In a semi-presidential system, which is the most common regime type in Europe, a separately elected president shares executive powers with the government. This dual-executive model incentivizes conflicts that reduce the capacity for effective decision-making. Alongside constitutional rules, the intraexecutive power balance is conditioned by informal practices in response to public opinion. Increasing public demand for a more powerful presidential role can thus ‘presidentialize’ dual executives. Utilizing novel survey data from Finland, we examine the factors that condition support for a stronger presidency. Relative to the country’s highly institutionalized and strongly government-driven political system, we find substantial support for a formally stronger and more confrontational presidency. This support is systematically connected with the typical features of a populist electorate (such as, for example, distrust in political institutions, male voters and ‘populist’ concerns) and we demonstrate that such respondents are also more willing to reduce the powers of parliamentary institutions. The strengthening of such attitudes can potentially destabilize semi-presidential regimes.

In political research and everyday politics, Finland is often presented as one of the gender-equal countries. The Nordic countries, Finland included, top a number of gender equality indices indicating that women’s societal position is particularly advanced. Feminist research, however, seeks to highlight the issue specificity of such evaluations. While Finland comes out on top in terms of a number of indicators, there are other areas where Finland is a laggard. Gender equality in the Academy is a case point. About a quarter of professors are women in Finland but their numbers fluctuate a lot from one discipline to another. Political science has traditionally been very male dominated, and the notion of politics is perceived as masculine. This article provides a brief overview of the current status of women in political science in Finland. It revisits earlier findings about how political science as a discipline is gendered in Finland and evaluates their pertinence today. The article then discusses the current situation and evaluates the changed institutional context. Despite progress made in numbers, gender continues to shape the political science discipline in Finland.

This article examines selected system-level variables. Its premise is that a better understanding of how and why scholars may, or may not, choose an international orientation in their career requires taking into account factors beyond personal preferences or constraints. We suggest that characteristics of national systems shape prospects and strategies of internationalisation and look at two broadly defined variables: resource availability and career incentives. With respect to the first, we study the absolute level of national resources and their relative importance vies-a-vis those provided by the EU. With respect to the second, we consider the rules and norms governing the progress of academic careers, especially the extent to which international collaboration is significant and necessary for initially attaining a stable academic position and career advancement. We explore these questions through targeted comparison of four national cases, selected to ensure crosscutting variation across the selected variables. A comparison of two relatively low-resource cases (Bulgaria and the Czech Republic) with two relatively high-resource ones (France and Finland) is followed by a comparison with respect to career incentives. This allows to conclude that both factors should be considered as necessary conditions for internationalisation, and to suggest how this hypothesis might be further tested in subsequent research.

The growing prominence of patient and public involvement in health services has led to the increased use of experiential knowledge alongside medical and professional knowledge bases. Third sector organisations, which position themselves as representatives of collective patient groups, have established channels to communicate experiential knowledge to health services. However, organisations may interpret and communicate experiential knowledge in different ways, and due to a lack of inherent authority, it can be dismissed by health professionals. Thus, drawing on individual interviews with organisation representatives, we explore the definitions and uses of as well as the ‘filters’ placed upon experiential knowledge. The analysis suggests that whilst experiential knowledge is seen as all-encompassing, practical and transformative, the organisations need to engage in actions that can tame experiential knowledge and try to balance between ensuring that the critical and authentic elements of experiential knowledge were not lost whilst retaining a position as collaborators in health care development processes.

While populism has been subject to growing scholarly interest, its relationship to feminist politics has remained conspicuously understudied. This article investigates this relationship by analysing two cases of European populism: left populism in Spain (Podemos), and right populism in Finland (the Finns Party). The questions asked, and the challenges posed to feminist politics from populist political forces are intriguing: How is feminist politics articulated in both left and right populism? What differences can be discerned between left and right populism for feminist politics? To explore this, the article analyses three core dimensions: (1) political representation: descriptive representation (numbers of women, men and minority positions) and substantive representation (policy content in relation to gender equality); (2) populist parties’ formal and informal gender institutions such as internal quotas, gender equality plans and institutional culture; and (3) dedicated spaces for feminist politics such as women's sections or feminist groups. It is argued that political ideology matters for feminist politics, and while left parties are more responsive to feminist concerns and populism poses specific problems for feminist politics, it is the gendered culture of political parties that ensures both left and right parties are problematic for feminist politics.

Jan Zielonka's Counter-Revolution: Liberal Europe in Retreat (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a furious, worried pamphlet on the challenges that European democracies are currently facing, on the apparent rise of illiberalism. This article critically reviews the book and seeks to offer a somewhat different and perhaps more optimistic picture of the current predicaments of European politics. The main point of reference in this respect is Finland, a country whose political institutions have managed, by and large, to uphold a sense of coherence in society. A commitment to participatory, equality-based, and freedom-generating institutions can indeed be seen as a primary means to counter the decline of liberalism.

