There has been much agonising in recent years over the future of the monograph. A few years ago the Association of American University Presses held a conference entitled ‘The Scholarly Monographin Crisis: or, how can I get tenure if you won't publish my book?’ The dilemma might be rephrased in the UK as ‘how can I survive the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) if you won't publish my book?’ – the pressures may be different, but the problem is essentially the same, summing up the way in which academic publishing has become un comfortably instrumental in the career structure and funding mechanism of the profession.

Rankings of departments are key Information tools for central administrations of universities, public and private funders of research, and students and faculty. For example, to find out how European universities perform compared to institutions in the United States, the European Economics Association commissioned research into the global ranking of economics departments (esp. Coupé, 2003). Applying a similar method in political science to the dominant method used in the natural sciences and economics - looking at the number and impact of articles published in the main journals in the discipline in a given period - produces quite robust results for our discipline (Hix, 2004). One of the advantages of this method is that it enables comparisons to be made across Europe, between Europe and the United States, and within European countries. The next section explains and justifies the method.

This paper reviews evidence concerning the recent growth of volunteerism among college students in the USA. It describes the various pressures to expand such activities and outlines steps being taken to promote them. Reforms of student financial aid can be used to facilitate service among students who would otherwise have to engage in substantial paid work to afford education, while educational institutions are taking numerous steps, most notably through integrating community service and academic study, to promote such involvement. The more general issues raised by all this are: the likely impacts on servers and served of this activity; whether education-based community service has demonstrable educational benefits; its impact on higher education institutions; and the wider impacts in terms of political attitudes and behaviour.

Over the years, many scholars have examined the relationship between electoral systems and measures of voter satisfaction with democracy. The tendency in these studies has been to explore the traditional Proportional Representation/non‐Proportional‐Representation dichotomy, assessing whether more proportional systems produce higher levels of satisfaction. This article examines another dimension of electoral system variation – namely the degree to which the ballot structure incorporates ordinal, or preferential features. Given that proponents of such systems extol their virtues as offering voters ‘greater choice’, it is interesting to explore how this actually plays with the voters. The article makes use of cross‐national data from the comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project to examine the relationship between preferential voting and levels of satisfaction with democracy.

In contrast to much of the recent emphasis on micro economic reform and market oriented economic policy, there is a strong argument in favour of considering political institutional factors. In particular, these include the power of labour in systems of collective bargaining and in broader policy formulation institutions which is an essential element of successful economic policy, especially the achievement of low rates of unemployment. The research reported in this paper is aimed at developing an explanation of the ability of the organized labour movement to promote its political interests through the institutional decision making structures of modern capitalist economies. We argue that, where labour participation is formalised in these institutional arrangements, specific policy measures conducive to low unemployment will be favoured, including relatively high levels of public capital expenditure and the protection of manufacturing employment. Most comparative studies of the consequences of collective action and of political intervention in the market employ a cross-sectional design that limits the number of cases in statistical analyses to the number of countries covered. In this paper we present the results of an analysis of comparative data on 11 OECD countries using a pooled time series regression procedure that enables us to use many more cases than is possible with the cross-sectional design. In this way we arrive at more firmly grounded conclusions as to the efficacy of labour movement strategies in reducing unemployment.

Building on the current creativity literature, the authors developed and tested a model of employee creativity in a sample of Lithuanian nonprofit organizations. It was hypothesized that individual cognitive style, intrinsic motivation, leadership behaviors, job design, cultural norms of diversity, and work group relations would be related to employee creativity. Sixty nonprofit organizations were randomly sampled from the Database of Lithuanian Nonprofit Organizations and packets containing questionnaires were mailed to the organizations that agreed to participate. One hundred and twenty two questionnaires were returned out of 180 total (67.8% response rate). Results showed that innovative cognitive style, intrinsic motivation, and cultural norms for diversity were the most important predictors, explaining 41.5% of variance in employee creativity. Suggestions for hiring and staff development practices are provided along with implications for future research.

