly, that a chief challenge in researching language in autism lies in the complexity and the subtlety of the data. In organizing my own response under this angle, I hope to react in a constructive way to most of the criticisms and suggestions voiced in these commentaries. In the next section, I return to the relationship between socio-communicative skills and language trajectories in autism; in particular, I argue that it is crucial to distinguish between predictors of language delays and those of language outcomes. Next, I discuss the complexity of pragmatics in autism, warning against reductionist attempts to subsume all data on pragmatics in autism under a single processing model. In the third section, I turn to the more general issue of the variability of individual profiles on the autism spectrum and ask how it can be integrated in a meaningful way within research on language in autism. I conclude this brief response to commentators by issuing a plea to think of the diversity of linguistic theories and schools as an opportunity for better understanding language in autism.

This study employs a decision model to study the effects on popular support of candidate chances and candidate moderation in the American presidential nomination process. The decision model draws upon psychological and rational choice theories of decision making to accommodate both the complexity of choice citizens face in the typical nomination campaign, and the need to keep decision costs in bounds. We use the model to simulate voter decision making under repeated trials of nomination campaigns. The simulation trials vary the chances candidates have of winning their party's nomination, and the ideological moderation of competing nomination candidates. Our results show that increasing a candidate's chances for the nomination can have substantial payoff in support, but that the consequences of moderating a candidate's ideological stand are more muted. Our research speaks to broader guest ions of decision making when information costs are high but cognitive effort remains low, and to the resolution of intraparty conflict in a dynamic and volatile political environment.

Basing his argumentation on an analysis of condition C effects, Bruening (2014) proposes to replace the familiar notion of c-command underlying dependency relations with a precede-and-command condition, which defines dependency relations as precedence relations within a local domain (phase). In this reply I argue that condition C effects cannot be used to show the relevance of phases for the definition of syntactic dependency, and I question the conceptual necessity of the notion phase as currently defined.

International organisations have considered national unity a necessary prerequisite to maintaining political stability and restoring economic growth in countries facing severe economic crisis. The European Union and the International Monetary Fund promoted such unity in Greece when making stabilisation packages available during the country's sovereign debt crisis in 2011–2012. Focused on the conditions under which diverse political groups can credibly coordinate their economic and political strategies, this article examines domestic and international factors that impact the prospect of political unity in Greece and small European economies. Anchored in the historical institutionalism tradition, it finds that political unity in small European economies has been consolidated during periods of economic growth and when complementary international institutions existed, but has regularly been undermined in countries experiencing the opposite conditions, including Greece. National unity in Greece over the long term requires domestic reforms, but such reforms will not be sustainable without external economic growth and a multilateral architecture that incentivises economic groups to share the benefits and costs of structural reform. Since the latter conditions are not ones that a small country itself can produce, sustained political unity rests as much with the actions of big economies as it does with Greece overcoming the historic legacies of its particular model of capitalism.

Applying the demand-side claims of Kitschelt's theory, and the expectation that electoral systems affect voter choice, this article provides an explanation of cross-national variation in support for new radical right (NRR) parties between 1982 and 1995. After discussing concepts and measures, two versions of qualitative comparative analysis (Boolean analysis and fuzzy-set analysis) are applied to data for ten West European countries. The results suggest that, in combination with electoral systems that had larger district magnitudes, NRR strength resulted from a restructuring of the space of party competition due to post-industrialism and growth in the welfare state. Convergence between major parties of the left and right was not among the combination of conditions that led to NRR success. Apart from demonstrating that fuzzy-set analysis can yield a simpler explanation than Boolean analysis, this study reveals anomalous NRR outcomes for Austria, Belgium and France.

The aim of the study is to analyze when and why Norwegian governments carry out expansive decisions rather than contractive ones. Following the politico-economic approach, it is proposed that both the governmental re-election prospects and economic indicators may influence macro-economic decision making.

The article attempts to employ this framework in an empirical analysis of events data, i.e. in an analysis of 318 decision events spread throughout the period from 1964 to 1984. Unemployment is the major determinant of macro-economic policies. The hypothesis of political business-cycle receives only limited empirical support, and there is little reliable evidence of socialist governments responding differently to economic and political factors compared to borgeois governments.

The worldwide departmental ranking by Simon Hix and national performance evaluations have dramatically shown that European political science is not sufficiently competitive at the global level. This symposium analyses why this is the case and what kind of reform measures should be introduced to move beyond this dire state of affairs. The authors detail the problems in four domains – (i) funding of teaching and research; (ii) the ‘market’ for political science education; (iii) career development, salaries, and tenure decision-making; and (iv) the publication behaviour of European political scientists. Each contribution concludes with suggestions about how the situation could be improved.

This article examines the debated relationship between liberal-democratic politics and states of exception in conditions of emergency. After Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, it is often maintained that today we live in a situation of perennial exceptionalism, where emergency measures have become a regular practice even by governments we name ‘democratic’. In these circumstances, exception is deemed to threaten democracy and hinder individual and collective political agency. Yet, such interpretation remains rigidly focused on the expanded governmental powers ushered by the exception. The article first unpacks how the relationship between exception and democracy has been differently addressed by juridical and biopolitical approaches. Then, it attempts an alternative heuristic: it discusses possibilities of democratic associative practices in emergency by looking at the notion of resistance that Michel Foucault links with power. This route remains unexplored in the literature on the concept of the exception.