The Legacies: Explaining the Richness and Heterogeneity of European Political Science

Abstract

Political science is to be considered a relatively new academic subject within the European scenario, having only seen the light of day during the second half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, as we have seen in Chap. 1, the discipline has grown significantly thanks to the extension of higher education in all European countries between the 1960s and 1980, to the transition to democracy of the South-European authoritarian regimes, and to the democratization of the former communist regimes in Central-Eastern Europe.

1 Premise

Political science is to be considered a relatively new academic subject within the European scenario, having only seen the light of day during the second half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, as we have seen in Chap. 1, the discipline has grown significantly thanks to the extension of higher education in all European countries between the 1960s and 1980, to the transition to democracy of the South-European authoritarian regimes, and to the democratization of the former communist regimes in Central-Eastern Europe.

In the previous chapter we also emphasized the considerable diversification of the degree of academic institutionalization within Europe, as a result of several factors that can be roughly classified in the following way.

First of all, different national traditions regarding the study of politics have played a role (Berndtson, 2022). In most of continental Europe, for example, political science has been characterized by the traditional “pluralistic” conception of the subject. In some countries, the historical hegemony of law as the pivotal discipline in the study of politics was evident during the aforementioned period. In others, the role of the State underlay the theoretical endeavours of the first generation of political science scholars.

A second important group of factors concerns the different timing of the processes of democratization in the various countries, while the third dimension to be taken into account concerns the different characteristics of individual higher education systems in Europe, as well as all the other institutional and contingent conditions for the potential development of political science.

In such a complex context, the development of political science has been characterized by diverse, specific national paths, stories and results. At the same time, a process of convergence can be perceived (Meny, 2010). This process is rooted in the paradigms shared by Western-European scholars—and later by the global community of scholars—since the end of Second World War. In this chapter we aim to reconstruct this complicated picture of the convergent processes and local specificities witnessed for decades.

The first section of this chapter will be devoted to the historical patterns we have identified through our research. More precisely, we are going to examine the evolution of about thirty national communities of political scientists in Europe, in an attempt to identify the different trajectories followed by the discipline in recent decades throughout Europe. This reconstruction of the most important routes taken towards political science’s consolidation will be based on a comprehensive assessment of the literature, together with some original data we have collected within the context of the Proseps project. In particular, we shall be using the data set from the 2019 survey conducted just before the start of the pandemic, other sources of information connected to the working groups’ efforts, and of course our interviewees’ recollections. The main purpose of this section is to offer a simple, but robust, classification of the national trajectories followed towards disciplinary consolidation.

The second section will shift from the level of history to that of memories. In other words, from a discussion of the degree of institutionalization of the whole community of scholars comparatively analysed as at macro-national level, to our interviewees’ recollections of their past experience, and their thoughts on the present and future of the discipline. In order to formulate this picture, we sought help from a number of scholars representing three generations of the current community of European political scientists. This section’s main goal is to describe the longitudinal evolution of the discipline by examining the different orientations of European political scientists.

This qualitative mapping will permit us to formulate an initial interpretation of the evolution of political science in contemporary Europe. In particular, we will deal with the multiple dimensions identified by different generations of scholars, and the capabilities developed to date by political scientists which, according to our interviewees, represent a fundamental legacy for the profession in the near future. This “pluralistic legacy” of the discipline was at first shaped by the European positivist paradigm, and then influenced by American behaviourism, and is continuously mediated by a number of specificities at both domestic and national levels.

The last section of this chapter will expand on the definitions of these legacies and present a typology of ideal figures that will be recalled in our empirical analysis.

Four metaphorical figures in particular will be involved, in an attempt to envisage the prospective scenario for European political scientists: we associate the attitudes that our interviewees aspire to, with four epic heroes whose personalities will be used, in a rather provocative manner, to indicate the distinctive features of European political scientists. Aeneas, the first of the four heroes, will be indicated as the ideal-type of the fully devoted scholar, who represents all of the most important capabilities of the European political scientist, but who, for this reason, is very difficult to find in reality. On the other hand, the figure of Sisyphus represents the risk of a diminishing willingness to cultivate such capabilities, thus reducing the professional and intellectual action of political scientists to an irrational acceptance of their fate as losers. Odysseus and Achilles, in turn, represent two types of scholars who maximize one of the two most important capabilities of a political scientist—the institutional devotion of the disciplinary saviour in the first case, and the individual desire to leave a personal intellectual legacy in the second case—whilst however neglecting the other important aspects of the profession. Our analysis will associate these archetypes to the characters that emerge from the recollections and views of the first three generations of European scholars.

By following this approach, we establish a classification which we then use to achieve this volume’s first goal, namely to provide an original and comprehensive map of the cultural and intellectual heritage of political science in Europe, by comparing different origins, different processes of institutionalization and also all information we can glean from individual stories and views. We believe that this is the first step towards offering a clear and original interpretation of the richness of the roots, experiences and “values” of European political science.

2 Historical Patterns of European Political Science

2.1 A Short but Important Record

The Proseps survey dataset compiled during the course of 2019 helps us to reconstruct the state of European political science just before the emergence of the pandemic. The overall picture is that of a sound discipline and one with a wealth of practicing scholars and significant ambitions.

As shown in the previous chapter, the discipline is now present in all corners of Europe. Despite differences in the process of institutionalization, we can argue that a hard core of specialists is now well established in every single European country. Dedicated PhD programmes and national associations have mushroomed in recent decades. Furthermore, the degree of internationalization of the new generations of researchers, although significantly variable across countries, is considered acceptable by many European scholars.

Certain indicators appear to reveal the diachronic nature of the consolidation of Europe’s political science community. All of these indicators can be related to the aforementioned dimensions, three of which are:

• (a) the density of political science in all higher education institutions;

• (b) the appeal of political science on first degree and PhD programmes;

• (c) the perceived quality and penetration of political science’s research findings.

