European Political Science: The Magnitude, Heterogeneity and Relevance of a Divided Discipline

Abstract

The study of politics goes back a considerable length of time and is deeply rooted in the evolution of human societies and their beliefs, preferences and worldviews. However, political science, as a specific discipline anchored to theory-driven empirical analyses of political phenomena, is still in its youth.

1 Premise: Political Science—The Youngest Discipline for the Study of Politics in Europe

The study of politics goes back a considerable length of time and is deeply rooted in the evolution of human societies and their beliefs, preferences and worldviews. However, political science, as a specific discipline anchored to theory-driven empirical analyses of political phenomena, is still in its youth.

While the genetic phase of modern political science dates from the turn of the nineteenth century, and principally concerns the USA and Europe, there is no doubt that this discipline is characterized by its subsequent non-linear development: while in the USA it began to be established between the First and Second World Wars, in Europe its developmental path has been more complicated due to diverging political contingencies. In particular, account must be taken of the asymmetric timing of democratization in European countries, and of the difficult process whereby political science has gradually freed itself of the legacy of other forceful disciplines which have traditionally been considered legitimated to a greater degree when it comes to the study of politics. These vary somewhat from one country to another, although in most cases the predominant disciplines have been public law, sociology, history and philosophy.

To be honest, every European country has attempted to anchor the national development of political science to the idiosyncratic evolution of the country’s academic, scientific and cultural history. For example, in Italy the elitist tradition of Mosca, Pareto and Michels is very often considered a pivotal factor in the evolution of the discipline. In France and the United Kingdom, it was the emergence of an inter-disciplinary set of educational programmes that provided the window of opportunity for the new subject. Indeed, references are frequently made to the establishment, in 1871 and in 1895, of two rather different models of “advanced school” specialized in the study of politics (Favre, 1989; Hayward, 1991). Swedish scholars often proudly point out that the Johan Skytte chair of eloquence and politics had already been established way back in 1622. Finally, even in those countries where long-lasting authoritarian and totalitarian regimes had somehow colonized the space of political science, these traditions somehow influenced the subsequent polyarchic experiences (Berndtson, 2012). Key examples of this include the former Soviet Union, where Marxist Leninism was taught as “political science” for decades, and Spain, where the Francoist regime introduced courses in political law (derecho politico) that were to impact the re-establishment of the discipline after the political transition in the 1970s.

Indeed, it is always possible to find predecessors of the discipline accounting for some kind of national tradition in every European country. However, the fact is that being a scientific discipline, political science has specific (albeit variegated) principles that are widely shared by an international community. These principles first emerged in the USA, and have since been strengthened thanks to the work of a few major European thinkers, including Stein Rokkan, Maurice Duverger and Giovanni Sartori. This was inevitable: in the United States a complete set of conditions favourable to the development of an empirical approach to the study of politics had emerged well before this happened in other countries. These conditions were: the political conditions (basically, the establishment of a solid democracy); the cultural condition (the prevalence of a pragmatic view, also from the philosophical point of view); and a less constraining State tradition (whereas in Continental Europe the lengthy evolution of the State meant that the juridical perspective had been adopted as the main analytical lens for the study of political phenomena) (Easton et al., 1991; Almond, 1996)

In Europe, these principles were introduced and subsequently supplemented not only through a complex process that was intrinsically linked to national legacies, but also through a process of adaptation the outcome of which was not just a faithful reproduction of the American template, but something different due to the variegated intellectual roots and institutional legacies present in Europe (Schmitter, 2002; Meny, 2020). We can safely assume that these differences may be exaggerated: as we will show below, there are significant divisions in the discipline that cut across the European and American contexts; what is undisputable in the case of European political science, however, is that the fragmented context in which it developed, the different timing of democratization of diverse European countries, together with their differing academic traditions, has meant that European political science is a latecomer and is definitively the newest social science to achieve a sufficient level of academic legitimation and a certain degree (not particularly high, unfortunately) of social recognition.

However, even if European political science seems to have an independent life of its own, its youthful character, together with the epistemological problems associated with the discipline, may represent an insurmountable limitation in the present (and future) turbulent times (Ansell et al., 2017; Ansell & Trondall, 2018). Continual crises and global challenges (the 2008 financial and economic crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, global climate change and so on) provoke recurrent upheaval in the academic and scientific world, since they trigger continuous demands for advice, knowledge and evidence-based guidelines. Such turbulent dynamics can represent a significant peril for European political science, which is required to overcome its traditional myths, epistemological divides and institutional weaknesses in order to provide such answers.

2 Political Science: Its Divisions and Weaknesses

2.1 The Epistemological Weakness of Political Science

As a matter of fact, while the (several) European political science communities have their own unique features (due to their history and context), they also share some significant common traits, in terms of their scientific status and social relevance, that have been attributed to the discipline as a whole. The status of political science is still fragile in many places, not only from the viewpoint of its relevance to the academic system, but also in terms of its public image. This fragility may depend on a multitude of reasons, but first and foremost it is embedded in the epistemological status of the discipline. In fact, while political science is undoubtedly a legitimate academic discipline, meaning “the primary unit of internal differentiation of the modern system of science” (Stichweh, 1992, p. 4), its epistemological status and its methodological and theoretical borders fluctuate and are very often affected by internal disputes and external pressures. An academic discipline is characterized by preserving the following characteristics to a certain degree (Krishnan, 2009):

• 1. A particular object at the core of its research (e.g. law, politics, society, natural world), although the object can be shared with other disciplines.

• 2. A body of accumulated specialist knowledge, that is specific to one discipline and should be not shared with others.

• 3. A set of common theories and concepts, which allows the systematization of a comprehensive corpus of cumulative knowledge.

• 4. A specific technical language.

• 5. A set of specific methods.

• 6. A structured presence in the teaching and research of higher education institutions (institutionalization).

Leaving the institutionalization dimension aside for a moment (see the following section), we shall now focus on the other fundamental dimensions. Political science suffers from a series of problematic issues due to its characteristics and to the significantly different ways that political scientists define their own jobs.

To better understand these problems, it is useful to conceptually treat the concept of discipline in accordance with certain well-known classifications (Biglan, 1973a, 1973b; Becher, 1989; Becher & Trowler, 2001), thanks to which academic disciplines are categorized according to their cognitive attitude (the nature of knowledge) and their social attitude (the nature of disciplinary culture). A discipline’s cognitive attitude can be treated by focusing on the epistemological/theoretical dimension and on the grade of applicability. Thus, academic disciplines can be divided into hard and soft, and pure and applied, thus giving a four-cell matrix (see Table 1.1). Hard disciplines hold well-developed, shared theories and methods, universal laws and causal propositions; they are cumulative and have generalizable findings, and are highly competitive. Soft disciplines, on the other hand, have unclear boundaries, a plurality of theories, different definitions of explanation, loosely defined problems. Pure disciplines are self-regulating and have little concern for practical application. Applied disciplines are to some extent regulated by external influences (e.g. by professional bodies such as the ones regulating lawyers or engineers) and are focused on the practical application of scientific concepts.