Michael McDonald and Ian Budge have recently advanced an interpretation of democratic governance based on what they term the ‘median mandate’. This perspective locates the key element of liberal democracy in a close correspondence between government policy and the policy preferences of the median voter on the left‐right scale. The cross‐national evidence they produce in favour of this interpretation is impressive, but it largely hinges on a method for measuring the median voter position in each election that relies on the positions of the various parties in the election and the vote shares they received. This article examines the validity of the median mandate hypothesis when median positions are measured more directly from public opinion surveys (particularly, the Eurobarometer and Comparative Study of Electoral Systems series). The findings show that choice between distinct alternatives, rather than conformity to the median, more accurately characterises governance in democratic systems.

The article introduces a discussion on approaches to the history of political thought based on a panel at the ECPR General Conference in Potsdam, 2009. After reconstructing the three classic approaches, the Cambridge School, the ‘Begriffsgeschichte’, and Foucault's Genealogy as well as more recent developments in the field, the authors outline a scheme for further methodological and comparative research. They also emphasise the importance of historical approaches for political theory and political science.

This article discusses recent moves in political science that emphasise predicting future events rather than theoretically explaining past ones or understanding empirical generalisations. Two types of prediction are defined: pragmatic, and scientific. The main aim of political science is explanation, which requires scientific prediction. Scientific prediction does not necessarily entail pragmatic prediction nor does it necessarily refer to the future, though both are desiderata for political science. Pragmatic prediction is not necessarily explanatory, and emphasising pragmatic prediction will lead to disappointment, as it will not always help in understanding how to intervene to change future outcomes, and policy makers are likely to be disappointed by its time‐scale.

A prominent principle in explaining a range of word-order regularities is dependency locality, which minimizes the linear distances (dependency lengths) between a head and its dependents. However, it remains unclear to what extent language users in fact observe locality when producing sentences under diverse conditions of cross-categorical harmony (such as the placement of verbal and nominal heads on the same vs. different sides of their dependents), dependency direction (head-final vs. head-initial), and parallel vs. hierarchical dependency structures (e.g. multiple adjectives dependent on the same head vs. nested genitive dependents). Using forty-five dependency-annotated corpora of diverse languages, we find that after controlling for harmony and conditioning on dependency types, dependency-length minimization (DLM) is inversely correlated with the overall presence of head-final dependencies. This anti-DLM effect in sentences with more head-final dependencies is specifically associated with an accumulation of dependents in parallel structures and with disharmonic orders in hierarchical structures. We propose a detailed interpretation of these results and tentatively suggest a role for a probabilistic principle that favors embedding head-initial (e.g. VO) structures inside equally head-initial and thereby length-minimizing structures (e.g. relative clauses after the head noun), while head-final (OV) structures have a less pronounced preference for harmony and DLM. This is in line with earlier findings in research on the Greenbergian word-order universals and with a probabilistic version of what has been suggested more recently as the FINAL-OVER-FINAL CONDITION.

Focusing on the low-cost nature of social media participation, previous studies have described social media as providing opportunities for nonprofit organizations to gain support for their campaigns, such as asking to click a button. However, the question remains whether and how social media participation subsequently encourages community-based (offline) participation. Extending previous studies’ focus on the actual cost of social media participation, we examine how perceived costs and benefits of social media participation motivate individuals to participate in community-based participation. Our analysis of two-way between-subjects ANCOVA demonstrated that the perceived benefits of initial social media participation, rather than its actual or perceived costs, drive individuals to identify with the issue and engage in subsequent community-based participation. This finding suggests that the meaning of social media participation does not lie in whether it allows for low-cost actions, but in how individuals perceive and appreciate the benefits from their actions and identify with the issue.

Study abroad is cited commonly as a critical element of education for global civic engagement, but the significance of various programmatic features has not been well established. This study examines the relationships among three facets of study abroad programs—destination, type, and duration—and subsequent volunteerism through international development organizations. Survey responses were analyzed from 2,250 college alumni (71 % female, 14 % ethnic minority, M age = 27) who studied abroad between 1995 and 2005. The results of logistic regression indicated that studying abroad in a developing country and engaging in international service-learning were positively associated with the odds of development volunteerism. The number of months spent abroad also predicted development volunteerism, though duration did not moderate the effects of program destination and type. An interaction test demonstrated that program effects were not dependent on gender. The findings suggest that differences in the nature of study abroad programs influence the extent to which participants become actively engaged in global civil society.