Before analysing and comparing the individual characteristics and views of three generations of European political scientists, we are going to examine the discipline’s historical evolution. There is considerable literature available for this purpose. For example, we know a lot about the development of the discipline in Western-European countries (Easton et al., 1991; Klingemann, 2007). Since the 1980s, the quality of publications and the internationalization of European political science during its phase of consolidation have been studied in some depth. There are studies of the overall variance in the attitudes of political scientists (i.e. Brush, 1996; Keeler, 2005), and even in-depth analyses of certain large national communities (e.g. the study of Italian political science findings by Plümper & Radaelli, 2004). Comparisons of European and American findings are also available (e.g. Norris, 1997). More recently, the internationalization and integration of national political science communities and associations in Europe have been studied by Boncourt (2015, 2017).

Figure 2.1 combines some of the milestones of European political science’s development with the other two aforementioned dimensions. Political science’s appeal as an academic discipline in Europe has increased thanks to the incremental consolidation of the supranational associations, in particular the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), and subsequently the European Political Science Association (EPSA) and the European International Studies Association (EISA). The establishment of several PhD programmes has been another fundamental step towards enhancing the discipline and furthering the mobility of scholars in Europe.

Fig. 2.1

The historical map of European political science

The same figure also shows the turning points identifiable from the experiences of European higher education systems, and from the development of European Union policies and actions in the fields of education and research. These policies have certainly encouraged the dissemination of political science in those countries where the discipline was either weak or absent altogether.

Similarly, the few examples we have selected from the most oft-quoted political science findings are sufficient to map the pace of innovation in the history of European political science. The story that emerges is also one of success, since the construction of a pluralistic, “dense” discipline is grounded in a wealth of studies. The bridges with the American schools of thought (the behaviourist school, and above all the rational choice approach) have never been burned (Adcock et al., 2007). However, the development of the European political science sector in recent decades has been characterized by a great deal of autonomy and creativity (Meny, 2020), ranging from the literature on neo-institutional approaches to the recent debates on constructivism and inter-disciplinarity.

Of course, a reconstruction of the theoretical grounds of European political science’s development is an overly ambitious goal for this volume. What we are going to examine is simply the magnitude of change witnessed in a relatively short period of time. The profession of political scientist in Europe, from the early days of the modern discipline (1950s) to the present time, has changed significantly. In order to better describe this process of change, the bottom of the figure indicates three generations of scholars: those who inherited the discipline from the founders at the beginning of the 1960s; those who then consolidated the discipline; and those who are currently working to constantly make it stronger (the so-called young lions).

In fact, the last row in Fig. 2.1 indicates the different generations of European political scientists who have written this short, highly concentrated history. Of course, those who were instrumental in re-establishing political science in the 1950s are no longer with us. Nevertheless, some of the scholars who worked with those founding fathers on consolidating European political science during the 1950s and 1960s are still here and could therefore be interviewed. Consequently, our interviewees fall into three categories (see below). Firstly, there are the Emeriti, a category consisting of scholars who retired from academia during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Although they cannot be considered among the founding fathers (the very first generation of European political scientists), they have undoubtedly played an important role in the consolidation of the discipline in Western Europe, having received their post-graduate education during the 1960s and working in their respective national university systems for the following fifty years.

The second generation of scholars is that of the Seniors. These are mature academics who received a PhD or equivalent qualification during the late twentieth century before becoming active political scientists, with domestic and supranational responsibilities in their universities, associations, editorial teams and recruitment committees at both domestic and European levels.

The third and final category is that of the Young Lions. This category comprises those scholars who joined the discipline in the early years of the twenty-first century and have since been employed as professional academics in Europe. This younger generation resembles the previous one from certain points of view—for example, in terms of its post-graduate education, strong methodological basis and significant international experience in terms of both higher education mobility and publications. However, these scholars are different from their predecessors in significant ways. Increasing competition and the emergence of a global system of research dissemination (especially after the emergence of the Internet) indeed created a totally novel environment for scientific training. The most evident sign of this new environment went under the name of publish or perish. However, many other innovative aspects have characterized the professional development of this new generation of scholars: new methods of scientific assessment, new teaching and learning techniques, new forms of public and civic engagement and so on.

The historical map, and even our diachronic reconstruction of the age groups of scholars, could of course be improved. Nevertheless, the description we have provided is sufficiently detailed to show that the generations of European political scientists who have been active from the foundation of the discipline up until the present day have seen professional opportunities, levels of academic internationalization and the organization of research change substantially. Moreover, the theoretical foundations of the discipline have multiplied over the course of the years, and there has been continuous innovation in the methodological tools employed. This simplified, albeit undeniable argument will form the basis on which we formulate our analyses of the density of European political science and of the different patterns of institutionalization of the discipline.

2.2 The Density of Political Science Within the European Higher Educational Area

Let us start measuring the density of political science as a discipline within the panorama of Europe’s higher educational institutions. Figure 2.2 shows a map of the density of European political scientists, measured over the course of 2018 as a simple ratio between the number of scholars counted by the Proseps experts and the overall number of higher education institutions, for each European country. The figure clearly shows different patterns between the Nordic countries and the United Kingdom on the one hand, where the mean number of political scientists is close to, or even higher than, 1 per university institution, and most Central-Eastern European countries (and some Southern European countries such as Portugal) where the mean number of political scientists is very low, on the other hand.

Fig. 2.2

Density of political scientists in European higher education institutions in 2019. (Source: Proseps Expert Survey)

Of course, this indicator has its limits, due to the presence of higher education systems and institutions whose mission is not inherently that of cultivating social science disciplines (super-specialized HEIs, polytechnics, art academies etc.). This may of course determine a very different weight of the denominator in our ratio. Nevertheless, the unbalanced geographical distribution of political scientists in Europe is clear, and this may be considered the point of departure of our analysis.

A second indicator to take into account is the political science teaching programme density, meaning the simple ratio of the number of HEIs where at least an undergraduate degree in political sciences (including a core of political science subjects) is offered, to the official number of HEIs registered in the country. As Fig. 2.3 shows, two patterns of density are clearly visible, thus confirming to some extent the cross-country distribution already seen. The United Kingdom, most of the Nordic countries (Norway, Iceland and Denmark), and a few Western countries (above all, Italy, the Netherlands and France) perform much better than the Central-Eastern countries and other “latecomer democracies” from Southern Europe. However, even Germany, Finland and Israel are characterized by a relatively low degree of political science density.

