Very few political science graduates go into politics. While choosing a different career track may be a matter of personal preference or context, the extent to which political science prepares students for political careers is questionable. This article seeks to explore that question by analysing how political science prepares students for activities within political parties. It draws upon semi-structured interviews conducted with political science students or recent graduates who are party members in Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. We find that political science courses have a positive impact on students’ activity as party members through providing them with a comprehensive theoretical basis and a holistic knowledge approach. However, access to the practical aspects of politics is limited in university courses, leaving students and graduates feeling unprepared for political careers. These observations are valid across the board, with few specific country-specific nuances.

Arising from the 2024 European Political Science (EPS) annual debate, this article examines the role of expertise in transnational governance (TNG) with a focus on political science. It explores how transnational governance reconfigures the spaces and contexts for expert engagements in global policy making and transnational administration. In these evolving spaces of jurisdiction, the democratic potential, accountability, and legitimacy of expert knowledge are not only shrouded from the Global Majority but cannot be assumed to be inevitable. The article outlines some meanings attached to TNG and suggests democratic considerations cannot be conceived or operationalised in the same ways as at nation-state levels of governance. First, TNG is a series of overlapping but fragmented transnational spheres of public sector activity as well as hybrid public-private jurisdictions where democratic principles are yet to be normalised and embedded. Second, the accountability and legitimacy of sources of expertise in the policy sectors of TNG can be counter-swayed by latent features of ‘epistocracy’, or expert rule, in transnational policy communities.

The purpose of this article is to give an account of how the values and organizational arrangements sustaining academic freedom and institutional autonomy may be affected by external pressure on academic research. The first part of the article seeks to clarify the concepts of academic freedom and institutional autonomy that guide our argument. The second part deals with external pressures on universities and introduces some distinctions that may help us tell the difference between external pressures that may be beneficial and those that may be harmful to academic research. The third part focuses on how organizational changes in research institutions have affected their ability to handle external pressures. It discusses how changes in leadership and internal decision making have affected the capacity of institutions to resist or deflect harmful effects of pressures. The fourth part analyses the role of public policies and how they may sustain or jeopardize academic freedom, before drawing a prescriptive conclusion about its defence under democratic and authoritarian political conditions.

Following the ongoing debates on (1) editorial bias and the degree of internationalization of journals in different fields and (2) internalization of (European) political science, this paper aims to descriptively analyze the composition of editorial teams and editorial boards of all 187 political science journals indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Although there are significant differences between individual journals, the analysis revealed an overwhelming Anglo-American dominance in both editorial teams (with an average of 60.6 per cent) and editorial boards (58.6 per cent) across the entire list of journals, reproducing the patterns of dominance and dependence. In addition to the global level, the analysis focuses more closely on the European environment and confirms the conclusions of some previous studies that the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region remains largely (semi-) peripheral in European and global political science. Based on previous research, we can infer that a higher level of editorial diversity would lead to increased diversity in published content, encompassing a wider range of methods, topics, theories, and cases. In conclusion, the study suggests (1) weakening possible biases by building more diversified editorial teams and boards and (2) continuing to analyze specific manifestations of bias in political science journals.

In authoritarian contexts, the organization of academic knowledge and scholarly practices is often shaped by both formal policies and subtle social mechanisms, including disciplinary norms, faculty networks, and informal negotiation strategies. Within this framework, autocratic governments frequently restructure social and political science education, designating it as a ‘sensitive field’ to prioritize ideologically sanctioned topics and embedding regime-aligned imperatives within academic institutions. This paper examines Iran as a case study to explore the effects of state-led Islamization policies (of humanities and social science) on political science curricula, research orientations, and institutional practices. Drawing on a systematic analysis of undergraduate curricula and academic research agendas, with a focus on published papers in Iranian political science journals, the paper demonstrates that these transformations reduce disciplinary diversity, marginalize comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, and constrain the role of political science as a site of civic and intellectual engagement. Rather than a neutral adaptation of academic fields, the Islamization of political science in Iran represents a deliberate strategy of knowledge control aimed at aligning education with authoritarian governance. The findings highlight how such interventions narrow the possibilities for academic inquiry and reshape the societal functions of higher education, contributing to broader debates on authoritarianism, curriculum design, and the global politics of knowledge production.

Rates of judicial dissent vary dramatically between Southern Africa’s appeal courts, even though judges frequently circulate between their benches. This variation cannot be explained by the ideological distance between judges or by their judicial philosophies. Differing institutional arrangements provide better but still incomplete explanations. These arrangements reflect dramatic transformations in the region’s judicial cultures. Analysing these diverging cultures illuminates why some forms of dissent have proved particularly contentious, and why styles of adjudication favouring dissent in some areas of the law have aroused particular hostility. There is thus no straightforward ‘norm’ that promotes or undermines judicial consensus in the region.

This paper examines Health System Resilience (HSR) through a political science lens, arguing that the capacity of health systems to become resilient is shaped not only by technical capabilities and available resources but also by the political theories underpinning health systems and health policy. While HSR has gained prominence in health research as a concept, its integration with political theories remains limited – particularly within political science literature. Drawing on a scoping review, the paper finds that political dimensions – such as governance and leadership, institutional path dependency, and power dynamics – are rarely and unevenly addressed in the literature. Most sources adopt a fragmented view of policy and politics, infrequently identifying the Political Determinants of Health (PDoH) systematically or analysing them through robust political theory. As a result, resilience is often depoliticised and treated as a managerial issue rather than a contested political process. In light of these findings, the paper proposes new opportunities to scrutinise how HSR is shaped by the interplay of actors, ideas, and institutions. In doing so, it contributes to developing a political science of health that fosters stronger interdisciplinary engagement. The paper calls on political scientists to engage more proactively with public health scholarship to support politically informed and more effective resilience strategies.

Political science concerns topics that can be highly relevant for politicians. Political science research and education offer insights that can help incumbents win elections or govern better. At the same time, the discipline provides knowledge that can be used to challenge politicians in office, for example, on how to organise mass protests or effective opposition parties. Therefore, politicians in power may have mixed feelings about the existence of political science departments. Some will encourage their establishment, while others – perhaps especially autocrats – may try to contain their presence or control their location. We study the existence and placement of political science units at universities across the world and assess the extent to which these features vary with regime type. Using large-N data on university subdivisions, we examine cross-national variation in existence and within-country variation in the location of political science departments. We find surprisingly few substantial differences along the democracy–autocracy continuum: Political science units, on average, are no more frequent in democracies. Across regime types, political science units are about equally likely to be located at public (versus private) institutions, and similarly likely to be placed at universities closer to the capital.