Table 1.1 The cognitive attitudes of academic disciplines

The social attitude of a discipline can be conceptually treated according to a distinction made based on the characteristics of the level of disciplinary identity, and of the way of doing research. According to the former criterion, disciplines can be either convergent or divergent. Convergent disciplines possess uniform standards of research and a stronger sense of cohesion and identity within the group; thus, their boundaries are much more clearly defined. Divergent disciplines, on the other hand, sustain greater intellectual deviance and display a propensity to adapt across boundaries from other disciplines. According to the latter criterion, a discipline can be classified as either rural or urban. Urban disciplines are characterized by a detailed disaggregation of the research problems in small unities, with a great number of researchers studying the same problem. Rural disciplines cover larger fields of research, involve less interaction, and the ratio of researchers to each research problem is lower. Table 1.2 presents the resulting typology.

Table 1.2 Social attitudes of the academic disciplines

By adopting these classificatory lenses, political science can at first sight be characterized as soft and pure from the cognitive point of view, and as rural and divergent from the cultural/social point of view. As a matter of fact, we may define political science as a soft discipline, since we are all perfectly aware that there is no paradigmatic consensus within the community, while our theoretical bases remain highly diversified. Analogously, we may say that it is a pure discipline since traditionally there has been very little concern regarding its practical application. Indeed, the original attitudes of political scientists and the broad majority of current research topics tend to exclude the practical application of our knowledge.

As far as the focus on the social construction of disciplinary identities is concerned, we may define political science as a divergent discipline. Indeed, its levels of identity and cohesion remain very low or generic due to the lack of a common core of discourse-argumentation-theories-methods. Moreover, we may define political science as a rural discipline in the sense that there are still few researchers dealing with the same topics, and thus there is limited competition among them (unlike physics, e.g., which is considered an “urban” discipline since there are many researchers working on the same topics).

This lack of a common core in the modes of discourse and argumentation structurally drives high disciplinary fragmentation. Furthermore, there is the vastness of the topics studied by political scientists (ranging from electoral behaviour to public policy, from political institutions to international relations, from political communication to political theory and so on). As a result, political science resembles a kind of confederation of research sectors: its internal borders are often more pronounced than its external ones. Consequently, competition among researchers is relatively low (Capano & Verzichelli, 2016).

The significant fragmentation and division of political science is widely acknowledged. The discipline has always been divided into schools and factions. For decades, there has been a clear methodological divide “between those who view the discipline as a hard science-formal, mathematical, statistical, experimental-dedicated to the cumulation of tested ‘covering laws’, and those who are less sanguine and more eclectic, who view all scholarly methods, the scientific ones as well as the softer historical, philosophical, and legal ones, as appropriate and useful” (Almond, 1990, p. 7). This divide is still present right now: it is highly probable that many political scientists would not recognize themselves in our classification of the discipline. There are those who embrace rational choice theory or a strongly quantitative approach, who would argue against our classifying political science as a soft discipline. They would consider it to involve sufficiently hard academic endeavour, and probably as more convergent than rural. However, this argument can be easily confuted by the presence of so many other scholars belonging to different theoretical schools, who are more interested in qualitative analysis.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the abovementioned classifications try to embrace a general trend, and this has become something of a challenge. In fact, we are perfectly aware that in recent years, political science has also been subjected to considerable pressure to modify its inherited cultural and cognitive features. As far as regards political science’s cultural features, the rural dimension has been challenged by the substantial pressure on scholars to publish as a result of internal academic dynamics. This phenomenon is linked to the evident transformation of research practices, which are now of a much more collective nature. The increasing number of scientific articles co-authored by more than two scholars is the most emblematic indicator of this pattern (Metz & Jäckle, 2017).

Moreover, the divergent dimension has also been affected by the attempt to reduce theoretical variety as well as methodological diversity. This is shown by several elements, two of which merit attention here:

• 1. the increasing prevalence of quantitatively significant items of research, based on large numbers of cases, published by the most prestigious journals (especially American ones);

• 2. the increasing propensity to adopt multi-method, increasingly sophisticated, research designs.

These characteristics do not radically change the rural/divergent nature of political science: in fact, qualitative analysis is still relevant, at least in the European scenario. However, if we take a closer look at the development of the discipline, we discover that there are dynamics that are working towards loosening the borders and partially changing the inherited legacy.

As far as regards the cognitive dimension, this has also been undermined by external actors. For example, in the USA a concerted effort has been made by the Republican Party to significantly reduce National Science Foundation funding to American political science departments. The arguments of the leading supporter of this strategy, Senator Tom Coburn, clearly dispute the social relevance of the discipline: “Studies of presidential executive power and Americans’ attitudes toward the Senate filibuster hold little promise to save an American’s life from a threatening condition or to advance America’s competitiveness in the world” (Coburn, 2013). At the same time, the new EU research framework for the periods 2014–2020 and 2021–2027 clearly calls upon all social sciences, including political science, to radically shift towards applied research.

Thus, the lack of any strong, unified theoretical paradigms (such as those that economists apparently seem to have), the fragmentation of research topics and the lack of large-scale joint research projects make the discipline very weak not only in epistemological terms but also from the professional point of view. The consequence is the risk of a weak public image, with the discipline being perceived as socially irrelevant (Flinders, 2013).

2.2 The Weak Social Relevance of Political Science

This almost intrinsic nature of political science also facilitates specific patterns of behaviour, which in turn can contribute to political science succumbing to the vicious circle of social and political irrelevance. As Gerry Stoker has pointed out (2010), there are four possible factors underlying the low esteem afforded to political science, which we believe to be closely linked to the aforementioned intrinsic hegemonic cultural and cognitive dimensions of the subject:

• 1. the temporal de-alignment of the logic of political scientific discovery and its political timing. In the world of real politics, there are very few windows of opportunity for political scientists to play a genuine advisory role (Brans & Timmermans, 2022), and these rare opportunities are often wasted since, owing to their “pure” mission, political scientists want to obtain accurate results from their research, which requires a timescale that the rapid, often erratic nature of political decision-making seldom affords. At the same time, its nature as a “soft” and “divergent” science does not offer policy-makers any potential widely shared solutions.

• 2. the organizational incentives of academic work. Within pure subjects, these incentives are particularly oriented towards peer reputation, and little or no consideration is given to its value by social and political actors. This means that, unlike most of the so-called applied sciences, political science is almost totally internally driven, with little attention paid to the external environment.

• 3. the problematic relationship between facts and values, and the prevailing rhetoric of the neutrality of research, that lead the majority of political scientists to pursue description and explanation rather than prediction, prescription and evaluation. From this point of view, there is an evident contradiction between the historical conditions which have allowed the development of political science (in one word: the consolidation of democratic regimes) and the embarrassment of political science when perceiving itself as a science of democracy, as suggested by Harold Lasswell (1956, 1963) and Lasswell and Lerner (1951).