Fig. 2.3

Density of political science programmes in European higher education institutions in 2019. (Source: Proseps expert survey)

This clearly uneven picture can be misleading: the evolution that we previously described concerns the whole European continent, and even those countries only recently “converted” to political science have significantly increased the number of political science degrees and academic posts they offer. We need to remember that unlike in the case of the hard-science academic disciplines, the density of political science in the pre-1990 university systems of the Central-Eastern European countries was basically zero. As previously mentioned, politics or political theory courses were basically a reformulation of Marxist philosophical thought. Even more evidently, the academic presence of political science has rapidly increased in all Southern European countries that passed from authoritarianism to democracy in the course of the 1970s.

This diachronic framework appears clear enough, even though it cannot be verified fully in terms of the figures concerned. In short, the evolution of academic political science in Europe has been profoundly affected by an asymmetrical distribution of resources, and there do not appear to be any signs of a recent re-balancing of this gap (with the partial exception of Turkey, Serbia and, to some extent, the Baltic States).

Overall, the indicators of political science density portray a situation that could be defined as a hare and turtle scenario: while the “richer” systems continue to offer political science courses (and, therefore, prospective positions in political science teaching and research) in a broad number of HEIs, the newer democracies with limited or no experience of political science are struggling to increase the number of courses due to the absence of a political scientific culture and the limited competitiveness of current courses compared to STEM schools or to other social science degrees.

These considerations bring us to a second aspect of the analysis, which concerns the appeal (to potential students) of political science as a university subject. Once again, the recent trend has been not particularly encouraging, partly due to the exponential rise in the number of new social science courses not necessarily related to political science (e.g. media studies), and to competition from STEM courses. Table 2.1 indicates the total number of higher education institutes where the country experts engaged in the Proseps Cost Action project found, at the end of the 2008–2018 period, subjects pertaining to political science. Two additional items of information are also reported in the table: the trend compared with the previous decade (according to the experts’ evaluation) and the trend concerning the launching of post-graduate and PhD programmes in the same countries.

Table 2.1 European academic institutions offering political science subjects (2019) and recent trends concerning undergraduate and post-graduate courses

Overall, stability seems to be the main key to understanding the state of European political science in terms of the discipline’s presence on university curricula; and stability basically means the stability of the very clear divide between those areas characterized by the strong professionalization and institutionalization of the discipline, and those areas with very unstable, if not always weak, rates of institutionalization. In the largest countries, the same trend can also be seen within the political system. Italy is a paradigmatic case of the unbalanced distribution of political science resources, given the difference between the Centre-North area (where Giovanni Sartori, Norberto Bobbio and Bruno Leoni rebuilt the foundations of social science in the second half of the nineteenth century) and the South, where lawyers and historians have hindered the true emancipation of political science (Capano & Verzichelli, 2016).

The information remains rather imprecise given the lack of systematic and reliable data with which to control the diachronic evolution of political science. However, Table 2.1 reveals a few cases of an increase in the teaching firepower of political science. For example, Portugal and France have recently undertaken radical reforms of their universities’ social science curricula, which seem to have had positive effects. Israel, on the other hand, seems to be suffering a crisis with regard to the “vocation” of political science within the higher education system of that democratic polity.

Finally, we must consider the issue of organizational trends at the international level. Following Klingemann (2007), we can use ECPR membership and the ratio of this figure to the overall number of political science research units, in order to get a good idea of international organizational density.

As Table 2.2 shows, the very few cases of increased density testify to the difficulties experienced by the discipline during the recent decade of crises. The backlash experienced by the Greek representation within the ECPR after the economic crisis clearly reveals the present difficulties, while other continental and southern European countries have suffered similarly in this regard. Most of the Central-Eastern countries remain some way off the average ECPR membership density, thus confirming the importance of path dependencies in the development of the European political system. The smallest among such countries are still not officially part of the ECPR network (although this does not mean that a good rate of circulation among individual researchers cannot be possible, as the key cases of Malta and Croatia show). On the other hand, a remarkable number of countries are now represented in this organization, thus marking the truly comprehensive Europeanization of the discipline, which is something that was still unimaginable in the 1990s.

Table 2.2 Membership of the ECPR by country (2019) and ECPR organizational density (2006–2019)

This process of Europeanization is also reflected at the third level of the analysis, that is, the analysis of the prestige and impact of research findings. However, here the divide between Western European (in general) and Central-Eastern Europe is still very evident, as recently demonstrated by Ghica (2021) in her comparative analysis of publications in the most important journals in the field.

We can therefore conclude this historical reconstruction by pointing out a new “point of departure”: all the indicators measured just prior to the emergence of the pandemic reveal certain signs of European political science’s vitality. However, this has not prevented the community as a whole from suffering the intrinsic problems of internal pluralism and diversity in terms of resources, cultural heritage and disciplinary sensibilities. Strengths and weaknesses both persist. This has to be kept in mind when discussing such a complex, fragmented, multidimensional “science”. European political science proudly boasts a history of pluralism, and all of its components have already learned how to protect the memory of this pluralism.

2.3 What Institutionalization?

As said, all the information we have already discussed testifies to the short, but important, history of political science in Europe. In this section, we are going to look at certain aspects of that history and reveal the main strengths and weaknesses of the discipline. More specifically, we are going to provide a brief review of the interpretative accounts provided by the literature, while the next section will try to disentangle the most important substantive features of the history of European political science; and then it shall focus on selected accounts of the disciplines’ evolution in different European countries.

The comparative analysis of political science’s consolidation across Europe has been a recurrent theme, since scholars have often been concerned with the risks of parochialism and a lack of communication among national political science communities. The supranational goal of the ECPR’s founders in the early 1970s (see above) has therefore been the main mantra of many scholars, even within the domestic and local arenas (Meny, 2020). As previously mentioned, the battle has been not won everywhere, although remarkable progress has been made in every single European country.