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.

As the term ‘soft power’ in international relations (IR) has been coined by Joseph Nye a quarter of a century ago it has gained a great response and initiated numerous debates. A high quality education sector is one of the important factors that contributes to a country’s soft power. Despite that, as shown in the article, education has not been adequately covered in the existing IR literature. The article addresses this lacuna by offering an attempt to conceptualise and operationalise the educational aspect of soft power. First, with cases from the People’s Republic of China and Finland, it provides various examples of growing internationalisation of education, and analyses possible soft power gains from education. Second, the article provides a theoretical conceptualization of educational soft power, and presents three mechanisms that it can work through: as a carrier of genuine values, as a resource that countries possess, and as a tool in achieving certain goals. All three mechanisms also show how increasing internationalisation brings more direct connections between education, international relations, and foreign policy.

This article traces the history of teaching Vulgar and Late Latin (LVLT) at Finnish universities from the mid-19th century to the present, focusing on the University of Helsinki. Drawing on archival sources, we examine changes in teaching programmes, degree requirements and thesis output. We show how LVLT was gradually integrated into Latin studies through philological renewal, Romance philology and epigraphic research, peaking in a ‘boom’ from the 1960s to the 1990s. Key figures such as Veikko Väänänen and Iiro Kajanto were central to embedding LVLT in teaching and research. However, recent structural reforms and cuts to staff and courses have contributed to a decline in LVLT instruction.

The article examines current challenges in teaching Vulgar and Late Latin (LVLT) at the University of Helsinki, the institution with the longest tradition of teaching LVLT in Finland. Based on structured interviews with researcher-teachers and doctoral students, as well as the author’s own didactic experience, the study identifies institutional, teaching-related, and learning-related challenges for effective LVLT instruction. The key institutional challenges stem from significant reductions in degree requirements and teaching staff, limiting students’ exposure to LVLT. Teaching-related challenges emphasise the need for improved alignment between teaching methods and intended learning outcomes, while learning-related challenges concern declining Latin proficiency and academic skills among graduate students. Despite the difficulties, interdisciplinary and student-centred approaches have proven effective in LVLT teaching. The study highlights the importance of the linguistic, philological, and historical contextualisation of LVLT texts, especially original documents, as well as the necessity of independent study to supplement formal instruction.

This article explores the cultivation of medical knowledge via popular health guides among the Finnish lay populace from the 1890s to the 1970s. By using written reminiscences and newspaper articles as source material, the article discusses the relevance, popularity, and practical use of various printed health guides and manuals throughout Finland. We place particular focus on the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century as the period that experienced a high increase in lay education and literacy. By focusing on individual readers and their experiences of popular health guides, the article examines lay medical and health practices as the number of medical manuals dramatically increased from the late nineteenth century onwards. It also investigates the reception of medical, popular and irregular health movements, such as hygienism, nature cure, and Couéist autosuggestion, and the change in medical culture brought about by the appearance of patent medicines. As the information discovered in popular health guides tended to fluctuate between official and irregular medical theory, we analyse the relationship between learned, alternative, and vernacular medicine through the views and opinions expressed by people who engaged with health literature. Through these materials, we provide a novel understanding of the accessibility of medical knowledge, the spread and impact of health guides, and attitudes towards different medical practices among the Finnish reading public.

Individuals who experience divorce in childhood are more likely to divorce themselves as adults. Notably, the magnitude of the intergenerational divorce transmission is stronger for groups among whom divorce is rare. This transmission may reflect differences in mating strategies passed from parent to child, or differences in cultural norms between groups. Sociologists and demographers have struggled to disentangle socioeconomic and cultural factors, because groups that are less wealthy also tend to have higher divorce rates. We use data from Finland, where two native ethnolinguistic groups with comparable socioeconomic characteristics – but different divorce risks – live side by side: Swedish-speakers and Finnish-speakers. Using register data on the entire Finnish population (N = 554,337 couples 1987–2020), we examine separation risk as a function of parental divorce. Data suggest that the intergenerational transmission is greater among Swedish-speakers, who have an overall lower separation rate. Group differences in separation risk persist even after controlling for socioeconomic factors and each partner’s experience of parental divorce. Notably, Finnish-speaking couples who reside in Swedish-dominated areas have both somewhat lower separation risk, and higher intergenerational transmission than their peers in Finnish-dominated areas. These results point to a cultural transmission of separation, beyond strong socioeconomic factors.