• 4. the prevailing focus on research questions which are largely disconnected from real political and policy problems. This lack of focus on practical problems, and the “rural” nature of the discipline (which does not result in any critical mass of scholars working on the same topic), means that the research design is substantially disconnected from the most pressing problems faced by existing political systems. The result is that the knowledge produced is not easily operationalized in applied terms. Therefore, political science is overly concerned with searching for explanations, rather than for political and policy solutions to important social issues. Obviously, there are some “practical outcomes”, as it were, of political science. For instance, the spill-over importance from the public policy or “institutional engineering” subfields has been broadly debated since the beginning of the post-behaviouralist re-establishment of the discipline: although it is intrinsically a soft-pure discipline, political science can generate knowledge that is directly usable in improving public policy (Cairney, 2015, 2016) and the institutional arrangements of political systems (Sartori, 1994). However, these examples do not change the general assessment of the situation.

The picture emerging from the above discussion furthers debate on the relevance and social impact of political science. In fact, such a framework shows how the internal (some might say “intrinsic”) features of the discipline represent a sort of epistemological constraint, that is a hurdle which needs to be overcome in order to guarantee political scientists a sufficiently wide audience in the social sphere and in political debate. These internal cognitive dimensions of the discipline make it substantially disadvantaged in the battle for a significant reputation. It is at a structural disadvantage when it comes to acquiring resources (funding, students), gaining academic visibility and ensuring society’s perception of its purported utility and legitimacy.

This assessment of the intrinsic theoretical-methodological divides in political science, together with its propensity to have an almost completely “curiosity-driven” research agenda, shows its general weakness and potential social irrelevance. This picture does not necessarily lead to a pessimistic conclusion (as we shall show at the end of this book). However, it is important to really understand the complex process of institutionalization of political science in Europe, as well as its current state.

2.3 The Problem of Identity: A Discipline that Still Does Not Know What It Is?

The characteristics pertaining to the cognitive and social dimensions of the discipline and to its social perception raise the issue of political science’s identity. This may seem an irrelevant problem. In fact, also sociology, for example, is characterized by the same cognitive and socio-cultural properties; but what a sociologist is appears quite clear to sociologists themselves, and also to society as a whole. Then there is economics, which is clearly harder than political science and more readily acknowledged at the social level. The identity problem is an intrinsic aspect of the genesis of the discipline political science developed in order to offer an empirical description and explanation of political phenomena, that is, something whose meaning is arguable and whose practical/empirical dimensions can be investigated by other pre-existing disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, economics, geography, law and history. The truth is that political science is a second- (or third-)generation discipline in the process of specialization of academic fields. It is precisely because the topic of research (the political phenomenon) has been the object of the relative disciplines (a crowded group), that many related concepts existed before the emergence of political science, or are continuously defined by older disciplines (Easton et al., 1991).

Unsurprisingly, political science can be considered a net borrower of concepts from other disciplines and is thus in some way bound to hybridization depending on the theoretical perspective adopted and the topic of research in question (Dogan, 1996). Very few research topics will be excluded from this constitutive dynamic (e.g. electoral behaviour, party system studies). This probably represents a favourable opportunity in terms of potential discoveries, but also an intrinsic limit on building up a shared, complete disciplinary identity. Finally, it should be pointed out that this intrinsic identity problem in the case of European political science may be further complicated by the considerable variance in national cultures and academic systems, which could act to exacerbate fragmentation and disciplinary hybridization. Thus, the question “who are we?” is always going to be important within this discipline.

3 European Political Science: The Long March Towards Professionalization

While sharing a number of epistemological and professional characteristics with a multitude of other branches of learning, as shown above, European political science has its own peculiarities. These are obviously related to the historical path it took towards its institutionalization, that is to say, the achievement of a sufficiently structured presence in the social sphere, and in particular within the institutional systems of higher education and research.

The factors that speed up or hamper the process of institutionalization concern specific cultural and scientific legacies and milieus of each political system; and the different historical development of the discipline from that of American political science is of course a fundamental aspect in this regard. These characteristics are clearly of a national character, although on balance they have something in common that justifies the label of European political science (Schmitter, 2002; Meny, 2020). A common core of values seems to be present in the development of most European political science communities (if not all of them). This is why it will be important to estimate to what extent the intrinsic fragmentation of the discipline in Europe may be offset by the undertaking to share these values during the different national processes of professionalization of the discipline.

In this section, we will therefore sum up the main historical points of divergence, as well as the main convergent traits, that determine the nature of the discipline as we know it today in Europe. Obviously, given the present volume’s focus on the community of people who practice the discipline, we are principally interested in the historical evolution of political science within higher education and research institutions, where the majority of those we call “political scientists” operate. That is to say, we need to examine a few indicators of the process of (academic) professionalization of political science: the process that we consider to be the necessary harbinger of a broader phenomenon of political science’s social institutionalization, which we will come back to in the course of the next chapter.

3.1 A Discipline in Search of Scholars

Politics has been the subject of analysis on the European continent for a great while, indeed since the days of the earliest Greek philosophy. Since then, politics has of course undergone a complex process of conceptualization and reconceptualization, in keeping with historical developments within Europe, while different national trajectories have been witnessed within the political sphere. Furthermore, the study and conceptualization of politics are deeply entrenched in the evolution of the State. It is widely acknowledged that this process of conceptualization was for a long time characterized by a strong normative basis, or was dealt with from a juridical or historical analytical perspective. This was inevitable due to the intrinsic evolution of academic knowledge, and to its specialization that had to reflect the historical developments of the time.

Consequently, while in the USA the first theoretical focus of modern political science was the role of groups and the pluralistic dynamics of the governmental process (Bentley, 1908), in Europe the focus was on élites and the élite-centred dynamics of politics (see, e.g., the works of Mosca, Pareto and Michels). At the same time, in Europe the call for a new discipline tasked with studying politics in a different way characterized the entire nineteenth century, as shown by the work of diverse scholars. These scholars began to examine the question of such a new discipline by separating politics from the State. The first signs of an approach to political science were witnessed in differing forms on either side of the Atlantic, this difference being due to the diverse political situations on those continents. This is something that needs to be borne in mind, as it was also to make a significant difference in the decades thereafter. In the USA, the discipline initially came into being when focusing on an empirical phenomenon, that is, a political process in which pluralism appeared to be the constitutive dimension; in Europe the new discipline had to deal with the presence of a strong State that appeared to use its juridical basis and language to compress and conceal the real characteristics of political phenomena.