However, comprehensive assessments of the differentiated historical paths taken by the discipline are few and far between. Nevertheless, there have been some interesting recent attempts to provide a generalized interpretation together with certain reflections on specific case studies.

We have already turned to the work of Klingemann, who gathered information on the state of political science at the beginning of the twenty-first century in seventeen Western-European countries (Klingemann, 2007), whilst also providing a general overview of the discipline in Central-Eastern Europe (Klingemann, 2002).

Other evidence emerged recently from two robust cross-sectional analyses conducted with the support of the ECPR (de Sousa et al., 2010; Boncourt et al., 2020), and with a specific focus on Central-Eastern Europe, in a recent volume edited by Ilonszki and Roux (2022).

We are not going to provide a comprehensive review of the insights emerging from this literature. Our present goal is simply to elaborate on the actual meaning of the concept of the institutionalization of political science, by distinguishing a general point of view (the room afforded to political scientists in their social and professional systems) from an internal point of view (what political scientists think about the history and institutionalization of their discipline).

Let us start from the former (external) point of view. Scholars tend to see political science’s institutionalization in a positive light. The volume edited by Boncourt, Engeli and Garzia, for example, offers a series of reflections on the cultural richness of European political science. Despite a number of criticisms, there has clearly been an increase in visibility and, to a large extent, an improvement in the scientific outcomes achieved over the past seventy years. The problems of a very segmented evolution are also evident, and this is particularly relevant in times of difficulty for European democracies. A final take from Kris Deschouwer (2020) exemplifies such a positive, albeit prudent impression: “Some of these internal European boundaries are problematic, because they reflect inequalities and the lack of true integration. The dominance of the North-West of Europe in what is considered to be the mainstream defines and treats especially East-Central Europe as peripheral. Further, while the community of political science has greatly expanded, it does remain rather homogenous, with only a gradual and slow improvement in the gender balance and with a striking underrepresentation of people of colour.”

Political science in Europe has travelled a long way and is now stronger than before. However, at a time when facts, figures and scientific underpinning are losing their legitimacy, when populism is rising, when those in power increasingly prefer a gut feeling over sound and scientific policy advice, and when some of those in power are directly and effectively attacking the very existence of a science critical of power, it requires considerable strength and persistence. It needs a strong and diverse community of scholars who are committed to political science and who believe in its necessity and relevance. There are many achievements to look back on, as well as many challenges to be aware of, but also great prospects for a bright future.

The data on the growing population of practicing political scientists (see above), and on the resilience of relevant degrees and PhD programmes during a period of economic and social crisis like the 2010s, confirm such an optimistic view. Roughly speaking, all the markers both on the demand-side and on the supply-side of our model of measurement of institutionalization (Klingemann, 2007) seem to work well.

So far so good then? Well, not really. Indeed, not at all it has to be said. First of all, a number of criticisms have been raised, also recently, with regard to the representativeness of the discipline. The most urgent question remains the inertia of a “young and gender-blind” conception of political science (Dahlerup, 2010) which persists among most of the oligarchies guiding the scientific community. However, the risks of de-institutionalization continue to be related to the age-old questions raised by Klingemann (2007) among others: solving the problems of the discipline’s identity in Europe; promoting a common market for political science; organizing common data infrastructures and studies; pursuing a balance between the cognitive and normative elements of political science.

Moreover, the quest for a truly balanced diffusion of the discipline as a whole remains a challenge, as several data sources show. In this regard, the problem of the Central-Eastern region of Europe remains a priority. The volume edited by Ilonszky and Roux (2022) deals precisely with the academic and social institutionalization of political science in that region. The analysis of this phenomenon from a very broad comparative perspective highlights a number of specificities that the authors tend to account for using path-dependent factors of continuity and resilience.

Indeed, several contextual narratives need to be borne in mind, ranging from the changed direction of an academic discipline that was once devoted to the cultivation of scientific socialism (Ilonszki, 2022), to the new pressures impacting a specific area like the Balkans (Boban & Stanoievic, 2022) and the regimes characterized by populist, illiberal leaderships (Vilagi et al., 2022).

As correctly pointed out in the conclusion of the aforementioned volume (Roux, 2022), the overall picture that emerges from the comparative analysis of the processes of institutionalization of Europe’s political science communities is a rather complex one characterized by considerable diversity. From an external point of view, political science in the cluster of continental Western countries seems to be institutionalized to a significant degree, while Central-Eastern Europe (including the Balkans) still represents the “weak side” of political science in Europe.

Let us now consider the “internal view” of the process of institutionalization; that is to say, the perception of those who define themselves as political scientists. In order to explore this dimension, we will first examine the attitudinal data from the 2019 Proseps survey, which we shall be analysing in depth in the next chapter. In particular, we are going to explore the responses to two initial questions from the survey dealing with the notions of political science’s “visibility” and “impact” (Berg-Schlosser, 2006).

Table 2.3 reports the responses of some 2275 respondents to a question about their perception of the visibility of political scientists compared to other intellectuals or academics. Even when conducting a detailed control by geographical area, no major differences emerge other than in regard to the Nordic countries, where a much larger group of respondents argue that political science has a considerable impact on the general public. Significantly enough, this vision is much more pronounced than in the UK, where on the contrary a large majority of scholars, while considering political scientists sufficiently visible, do not believe them to have any great impact on public debate. The other areas considered in the table do not show any evident discrepancies. Even the scholars from Central-Eastern Europe consider the work of political scientists to be significantly visible.

Table 2.3 Visibility of political scientists compared to other academics

Northern Europe includes: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden. Western Europe includes: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Switzerland. Central-Eastern Europe (EU) includes: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia. Southern Europe (EU) includes: Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain. Central-Eastern Europe (non-EU) includes: Albania, Bosnia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Moldova, Russia, Serbia.