How can we define democracy today given the continuous changes that modern societies are undergoing? What is the role of a democratic theorist? This paper articulates a threefold argument in responding to these questions by analyzing the term of democracy in vitro, in vivo, and in actu. The first step is to secure a democratic minimum and the core principles of democracy. The second step involves studying democracy as an ongoing project and examining how the principles of this democratic minimum are encoded. In the third step we deploy the basic premises of discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe when evaluating a specific discourse of democracy, as this approach encompasses both discursive and nondiscursive practices. Utilizing this three-level evaluative framework for democratic theory will allow us to not only articulate normative principles but also evaluate them according to their mode of implementation.

This article discusses the evolution of the public debate in Italy about unemployment over a period of almost ten years (1995–2002) that was particularly crucial for the Italian labour and political systems. From the early 1980s and throughout the 1990s, the country experienced major industrial change, which dramatically restructured its labour landscape. Moreover, this industrial earthquake occurred within internal (a deep political party system re‐assessment and the fluctuating importance of unions) and external (European Union‐driven state budgetary limits) political constraints that have heavily influenced the debate itself. The analysis of the public policy debates allows the authors of this article to portray the agendas, concepts and strategies introduced and discussed by experts, politicians and interest groups as pillars of a new edifice of public policies. Although other sources are more complete in presenting the policy‐making process on unemployment issues, the focus in this article on the public debate in the mass media reflects a specific interest in the discursive interactions between the symbolic images promoted by different actors. To this end, the authors have combined claims analysis and semi‐structured interviews. Through their combined use, the article describes the selective field of contentious politics as far as main actors are concerned: its effect on the policy issues addressed, and the repertoire used for making claims and influencing policies. The authors also single out the role of the European Union and its potential impact on Italian public debates. In particular, the authors are interested in learning how inclusive these public debates are with reference to weakly represented interests and precariously organised groups (particularly the unemployed).

Childcare policy has become an integral part of social and economic policy in post‐industrial democracies. This article explores how the transformation of party systems structures the politics of childcare policy. It reveals that political parties contend with each other over childcare and female employment policy on the social‐value dimension as well as the redistributive dimension. Assuming that different party policies have distinct impacts on public childcare policy, it is hypothesised in this article that a government's policy position – composed of the governing parties' policy positions – affects changes in public spending for childcare services. Through an analysis of the pooled time‐series and cross‐section data of 18 advanced industrialised countries from 1980 until 2005 using multivariate regression methods, it is revealed that a government's redistributive left–right policy position interacts with its social liberal–conservative policy position, and that a left–liberal government raises its budget for childcare services while a left–conservative government does not.

In their 1994 study of electoral preferences for anti-immigrant parties, Van der Brug et al. (2000) concluded that most voters consider anti-immigrant parties to be normal parties. In this replication using 1999 data, the main conclusions of the 1994 study are confirmed for FPÖ, Alleanza Nazionale, Dansk Folkeparti and Vlaams Blok. Preferences for these parties are largely determined by the same variables that determine preferences for other parties. Votes for these parties should not be interpreted as protest votes. Things turned out to be different for the Lega Nord, the Centrumdemocraten, the Fremskridtspartiet, the French Front national, the Republikaner and the Wallonian Front National. The motivations to vote for any of the latter parties turn out to be substantially different in 1999 than they were in 1994. In 1999, these parties attracted more protest votes, or rather they lost their ideological and pragmatic votes. This article ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings for our theoretical understanding of electoral support for these parties, as well as for the ongoing political debate about the appropriate strategy to fight them.

Social science departments are regularly criticised for a perceived failure to provide their graduates with a range of transferable or employability skills. This is particularly acute in many politics departments that have the difficulty of not being seen as a vocational subject. This article provides a national audit of levels of transferable skills teaching in UK Politics departments, carried out in academic year 2013–2014. It will argue that there is much good work in these areas being carried out in the UK political studies community, providing students with a range of transferable skills they will find of great use as they move towards employment. It will however observe that the discipline is poor in highlighting this in the online descriptions of course content they provide to students (and their parents).