We do not know whether these different roots of the discipline could have led to any kind of convergence, owing to the different paths it took in the two continents thereafter. In fact, the new discipline had the opportunity to emerge in the USA thanks to the empirical and quantificative transformations introduced by Merriam and the Chicago school, to the institutionalization of the profession, and to the behavioural revolution after the Second World War. On the other hand, the new discipline’s emergence was stunted in Europe as a result of the dramatic political events between the 1920s and the end of the Second World War, and thus the evolution of European political science was frozen by the political context and its dynamics.

It was only after the war that European political science could resume its developmental path, at least in Western Europe, while in Eastern Europe this had to wait until the break-up of the Soviet Empire. It has been a long process: most countries initially saw the establishment of the first “chair” in political science and of certain national associations of scholars who defined themselves as “political scientists”. Describing this process is complicated by the fact that it is not easy to establish when the first chair of political science was created in each of the countries concerned. This depended on national traditions and on an understanding of what political science was. Table 1.3 shows the dates of the creation of such chairs, and also of the respective national political science associations, in 36 different European countries, according to the Proseps (Professionalization and Social Impact of European political science) project’s data (which are based on an in-depth analysis of the diverse national paths followed in this process).

Table 1.3 The establishment of the first chairs in political science and of national political science associations in Europe

What is interesting here is that not only are there “symbolic” dates in several countries, taken as indicators of the start of a lasting tradition in political science, but also that in all Eastern European countries the first chair of political science pre-dates the wave of “democratization” that put an end to those countries’ communist regimes. It is interesting that regardless of what political science actually meant, it was considered something worth labelling at least. Various studies have shown that while most political science in the USSR was based on so-called scientific communism (Smorgunov, 2015), at the same time there were streams of research of a more empirically oriented nature (Galkin, 2010). However, despite the fact that there were chairs in political science in such countries, the study of politics continued to be an inextricable mix of Marxism, sociology, legal studies with a little empirical research thrown in for good measure (Chulitskaya et al., 2022). Thus, the real birth, or rather “rebirth”, of political science only happened after 1990. The situation in Western Europe was very different. As is well known, there are some cases of chairs in political science that had been established much earlier: the abovementioned Johan Skytte professorship in government in Uppsala dates from 1622, while a number of chairs were established during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century; and as such they indicate increasing interest in the independent study of politics. However, most political science chairs were established in the period after the Second World War.

Unsurprisingly, the pattern of the discipline’s development is rather regular, following the waves of democratization. Only two small countries with a limited provision of university subjects (Luxemburg and Malta) established political science courses late, although this has not prevented the emergence of certain specialists from these two systems within the international political science community, or even the fair representation of Luxemburg and Malta in the comparative research sector.

As regards the professional organization of the discipline, all national political science associations (with the exception of Finland’s) were founded after the Second World War. However, despite the different timescale of institutionalization in the various countries (in the sense that generally speaking, the establishment of a professional academic association should indicate the presence of a group of scholars sharing the same identity), this cannot be considered a definitive indicator of the contemporary “meaning” of political science. Yet the academic development of the discipline has almost always resulted in the establishment of an official political science association. Indeed, similar patterns of institutionalization can be seen following the process of democratization in the countries concerned. The few European countries with an inactive political science association, or no such association at all, tend to be small, relatively young democracies, with the sole exception of Romania where, according to our experts, academic rivalry and the lack of communication among universities have played a role in the difficult process of institutionalization.

Again, national paths matter here. For example, the UK association was set up in 1950 following a disagreement between the London School of Economics, which was pushing for an association of political science, and a group of scholars, led by Oxford University, who wanted the association to bear the label Political Studies. The latter position prevailed in the end, thus indicating that the establishment of the resulting association was driven by scholar of politics from other disciplines (mainly history) (Chester, 1975, pp. 152–4; Hayward, 1991). Likewise, neither can the Association Française de Science Politique, founded in 1949, be considered a pure political science association, but rather a State-driven institutional initiative (represented by the establishment of the National Foundation of political sciences—Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques), designed to promote the development of political economics and the social sciences. As has been observed, the establishment of the association indicated the need for a discipline, although the content was still lacking: “while its library, research units, courses, journals, associations, and funding were in place, it had no readers, researchers, teachers, or authors” (Gaiti & Scot, 2017, p. 2). Finally, a similar trend was observed in Germany as well, where the country’s political science association was founded in 1951 under pressure from an intellectual élite with Social Democratic Party sympathies. These intellectuals considered political science to be an “oppositional discipline” compared to existing ones, and one that boasted a potentially innovative scientific community able “to guarantee independent analysis of the Federal Republic’s political development and be a control discipline to ensure democratic development” (Kastendiek, 1987, p. 34).

Two of the aforementioned cases—the German and French ones—show how the establishment of a new academic discipline is not necessarily an internal product of the academic world, that is, the outcome of that process of specialization and knowledge development that very often is considered the driver of new disciplines. These two national cases show how, in the case of political science at least, contextual factors and social or political actors can instigate change.

These three national cases are very interesting because they show how problematic the institutionalization of the discipline has been: paraphrasing the title of a novel by Luigi Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), the beginnings of European political science may be likened to those of a discipline in search of scholars invested in it. Such a search has been either an institutional-driven enterprise, as in France or Germany, or a more academic-centred undertaking like in other European countries, where the discipline emerged thanks to the efforts of individuals or group of scholars seeking space for political science. In either case, the need for an independent discipline tasked with investigating political phenomena already existed. But it simply needed agency in order for it to become reality.

3.2 The Never-Ending Saga of Disciplinary Borders

Hence, in every European country, political science has had to struggle in order to free itself from those other academic disciplines that have traditionally dominated the study of politics. These disciplines had traditionally been history, law, and political philosophy or the history of political ideas. Public law had played a prominent role in continental Europe, where it had provided the modern State with certain core notions which quickly became the go-to tools with which to describe daily political life. The expressions constitutional theory or State doctrine, for example, were labels applied in several European countries to academic subjects and branches of scientific literature dominated by lawyers. In Germany, the Rechtstaat (State of law) tradition had nurtured, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, a first generation of constitutional lawyers who subsequently established a highly prolific school of theorists of normativism. This was the main school of thought influencing the later development of modern social sciences after the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.

In Italy and France as well, the impact of constitutional law on empirical political science was patent due to the enormous bearing of normative theories and juridical doctrine on those countries’ political élites. Still today, the majority of public intellectuals invited by the media to comment on the political news are referred to as constitutional experts, even if they do not discuss constitutional issues at all.

The historical weakness of political science is therefore traceable and explainable in terms of its cultural subordination to other academic disciplines, and in particular to the juridical domain. This is very evident in the three countries already mentioned—Italy, France and Germany—which were probably the first in continental Europe to experience the problem of the “emancipation” of political science. However, a similar scenario was soon to emerge in the Nordic countries as well (Anckar, 1987).