Table 2.4 concerns the perception of the transformation of the discipline over time and considers a question about the impact of political science in the decade following the 2008 financial crisis. As expected, the regions where the discipline plays a stronger social role (Northern Europe and, to some extent, Western Europe) tend to perceive a degree of continuity, while political scientists from Southern Europe express a more optimistic vision, whereby political science is judged to have had a greater impact since the beginning of the crisis. This optimism seems to be even more evident than in the UK, while the only region where the impact of political science is believed to be declining is that of Central-Eastern Europe. This is particularly important in terms of the degree of institutionalization of the discipline, since it confirms that the real risk of the de-institutionalization of political science is only present in those political systems where the transition to democracy happened at the end of the twentieth century.

Table 2.4 Opinions about the impact of European political scientists’ work since the 2008 financial crisis

The figures shown in Table 2.4 reflect the models mentioned above almost perfectly: the cluster of Nordic countries (with the partial exception of Finland which represents the less “Americanized” academic system) and the UK have the most highly institutionalized political science communities in Europe. However, the British community seems to be today more endangered than in Western and Southern Europe.

Hence, our data confirm common knowledge regarding the complexity of political science’s development in Europe. At the same time, the amount of qualitative information we have recently gathered through the Proseps project—and partially analysed already (Ilonszki & Roux, 2022)—may point to further elements of complexity. The existence, persistence and hybridization of a number of national traditions are important, and the specificities of each single case lead to a number of departures from the usual “geo-political interpretation” of the segmentation of European political science. National traditions may be linked to the largest, most influential countries. In this regard, we can follow Berndtson (2012) and argue that British, French and German political sciences represent highly independent models, different from the American one. However, if we want to show the impact of history on the evolution of political science, then the national criterion needs to be applied. Ilonszki and Roux (2022) show that the characteristics of political science in Central-Eastern Europe vary considerably from one country to another; and the same is true of other European areas.

A detailed examination of all these specific narratives is not envisaged in this volume. However, we think it important to mention some of the events and traditions that render certain European political science communities very different, and in any case very interesting when trying to understand the complexity of political science as a whole.

2.4 Classifying the National Trajectories of the Institutionalization of European Political Science

The preliminary analyses we conducted confirm the considerable variability of the discipline’s development, which is a result of different national contexts and cultural legacies. In order to carry out a more sophisticated comparative analysis, we need to hone our information by highlighting the main patterns, or at least the similarities, present in order to simplify such a fragmented framework.

With the purpose of obtaining an initial, immediate picture, we have based our analysis on one of the indicators employed by Hans Dieter Klingemann (2007), namely a summary of the availability of reports written in English concerning the development of political science in Europe (Table 2.5). More precisely, we have supplemented the list of sources used by Klingemann with a few works published in English over the past decade and reported the first time that each European country was covered by these reports (starting with the well-known UNESCO report of 1950), and the regularity of available reports on each political science community. This indicator may represent a starting point for a qualitative analysis, since the longstanding presence of reports and the frequency thereof indicate when a process of institutionalization started and how successful it has been.

Table 2.5 Reports on the development of political science communities in Europe (1950–2021)

The case studies indicated in the table, together with a reasonably comprehensive review of other classic works on the history of political science (Rose, 1990; Klingemann et al., 1994; Easton et al., 1991; Daalder, 2003), are useful for the purpose of producing a qualitative assessment. In short, we argue that the diffusion of a plethora of national communities does not indicate a random form of development, since the advance of political science’s capabilities (Klingemann, 2007) tends to display certain regularities due to important intervening factors. Following Easton et al. (1991), we may therefore argue for a parallel development which would have been more likely than a scenario of random diffusion. Again, this very much concerns the cultural attitudes of the earliest group of scholars who established political science in each European nation. However, other variables are at play here: in particular, the pace of democratization and the type of democratic regime, the resources invested in public research and teaching institutions, and the organizational nature of the higher education system concerned.

On the basis of the abovementioned literature, we may argue that three historical patterns can be identified that help to simplify the picture.

• 1. The Northern-European model of development, including the prototypical example of the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and the unique case of the United Kingdom. Roughly speaking, this model may be considered to include a cluster of countries where political science boasts a lengthy tradition (dating from before initial developments in the USA), but one that has been closely linked to the main scientific achievement of the American community of scholars. This latter aspect is the result of the direct impact of the American intellectual and academic environment on Northern-European political science, which has also been affected by the high degree of mobility to and from the wealthiest Northern-European universities since the early days of post-behavioural political science.

• 2. The continental model of political science. This model to some extent resembles the Northern-European model: Belgium, for instance, displays certain similarities to Nordic countries in terms of the discipline’s academic profile. Of course, the continental model may be considered excessively broad, as it covers peculiar cases like the French one (Leca, 1991). Furthermore, it includes countries at different stages of their political development (such as the latecomer democracies like Spain, Greece and Portugal). However, the academic systems of all these countries share a longstanding pluralistic tradition in political studies. In all of these countries, the development of political science has been hampered by the legacy of the “political sciences”.

• 3. The Central-Eastern European model of political science. The consistency of this model also requires carefully examination given the diverse sources of the discipline’s inspiration in the Eastern European countries (Unesco, 1950; Ilonszki & Roux, 2022). However, the very fact that it was not until the 1990s that a new process of institutionalization emerged is, by definition, a key element of political science’s convergence throughout post-communist Europe.

The data regarding the institutionalization of political science recently gathered within the contest of the Proseps project generally confirm the validity of this vision of European political science based on three separate histories of the discipline’s development. The historical sedimentation of the academic discipline is what results in the clear difference between the strong figures for Northern Europe and the weak figures for Continental Europe, and of course within Eastern Europe. A similar picture emerges if we look at the figures for IPSA membership of national associations of European political scientists, together with the data regarding the history of political science PhD programmes.

3 Three Generations of Political Scientist: Memories, Legacies and Visions

3.1 Three Generations: How Many Types of European Political Scientist Exist?

The approach we adopt in this volume differs from, and in some way is complementary to, those works we reviewed above dedicated to the history and institutionalization of political science in Europe.

The data regarding the state of the discipline, briefly reviewed so far, and the attitudinal data from the previously mentioned Proseps survey (which we shall be examining in the next chapter), are to be complemented by a number of accounts resulting from interview with 20 representatives of the European political science community. We have selected our interviewees based on a longitudinal perspective, that is, by considering the three generations already discussed: five interviewees are from the Emeritus class, the majority (nine interviewees) from the Seniors class and six are Young Lions.

Basing our argument on the abovementioned literature, we believe that, with the passing of time, the generations of European political scientists have become increasingly similar as a result of internationalization, despite the resilience of local and national distinctiveness. Therefore, European scholars’ sense of unity is expected to grow stronger (in terms of reputation and relevance), thus encouraging the scholarly and intellectual formation of thousands of academics all around Europe.

However, the presence of the aforesaid country-specific factors remains strong enough to hypothesize a considerable level of domestic constraint, especially where academic recruitment is concerned. For this reason, we cannot assume that the idea of a “European political scientist” represents a unitary model. Rather, we should consider it a sort of benchmark to be aspired to, and one that is increasingly visible thanks to the internationalization of the scientific community. With the passing of time, the characteristics of “internationalised” and “European” models of scholar have become more relevant in all national contexts, but several domestic peculiarities and constraints have certainly not disappeared.

Moreover, other specificities may have arisen due to the different levels of integration of given sub-communities and sub-disciplinary fields. We may argue, for instance, that many experts in international relations and comparative politics may be more inclined than political theorists towards certain internationalization practices. We may also assume that the larger and wealthier universities and institutions may be more inclined to carry out international research, and thus become drivers for the supranational integration of their scholars. On the other hand, less important, poorer universities may find internationalization and innovative research practices more problematic. These factors are not easily controlled using extensive, superficial surveys only. For this reason, we have opted for a mixed research approach whereby we ask our interviewees specific questions about the impact of their backgrounds and training experiences.

3.2 Difficult Legacies: Still Too Few Women; Still Too Little Inclusion

Among the critical reasons of dissimilarity among the European political scientists, the persisting male predominance and the difficult access to the academic career for the scholar coming from less privileged and minority groups still play a relevant role. We do not have systematic data concerning the gender distribution and the generational distribution within the European communities of political scientists. However, the profiles of the respondents to the Proseps survey confirm the negative impact of these two factors: the female component of our sample of scholars is lower than 35% of the overall number of interviews, and the measure is even lower if we take only the tenure positions into consideration (31%). Although relevant differences may be noticed across countries, it seems that the preclusion to female remains rather transversal in most of the European realities. These figures are in line with previous assessment from the recent literature (Norris, 2020; Engeli & Mugge, 2020).

A similar trend may be noticed looking to the mean age of European political scientists. Quite a large number of respondents to the 2019 survey (N = 2308) had indicated their year of birth, showing a mean age of less than 50 years. However, if we take into consideration the only tenure office holders, the mean age goes up to almost 51 years, with significant differences across countries.

Therefore, two variables like academic ageing and gender distribution cannot be neglected in the attempt to map the historical emergence of multifaceted group of European political scientists. In the remaining part of this volume, we will try to take in count the visions of the “next generation” of scholars, comparing them to the attitudes of their older colleagues. Moreover, we will include in our analyses, where possible, an adequate assessment of the attitudes expressed by the female component of European political scientists. This control is fundamental given the persisting biases that bring, in several European realities, to a systematic reiteration of the gender gap. The success of the legal provisions recently introduced to reduce the gap, and the concrete changes already achieved for women’s status in the profession in some selected countries (Bates & Savigny, 2015) do not cancel this negative legacy of the first phase of institutionalization of the discipline, which is rather evident in all the pillars of academic recognition (Engeli & Mugge, 2020).

In the final part of the volume, we will argue that the question of gender gap will have to be monitored carefully in the years to come. Indeed, we know already a lot about the glass ceiling impacting the career prospects of female political scientists. However, much less attention has been given to assessing the long-term impact of this clear imbalance on the new expectations of the generations of scholars who had to be trained in times of crisis. Such information appears to be particularly relevant today, given the undeniable additional costs that female scholars have had to bear (and continue to bear) during the current pandemic.

3.3 Memories of the Past and Visions for the Future

As previously mentioned, we asked the twenty scholars we interviewed to describe their experiences as political scientists, by providing definitions, anecdotes and images pertaining to such. Here we offer just a short recap of the responses we received concerning the first two dimensions covered by our lengthy interviews. The content of the remaining parts of the interviews will be analysed in the remaining chapters of this volume.

The content of relevance here can be subdivided into three areas: the historical evolution of the discipline; the profession and role of political scientists; and the weaknesses/strengths of the discipline and the related challenges.

• The historical evolution of the discipline in Europe. It is well institutionalized, but is it perhaps too fragmented?

One dimension we dealt with during our interviews concerns the evolution (or the involution) of the discipline. In particular, we tried to stimulate people’s thoughts on the achievements of political science in Europe, by scrutinizing the pros and cons of the outcomes achieved so far. This assessment has also been connected to other literature on the impact of the current challenges to the discipline, the necessity to select new questions and topics, and the persistence of criticisms, weaknesses, bad professional habits and biases; and in particular, to those criticisms and remarks often connected to arguments concerning the uncertain future of political science and the expectations gap (Flinders, 2018).

What have European political scientists got to say about the evolution of the discipline? An examination of a complex array of arguments and speculation reveals a generally positive view of the results achieved by political science, judging by the answers given by a large majority of respondents. Indeed, several scholars underline the achievements of what is perceived as an expanding discipline capable of gathering significant knowledge. As an Emeritus scholar and one of the leaders in the field of public policy and administration observed:

I would say that progress has been extraordinary. The number of European political scientists who have adopted the most up-to-date approaches to the study of political phenomena is clearly evident.

In accounting for this positive assessment, some respondents underlined the crucial role played by transnational networks of scholars and the European academic associations, which together have managed to preserve the unity of a discipline despite the costs of its intrinsic internal pluralism. One of our seniors argues:

I think that (political science) still exists. It can be divided, in some sense. But, in essence, it is there … ECPR plays an important role in connecting European political scientists.