Law is not the only discipline to have contributed towards the late development of political science in Europe. In France, for example, sociology has also played, and continues to play, a significant role (Favre, 1989; Legavre, 2004), with political sociology being specifically seen as a national variant of political science (Boncourt, 2007)

To cut a long story short, European political science as an academic discipline can be considered to be the product of Europe’s cultural history and of the segmental development of its national university systems. The historically rooted pluralistic tradition of political study is important here. The “political sciences” is another generic label that has been used for decades now to cover a vast array of courses offered by many higher education institutions. Several universities in Europe still award bachelor and/or master degrees in political sciences. This pluralistic academic tradition has severely constrained the academic development of political science as a specific, methodologically separate discipline. As a consequence, the public’s perception of the discipline has been clouded and its recognition hindered.

Given this fragmented state of cultural pluralism, the establishment of a professionalized community of political scientists has tended to follow diverse random pathways. Basically, in every country efforts have been made by those interested in establishing an independent field for the study of politics, to unite existing links with the aforementioned hegemonic disciplines. However, and this is an important additional point to make, many of the major political science thinkers in Europe first encountered the discipline, or decided to transfer to it, after they had graduated (in another subject that is). It could not have been otherwise, due to fact that what we call modern political science was not taught at university in their time. This is true, for example, of the first generation of European political scientists, all of whom were born during the second decade of the nineteenth century: Samuel Finer and Mattei Dogan, who both graduated in history; Karl Deutsch, who graduated in international and canon law; Maurice Duverger, who graduated in law and was a professor of public law for many years.

Even the group of younger scholars flanking the abovementioned founders, who were to become leading figures of modern European political science in their own right, had a somehow disparate education. Stein Rokkan graduated in political philosophy and was assigned a chair in political sociology in Bergen after a lengthy academic career at several different American universities. Giovanni Sartori graduated in philosophy and had to wait more than ten years to obtain a chair in political science in Florence, where he actually taught the course in political science whilst being himself a Professor of Sociology. Juan Linz graduated in law and political sciences, and was also a Professor of Sociology, before obtaining a position as a political scientist (at Yale). Jean Blondel, who graduated from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (SciencesPo Paris) in the mid-1950s, was probably the first of the political science “majors” who spent an entire academic career as a “political scientist”. Nevertheless, the content of the degree courses offered to several generations of prospective political scientists was the usual mix characterizing the European pluralist tradition of “political sciences”. Generally speaking, it could therefore be argued that all of the founders of political science in Europe lacked a university background in political science as such, as was also the case of subsequent generations of scholars until the establishment of a specific, specialized system of doctoral studies in political science in the majority of European countries.

These personal case-histories not only render the idea of the complexity of the process leading to the independence of European political science communities but are also a reminder of the roots and the precursors of the discipline; all in all, they also partly account for the current differences between the contrasting pathways taken by political science in different countries.

We may therefore argue that the process of political science’s liberation from its neighbouring disciplines has not been a simple one. However, in one way or another it has been successful. However, it has occurred at different times, and to different degrees, in the various countries concerned. The differences in the process of institutionalization are mainly due to the characteristics of the diverse national university systems, and to the resistance of the aforesaid neighbouring disciplines. The watershed moment was the process of massification of the university system that occurred throughout Europe from the early 1960s onwards. Due to this process, more public funding was allocated to higher education programmes, which in turn entailed the ability to increase the number of academic posts. Consequently, there was also room for posts in political science, as shown by a comparative study conducted by Hans Dieter Klingemann (2007). The Western European countries surveyed in this study (see Table 1.4), however, are characterized by the different timing and timescale of professionalization: the first systems to display a significant increase in the number of academic political scientists were, understandably, the United Kingdom and Germany, followed by Belgium, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. The last to do so were the Southern European countries, which had to await the third wave of democratization. Somewhere in between were France and Italy, the two broad systems from continental Europe that only obtained a significant number of political scientists after a long, complicated phase of liberation from the dominance of political science’s neighbouring disciplines (Blondiaux & Deloye, 2007; Freddi & Giannetti, 2007).

Table 1.4 Evolution of political science and tenure positions in Western Europe (1960–2005)

Table 1.4 shows a process of academic professionalization that we have defined as successful. However, we should not forget that the combination of university massification during the glorious thirty years and the transformation of European higher education systems after 1968 resulted in a substantial increase in academic positions for all the established academic guilds. In the end, political science was the latecomer among the social sciences when it came to competing for academic resources, and this would explain the fact that even in those countries where such resources proved sufficient, it was not capable of rivalling its closest competitors such as economics or sociology.

This difficult, complex process has undoubtedly been helped by political developments in Europe. The centrality of political parties in the development of Western Europe’s political systems has helped the institutionalization of the discipline as much as the recognition it has been afforded by its neighbouring disciplines. At the same time, this process, in which the emergent discipline could only try to operate in the interstices of the existing higher education systems, and within the parallelogram of academic forces, when successful has resulted in a very restrictive perception of the disciplinary borders in question. In other words, the consequence of this process is that political scientists have become very suspicious of any potential “invasion” of their field by scholars and studies from other disciplines. This is paradoxical given that, as previously mentioned, political science is a net borrower of concepts and methods from other academic disciplines.

The defence of disciplinary borders (especially the perception of neutrality and objectivity in studying politics) could also account for a certain tendency that political science has of developing separately from the real world, or rather, of developing theories and conducting empirical investigations that are more driven by the desire to demonstrate its scientific relevance (and thus by internal dynamics) than by the aim of signalling its social and political relevance (by focusing on real problems faced by the contemporary world).

There is another paradoxical aspect of the issue of disciplinary borders, and it concerns the consequences of an incremental specialization of the discipline. As with other sciences, in fact, political science has seen a rapid process of specialization since its initial consolidation. Consequently, the central focus of European political science (comparative politics, and in particular the comparative study of European political parties and institutions) has been accompanied by a number of other specializations. There has been an increase in the number of subfields—like political theory, public policy, European studies and international relations—which has resulted in a significant segmentation of the discipline in terms of the adopted theories and approaches. There are now many political scientists with a kind of dual identity (political scientist and historian, or constitutional law scholar, or sociologist etc.). Importantly, this second identity can very often become predominant, and this clearly poses a challenge to political science: it risks being condemned to the status of a rural/divergent discipline.

Finally, there is a third paradox: the segmentation of political science means that at the subfield level, political scientists continuously interact with scholars of other disciplines studying the specific object of the subfield in question. Therefore, policy scholars necessarily interact with economists and sociologists, while political scientists studying the European Union necessarily interact with scholars specialized in European Law and the History of European Integration. Similarly, political scientists working on International Politics necessarily interact with political geographers, political economists, historians of international relations and so on.

Thus, the battle over the borders, which seems to have been won at the higher level, still persists at the lower level where the specific subfields of research, or the focus of individual research, favour exposure to, and often interaction with, other disciplines. Such dynamics may be considered normal, and in a certain sense necessary, in the attempt to understand and explain the object of study. At the same time, working with scholars from different disciplines can lead to the watering down of disciplinary borders, or even to the hybridization of the work of political scientists. While this may well be a fine driver of research excellence, it can constitute a significant challenge to disciplinary identity.