This positive view of the discipline’s historical development is also confirmed by the autonomy achieved by the European discipline after decades of subordination to the paradigms and quality of North-American political science. One of our seniors clearly describes this transition:

Now you have a new situation … I think this is a degree of major methodological progress. … European political scientists now have much less to learn from the Americans and even from their British colleagues.

Such a constructive assessment seems to corroborate the vision of a virtuous transformation, contrary to the idea of the discipline going backwards underlying the old mantra of the tragedy of political science (Ricci, 1984).

It is important to point out here that respondents differed in their views of the characteristics of the discipline in terms of its continental status and internal coherence. Many of those interviewed, regardless of their generation, agree that fragmentation and excessive specialization are significant characteristics of the discipline. This is clearly implied by one senior scholar:

when I began to read about this, and I began to work on this field, I was absolutely sure that these classics, Rokkan for example, or a little bit later Schmitter, I was absolutely sure that when I read them I got a view, a picture of political science, of the major questions and of Europe, permitting me to understand them … now, I think our profession is so specialized, so many things go into details, details that are not always that interesting furthermore. So, I often have the impression that all this is not so important anymore, that there is no broad European view, no real message about political science or about our world as such.

To be clear: all the respondents are completely aware that specialization is an essential structural dimension of the evolution of the discipline. However, at the same time many of them recognize the risks that such unavoidable dynamics can represent for the community of European political scientists as well as for their disciplinary identity. For example, two “young lions” specialized in International Relations observed how their field is not very closely linked to the main body of political science because

our subfields do not communicate as much as they do. For example, I no longer work with political scientists. I deal mostly with geographers, anthropologists and historians,

… or even because of a strong methodological divide within the subfield:

while scholars of electoral studies have a more standardized training, clear outlets for their publications and clear training trajectories compared to IR scholars in Europe. IR is still strongly divided between positivists/quantitative scholars and non-positivist/qualitative scholars.

This process of specialization, while representing a necessary step in the development of political science, is considered to result in the abandonment of a broader view of political phenomena, and this could be detrimental to the discipline. As an “Emeritus” clearly stated:

[W]e may observe a problem, a problem (first seen in the United States) of excessive specialization and the gradual abandonment of any general theory of socio-political action. In other words, as I go through the journals of political science in both Europe and the United States, I see very in-depth analyses of small segments of political action, and the gradual disappearance of grand theories trying to deal with the big problems, like the old masters did, meaning those who lived and worked in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

There is a clear awareness that this specialization can be detrimental, but also that it is driven by the system of incentives of the existing academic world, which is very different from the one in place in the recent past. As one senior scholar observes:

[I]n the process of reproduction of the discipline—we are teaching at PhD level in a highly specialized way. … I finished my PhD 30 years ago and I had a very general training, you know what I mean? And now a PhD student, very often starts immediately to specialize … this is not only true in the field of comparative politics, also in public policy. … So, on the one hand we agree on the fact that we are risking excessive specialization, but on the other hand the system pressurises us into producing highly specialized young scholars.

Finally, what emerges from the interviews is that the majority of respondents clearly believe there is a significant divide between American and European political science, and also an internal division within European political science. This latter division is not one of different theoretical approaches, which constitute a kind of horizontal divide characterizing the profession of political scientist everywhere; it concerns other dimensions that emerge as the cornerstones of European political science. Those dimensions are political scientists’ greater focus in terms of their objects of research, and their closer attention to conceptual work. All three generations of scholars tend to agree on this point. As an Emeritus scholar told us:

What is distinctive, what is different, are the realities and phenomena you are studying, and the approach you adopt in doing so.

This is echoed by a “young lion” and a “senior scholar”, both of whom point to a difference in both content and the attention paid to conceptual reflection.

I think it’s a focus on political parties. I think that American political science has lost touch with the notion of political parties, different types of government, the impact that different types of government regimes have on politics and policy. I think that’s something we do in Europe that they don’t really do very much [in the States]. It is also a question of adopting a plurality of methods, I think in the ECPR we do not have this completely sterile debate about the qualitative and the quantitative. So, we kind of accept everything, as long as it’s more or less sound in terms of its research design, while I think in the APSA they still have a lot of problems. And I think in European political science, we care much more about the definition of what is political, in the sense that we still have quite a lot of people working on social movements, for example, maybe not in Italy so much, but in other countries in Europe we believe that social movements are part of political science, like social cleavages, that kind of stuff, while in the US they will clearly consider that as outside the mainstream, more or less. (young lion)

I think European political science was initially (and still is) more conceptual in its focus. So there’s a dominance of conceptual work. Maybe this also comes from the fact that we have very different nation states in Europe, compared to the US system, we have very different state traditions. I think the predominance of concepts is one thing. I also think it’s difficult in terms of topics. … I just think of these people in Oslo and so on, these people who also made this link to the political science literature, but also they had these guys in Stanford … so it might be difficult to identify a difference, but probably, I think. … Of course, Europe also has a stronger focus on political parties because we have a greater variety of parties and party systems, a more highly diversified analysis of the study of interest groups, a stronger focus on state traditions. And also, in terms of theoretical background, maybe a stronger base in classical political theory than in the USA. (senior)

What is interesting here is that the majority of our experts argue that disciplinary fragmentation, different paths of consolidation and methodological pluralism do not prevent European political scientists from developing diversified capabilities. The variance of skills and methods is not a problem per se. Indeed, it may still be perceived as a plus factor of European political science.

• The Profession and Role of the Political Scientist

In the initial part of the interviews, the respondents recounted their experiences as political scientists. Anecdotes, “legends” and memories can help provide a good understanding of the degree of consistency among the several possible definitions of the discipline, and among the different ways that the profession of political scientist can be conceived. This assessment has to consider two things here: the longitudinal dimension, by comparing the opinions of different generations of scholars; and the country-specific cultural constraints and different research interests represented in our panel of interviewees. Our questions were designed to encourage a rather broad and spontaneous set of reactions. We began with respondents’ initial approach to the discipline (how did you first become interested in political science?), before then moving on to the more specific reconstruction of the fundamental elements of our interviewees’ career development.