4 What Do European Political Scientists Actually Do?

In Sect. 3 we briefly reviewed the longitudinal trends displayed by the main indicators of European political science’s academic professionalization. These trends lead us to conclude that nowadays, the discipline can be generally considered well institutionalized throughout the continent, albeit with certain obvious differences between Western and Eastern Europe, and to some extent between Northern and Southern Europe as well.

We shall be returning to the question of the geo-political distribution of European political science’s “record” in the third chapter of the volume, since we are interested in exploring the factors underlying this variance. For the moment however, we are simply going to focus on the late but all things considered, satisfactory trend of political science’s establishment within European educational and research institutions in general.

We shall now examine the implications of the previously mentioned paradox of internal borders. We know that the potential scope of political scientists’ scholarship has always been broad and somewhat vague, thus rendering the soft nature of our subject particularly evident to all observers. At the same time, the increasing complexity of our common object—the “political phenomenology” at large—has determined the consequent increasing complexity of the “domains” within political science. This emerges, for instance, from the pioneering studies on the age of maturity of the discipline (Easton et al., 1991).

After all, heterogeneity has always been the quintessential feature of the discipline since the original definition provided by its American founding fathers (in particular, Easton and Almond, who in their works emphasized the multifaceted nature of political science, which targets a variety of different objects and units of analysis). This applies even more so to the European context, where the complexity of the discipline has been nurtured by several recently developed overlapping and inter-disciplinary areas (Political Communication and Media Studies, European Studies, to give two obvious examples). According to Mattei Dogan (1996), one of the founding fathers of the discipline in Europe, political science’s heterogeneity is directly connected to its continuous exchanges with neighbouring disciplines, and this makes the work of political scientists particularly important in inter-disciplinary cooperation, as we will see more in detail later. Therefore the multi-tasking, multidimensional remit of political scientists should be measured in terms of their wealth of interests. This is rather a difficult exercise to do in a truly comparative perspective, due to the different educational and research systems, some of which group together very different topics and research sub-communities in general, and are sometimes characterized by undefined categories (for instance, a course or a research project generically entitled “political science” or something similar).

On the other hand, it is also difficult to avoid overstating political scientists’ variety of research or teaching interests, given the different terminology sometimes used to cover very similar topics. One example of this is the plethora of labels that can be more or less grouped together in the methodologically and epistemologically coherent category of comparative politics: comparative political behaviour; comparative political systems; comparative democracies (or comparative non-democratic regimes); comparative political institutions; and so forth.

In order to proceed with our exploration of the future perspectives of a “sufficiently institutionalized”, but still largely improvable, discipline “in search of identity”, we therefore need to assess the current state of the discipline’s internal fragmentation. The question is therefore: what exactly do European political scientists do today? We can try to answer this question by looking at both the variability in research interests, and also the variability in the academic subjects included in courses taught by political scientists. As previously stated, it is difficult to map the variance in the “core business” of political scientists, although we can try to do so by examining both of the abovementioned dimensions.

For example, we can measure the scope of the research conducted by European political scientists by looking at the number of area of interest represented within that community. According to Klingemann (2007), this scope was expanding, but was still rather limited, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To be more precise, the national reports underlying his qualitative survey showed a predominance of research projects dealing with single-country analyses of political systems (but this should be distinguished from the study of the European Union’s “political system” which is nowadays considered a separate branch of political science), followed by three well-established domains, namely International relations, Policy analysis and Public administration (another category that should probably be split in two, given the substantive and epistemological differences between these areas) and Political sociology. Another important category considered by that survey is Political theory (including the history of political ideas), while a much more limited role was found to be played by two minor, albeit significant, areas: Comparative politics and Methodology.

Regardless of our critical comments concerning the ambiguity of some of these categories (which in any case substantiates the general view of an increasingly complex discipline), the picture provided by the reports produced in the early years of the current century certainly requires updating now. Unfortunately, we cannot replicate a similar qualitative survey in order to compare the “weights” of different political science domains. However, we can provide a reasonable comparative picture by utilizing the data from the Proseps survey,¹ which asked each respondent to indicate up to three “fields of specialization” deserving attention from the political science community, in the country where the respondent worked at the time of the interview.

Figure 1.1 reports the percentages of cumulated preferences recorded by each of these 15 domains (14 options plus a residual category), together with the weighted percentages for each single category included in the pie chart.

Fig. 1.1

Perceptions of the importance of political science’s subfields. (Source: Proseps, 2019 Survey data. Note: the figure reports the distribution of the answers to the question: Which field of political science do you believe should receive more scholarly attention in the country where you work? The first figure represents the percentage of respondents indicating each subfield. The second figure indicates the weight of each subfield)

Three general implications result from this description. Firstly, the overall nature of political science has certainly become considerably more complex over the last twenty years. This is confirmed by the fact that the variability of the studies previously done by the new generation of scholars is now much greater. Indeed, a greater percentage of them seems to be attracted by specific sub-disciplines that are in some way separate from the “pure political studies” of previous days.² Secondly, the main challenges to the traditional domains come from a series of brand-new academic categories (gender studies, security studies and, to some extent, social movements and political economy).³ Thirdly—and this indicates incremental rather than revolutionary change—none of the traditional categories has lost substantial ground to others. In other words, the discipline is becoming increasingly complex and seems considerably richer in terms of the substantive topics it covers, without losing any of its original elements of scientific heritage.

This gradually increasingly complexity (implying richness but also potential weaknesses) is not only the result of an increasing number of fields of study, but also of the different distribution of these domains between diverse countries. Figure 1.2 shows this across-country distribution in terms of the seven most important fields of study (which are very similar to those listed by Klingemann in his 2007 survey).

Fig. 1.2

Political scientists in Europe according to their field of specialization. (Source: Proseps, 2019 Survey data. Note: the figure reports the distribution of the seven subfields indicated by Proseps respondents as their main field of specialization. Only countries represented by more than 25 respondents were selected in the graph)

The data shown in Fig. 1.2 are extremely interesting since they indicate not only the specializations within the discipline, but also the significant differences there are among countries. A few points that emerge from the wealth of data in the table are worthy of special mention here, for the sake of this analysis.

• 1. Comparative politics is no longer a “hegemonic field” in any of the countries considered, but still represents more than 30% of the total, and in fact 40% in Croatia, Israel, Romania, Portugal, Austria, the Czech Republic and Italy.

• 2. The field of Public Administration accounts for the relative majority of political scientist (around 30%) in the Netherlands and Norway.

• 3. More than 40% of political scientists in Switzerland, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark are specialized in Public Administration and Public Policy taken together.

• 4. The EU Studies field is only significantly developed (in relative terms) in Austria and Belgium.

• 5. Political theory plays a major role in Russia, Greece and Slovakia.

• 6. Political institutions are studied to a significant degree in Russia, Finland, Switzerland and Poland.

• 7. International Relations look to be less developed than other subfields in Spain, Switzerland and Hungary.

Other conclusions may be drawn from these interesting data. However, for the time being we are going to stick with the above summary, which basically substantiates the initial observation made in this chapter, namely that the different situations observed in each individual European nation with regard to the various aspects of political science’s professionalization need to be considered in view of the fact that political science necessarily depends on national contexts and academic legacies.

A final exercise we are going to conduct in order to portray the complex development of political science’s internal structure over the past two decades concerns the organization of research by the political science community as a whole. In particular, we shall be focusing on the recent transformation of the most important political science organization in Europe, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR). Founded in 1970 thanks to the decisive contribution of a few scholars—Stein Rokkan, Rudolf Wildenmann, Giovanni Sartori, Richard Rose among others, and with the key contribution of the ECPR’s first chairperson, Jean Blondel—this association has been the driving force behind the internationalization of European political science. Its first declared goal is to remove the divisions separating European scholars: “breaking down the barriers between the national traditions of the discipline and creating a truly international community of scholars within Europe.”⁴

There can be no doubt that the ECPR has achieved that goal; one only has to look at the many activities, and the growing institutionalization, of the entire community achieved thanks to the concerted efforts of this organization (Deschouwer, 2020). It has striven to reduce gender and generational gaps, to establish a degree of solidarity between richer and poorer research environments, and to launch a fruitful dialogue with non-European communities of scholars. However, what is particularly interesting to note here is that the process of professionalization promoted by the ECPR in recent decades has been based above all on the recognition of the discipline’s growing plurality. This plurality is evident from the growing interest shown by the ECPR’s journals and events in new projects and research fields. The traditional core of comparative politics has been flanked by other substantive fields of interest, resulting in new editorial initiatives representing the complex world of European political science. Above all, the ECPR has paid constant attention to the “new frontiers” of the discipline, as shown by efforts to represent the complexity of the research agenda through the organization of permanent research infrastructures. Figure 1.3 shows the number of sections present at the ECPR general conference (introduced in 2001), and the number of standing groups/research networks operating during the same period. If we compare the trends of these indicators to the vitality of ECPR membership (which up until a few years ago was increasing), the picture we get is clearly that of an increasingly proactive, creative community of scholars engaged in the study of a growing range of topics and sectors.⁵

Fig. 1.3

ECPR standing groups and research networks; thematic sections at the ECPR annual general conference; ECPR membership 2000–2021. (Source: elaboration of official data taken from the ECPR website)

5 A Point of (Re)departure? Crises and New Opportunities for European Political Science

In this chapter we have basically abridged a lengthy story that has already been recounted by certain classical analyses of the history of European political science. In doing so, our goal was not to add new evidence to the picture of the longitudinal transformation of European political science. Indeed, we are perfectly aware of the historical-cultural sedimentation of the discipline in Europe, and the very different timing of its institutionalization and professionalization from one country to another. Moreover, we know that the frenetic relationships built among the multitude of “souls” populating the world of political science are not easily dealt with: internal borders are sometimes perceived as more problematic than external ones, and the soft nature of the discipline remains a serious dilemma.

These characteristics are both a torment and a delight for the members of the European political science community. In fact, these scholars know that these structural divides may undermine their bargaining powers within their professional environment, that is: at their universities and research centres, as well as within those branches of the public administration supporting the higher education system in their own countries. They also know that the weakness of political science may place them in a subordinate position vis-à-vis other academic groups that are more strongly established, and even better “protected” by the organization of scientific work at supranational level; for instance, by the presence of selected academic sectors within the European Research Council’s system of evaluation. In fact, among the panels and related subsections through which the ERC classifies all disciplinary fields, political science gets watered down within a few inter-disciplinary categories, all of which are included in section SH2.

However, the pluralism of European political scientists’ contribution, and the flexibility of their methodological tools, may be seen as virtues. For example, political scientists may teach a great variety of courses in addition to those that are part of traditional social sciences degrees. Over the past four decades, the growth in the number of successful paths to a career as a political scientist—via media studies, public administration studies, international cooperation, public policy, geo-politics, just to mention the most frequently followed paths—confirms the eclectic nature of the discipline, which in turn also results in a certain presence of selected, specialized political scientists within the life-long learning and professional training spheres.

Similarly, the rapid rise in the number of multi-disciplinary, dissemination-oriented projects has enhanced the role of political scientists in many ways. Indeed, they represent the ideal “bridge” between different groups of scholars—lawyers, sociologists, historians and economists—who are sometimes unable to interact given their different epistemological bases. As a matter of fact, the intrinsic fragmentation of political science offers them the opportunity to share certain objects of research, or even some of their methodological toolkits. In the end, the context-driven dynamics of political science seem to represent the ideal basis from which to rethink and re-launch the role of a discipline that seems to be eternally suspended between reflection and action, and which at the same time appears clouded by its national, country-specific interpretations.

We would like to conclude this first chapter by examining the main objective of this volume, and by fine-tuning the underlying questions it poses. We already know that the near future is going to be a significant challenge for the discipline, and to some extent for every individual political scientist. However, we need to understand whether this challenge needs to be met in purely defensive terms (i.e. by safeguarding the professionalism, the values, the methods and the social roles that have characterized European political science in its century-old history), or whether a more complex, but also more ambitious, objective can be pursued. To the latter end, the idea is to bring together all of the doubts and questions raised over the past few decades and reformulate them in terms of a new professional and intellectual challenge.

The danger of fragmentation among sub-disciplines, and of the idiosyncratic behaviour of different sectors of the discipline (theoretical “schools”, national communities of scholars, methodological “tribes” etc.), can be transformed into an opportunity for political scientists to reconsider for the purposes of their own future. This is a crucial question in Europe in particular, for all of the reasons given above. It should also be pointed out that looking to a “new challenge” does not amount to creating a “new science”. As is always the case in scientific discourse, what we are doing is simply transforming pre-existing elements. For instance, when we talk about the need for a new approach to the comprehensiveness of scientific debate (the social role of science, the enhancement of scientific discourse, the “third mission” etc.), what we are doing is rephrasing something that one of the founders of modern political science already had clear in his mind. Harold Lasswell was pointing to this need when he argued for a policy science for democracy when proposing a specific model of engagement in social and political problems on the part of political science scholars, aimed at preserving and improving democracy (1948, 1951). A model in which political science is pivotal to the integration of the various normative and descriptive frames applied to the collective consideration of important policy issues; whereby, in doing so, “political science is the policy science, par excellence” (Lasswell, 1956, p. 979).

Furthermore, Lasswell, together with other champions of American behaviourism (such as Gabriel Almond, 1966), may be borne in mind when reviewing the role of political science in a public debate dominated by evidence-based decisions and by the quest for adequate communication between the scientific community and the public sphere. This type of debate should involve a public informed by the social sciences also through “the dissemination of insight on a vast scale to the adult population” (Lasswell, 1948, p. 148).

Once again, this is particularly relevant (and somewhat desirable today) in European society. Indeed, the problems of a lack of social dissemination and of social apathy were traditionally less important in Europe than elsewhere. However, in times of mistrust and disenchantment, this is no longer the case.

We could examine hundreds of examples pointing to the risks of political science’s oblivion (Ricci, 1984) present in Europe today; but we can also point to the fact that the current scenario may represent an opportunity to re-launch the discipline in the near future. The different aspects of political scientists’ scholarship may be mentioned here. For example, their comprehensive knowledge of international relations; the opportunity they have to produce advocacy and evidence-based support to domestic policy-makers; the communication skills they can transfer to young politicians and newer generations of opinion makers. However, the best example may be the capability of political scientists to present the results of their research to non-academic audiences in order to enhance electoral participation and further a better understanding of the electoral system. Traditionally this has been a concern for many North-American scholars. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the difference between the participatory gaps in the USA and Europe remains evident, as shown by Donald Green, one of the most eminent American scholars involved in the debate on the nature of electoral democracy. In the volume Get out the vote!, written jointly with one of his associates (Green & Gerber, 2008), Green provides a clear example of advocacy (in this case, for aspirant campaigners and political motivators), basing his work on the strict, coherent application of the experimental method. The main argument of this volume is that only a careful mix of scientific knowledge and a proactive approach to applicative and participative experiments can save American democracy from decline. Just two decades later, Europe is now running exactly the same risks. Indeed, perhaps it will face an even worse scenario, given the inability of several European countries to respond to populist discourse and authoritarian trends (Urbinati, 2019).

Ultimately, we may conclude that such “torment and delight” for European political scientists—the possible transformation of an endemic and multidimensional weakness into a major opportunity—will represent a key issue in the years to come, involving all professional aspects of the discipline: teaching, research, third mission and social activities.

In this scenario, the recent crises have clearly increased political scientists’ sense of awareness, since they have been forced to react, as have all academics, to the challenges of our times. However, they have also had the chance to test their ability to be more visible and more proactive in formulating diagnoses and possible cures for the ailments afflicting today’s society (Real-Dato & Verzichelli, 2022).

Of course, when we talk of crises we are referring to a number of very different phenomena. After the Twin Towers tragedy on 11 September 2001, at least three types of crisis undermining the foundations of modern democracy (and particularly the stability of democracy in Europe) were identified. Indeed, these crises have called into question very different aspects of the functioning of both domestic politics and the European Union (EU) system. Some of them are clearly of a transnational dimension and may be connected to exogenous factors deriving from the domestic effects of global events.

The 2008 Great Recession and the subsequent Eurozone crisis (Stiglitz, 2016), and the 2015 refugee crisis (Castells et al., 2017), belong to this first category of crisis. Although they should be explored separately due to the very different scope of their respective impact on our discipline, they may be assimilated also in terms of the specialization of the necessary skills (not all political scientists can be considered “experts” in economic or migration policies), and in virtue of the level of possible engagement due to knowledge of these related fields (local governance, national governance, EU governance, international organizations etc.).

Other crises that specifically affected certain European countries were the result of issues or events within a specific polity. This is clearly the case of independence and/or secession crises like those witnessed in Scotland, Catalonia and Belgium, or of the broader issue of Brexit in the United Kingdom. We can consider these episodes as being the “hunting ground” of specific sub-sets of political scientists, such as experts in constitutional and administrative reforms for example. However, so many skills (including an understanding of the normative theories of politics, and also of international politics) are often required in order to answer the major questions arising in the context of such crises. This is another type of phenomenon that has speeded up the quest for “personal engagement” in domestic debate, albeit with very different results in terms of the efficacy of political science’s dealing with the issues in question (Real-Dato et al., 2022, with regard to the Spanish-Catalonian case).

A third type of crisis concerns the long-term effects of reform within our democracies (Pritoni & Vicentini, 2022; Koikkalainen, 2022). The decline of formerly super-resistant élites and party systems in Europe is clearly related to the new quest for direct democracy, unmediated decision-making and responsive action. The nature of the debate about the crisis of representation may vary in terms of its focus and scope, but there is no European nation that has not been affected by this problem over the two past decades. Although we cannot argue that such a situation will result in a sort of permanent transition of our policy-making systems, we must admit that the search for new policy paradigms and solutions has often been breathless in recent decades. This is also reflected in the pessimistic tone of many important works by political scientists, who more or less denounce the crisis of liberal democracy (Mair, 2013; Urbinati, 2014; Tormey, 2015; Howe, 2017).

The COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak in 2020 represents another critical event that has captured the attention of political scientists around the world. This crisis will undoubtedly overshadow previous post-Second World War crises: its disruptive effects in many countries worldwide will call into question key aspects of their respective political systems. Such aspects will include the normative and ethical principles underlying the behaviour of public authorities (particularly in democratic countries), the role of the state in the management of the economy, citizens’ attitudes towards democracy and states’ capacity to protect their society by providing adequate safety nets. This argument seems to apply even more so to the future of political science in Europe. Indeed, we could argue that the pandemic represents a sort of ultimate acid-test for European political scientists, acting simultaneously as a brake on the constant process of emancipation of the discipline, and as a stimulus for a community of academics who are supposed to be familiar with the catch-words of the last couple of years: emergency, crisis, policy solutions, sustainability, trade-off (between the economy and health) and so on.

Given that we are perfectly aware that COVID-19 may affect the overall profile of all academic disciplines, the reality of political science—and in particular European political science—may be taken as a paradigmatic test of the discipline’s maturity, due to the importance of the long-term implications of the scholarly community’s reactions. As we have already pointed out elsewhere (Capano et al., 2023), we need to assess the degree of “awareness” of European political scientists, and thus to measure their “predisposition to adaptation”, and to understand if this kind of reaction hides different aspects of professional adaptation (which we may call passive, proactive and innovative adaptation).

We are not convinced, as many claim, that nothing will be the same after COVID-19. However, the pandemic has had, continues to have, and in the future will probably still have, a significant impact on socioeconomic systems, political relationships and public policies. Uncertainty and ambiguity will characterize the coming years in terms of the real socioeconomic and political impact of the pandemic, and of what to do to cope with that impact. Again, as every critical juncture in history shows, the coming years will be full of unexpected, or consciously pursued, change as well as the unexpected, and not necessarily desirable or fair, persistence of the status quo. The world of science and of academic institutions will undoubtedly be called upon to make a greater contribution to society in its effort to deal with crises (the next pandemic, climate change, dramatic migration processes, increasing social inequality). This scenario will represent a serious challenge to European political science, and will require a significant reconsideration (and, as we firmly hope, renewal) of its characteristics, professional patterns and mission. This challenge is unavoidable, and we shall be coming back to it in the conclusive section of the present volume.