We also tried to identify the main distinctive features of “European political science”, by focusing on a few possible issues and provoking the respondents with some puzzles. Said issues included the importance of intellectual formation/training, the role of the classics (and the definition of what a classic is), the difficulties of overly broad research agendas, the trade-off between academic engagement and room for intensive, “undisturbed” research. Thus stimulated, our interviewees could present what they believed to be the arts and crafts of the contemporary profession, as determined by the gradual affirmation of methods and research practices. Last, but not least, they were put in a position to describe the steps towards a good and fruitful “style of academic life”.

As expected, the answers revealed a significant degree of complexity, and once again confirmed the imperfect, rather vague definition of “roles”. However, a few robust items of evidence can be taken from such a complex picture.

First of all, respondents tended to agree on the basic reasons why they chose careers as political scientists: the example of the North-American academic system was a recurrent theme among Emeritus scholars, while the seniors and, above all, the younger respondents, often made reference to their European mentors.

This is consistent with the evolutionary map described above, and also with our expectation of a process of emancipation of European political science, which does not however negate the influence of its American predecessors. As mentioned in Chap. 1, political science as a separate academic discipline did not exist in Europe until the Second World War. In fact, all of our interviewed Emeritus scholars have a background in other disciplines (mainly history, law or old European style “political sciences”). Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that the emergence of a renewed political science in Europe was part of a “political” process based on American foundations. This point is clear from the recollections of the older scholars we interviewed. As one of them pointed out:

[A] few US foundations play an important role through their investing in Europe. In the UK, not only in Italy, and also to a degree in France, as well as an enormous amount of money in Germany. I’m speaking about Western Europe, and about the transformation of European political science into a much more Americanized political science.

These roots have been completely forgotten by the following generations, and this point is crucial since it indicates an insufficient inter-generational transfer of information, stories and narratives.

A second factor that our interviewees agreed on in the main concerns the importance of academic training and the independence of political science from the cognate disciplines. Several scholars spent time describing the costs of the difficult establishment of the discipline in academia which underlies the aforementioned paths of institutionalization.

Even in those cases where the consolidation of the academic discipline appears more challenging—in Central-Eastern Europe for example—the importance of this investment of time (and the consequent capabilities of political scientists to build academic institutions) is unanimously stressed by several interviewees. The vision of a mature discipline that can result in the development of a multitude of capabilities that enhance the role of political scientists as a collective body, consolidated across generations and disciplinary profiles, leads us to give a generally positive evaluation of the self-awareness achieved by European scholars on the whole. In other words, the presence of a significant skill set comprising academic, teaching, research and media skills is the very proof of the discipline’s solidity and credibility.

It proved much more difficult to interpret the considerable variance in the answers our respondents gave when asked about their sources of inspiration and their professional agendas. What clearly emerges is the intrinsic pluralism characterizing the political science community. Some respondents, for example, were very much in favour of a changeable and permeable research agenda and stressed the importance of reconsideration and hybridization. Others, especially the youngest generation, emphasized certain very specialized and coherent topics and approaches. Here, however, their different individual stories show how the decision to become a political scientist can be based on extremely different reasoning. This may vary from:

“I was interested in political stability and the crisis of democracy”

to

“it was not a vocational decision, it was mostly a matter of opportunities and circumstances. So, when I finished my studies I had two options: either preparing to be a civil servant (which I liked), or the quickest option to achieve some form of economic independence was to get one of these fellowships, which provided quite a decent income. So, I mean, I had no vocation to be a political scientist.”,

or from

“I was interested in the effects of power on society and individual lives”

to

“I always feel I never really chose a career … you know, you go to school, you go to university, you have a vague idea of being a school teacher or something, I didn’t know any other jobs, and then, you know, you’ve got a good degree so you’re going to do research and then once you’re doing your doctorate, you obviously start thinking about getting an academic job.”

Even more evidently, acknowledgement of the maturity of political science is not accompanied by the same idea of priorities for each single practicing political scientist. Obviously, senior and Emeritus scholars tend to place greater importance on their achievements as academic institution builders. However, the impression remains of a highly segmented group: some of the respondents clearly prioritize individual objectives (especially when they talk about their research), while others mention the accomplishment of collective results as crucial goals.

This third item of evidence can in fact be interpreted as a systemic variance resulting from the range of political science’s substantive content, and even to the asymmetric development of the very sense of a political scientist’s role. However, the different interests and roles are often correlated to different sets of theoretical and methodological tools, and this substantiates the perceived segmentation of European political science’s bittersweet existence: it is a sign of its autonomy and broad outreach, but also of its very confused and unstable values and priorities. Furthermore, what clearly emerges from the interviews is that “what you do” determines your view of the discipline and its role.

In this regard, the division between the major subfields of the discipline (IR, comparative politics and public policy) is rather important.

Finally, there is a certain degree of concern about the way in which young generations are professionally trained; this regards not only the issue of specialization, but also the extensive methodological training that is now considered a cornerstone of every political science PhD programme. A senior scholar presents this problem very well when she says:

Methodification is a good thing. It’s part of the professionalization of the discipline. But when it becomes too much a part of a business model requiring publications, I think it becomes detrimental. So I have seen academics be promoted simply because they had a dataset or a method to offer. But if you were to ask them: “do you know what your research questions are?”, they wouldn’t have any. Also, I do think that this method of education can be excessive. It’s good, we have this formalization of methods, but in the end this process of professionalization should contribute towards relevant research.

However, this did not prevent respondents from expressing their doubts about the substantial inefficiency characterizing the academic environment, as well as making a number of remarks about the gaps that political scientists have to cope with in the current social and political scenario (Flinders, 2018). We shall come back to these doubts very shortly here, as well as in the next chapter.

• Weaknesses/Strengths and Related Challenges

All our interviews show our respondents’ significant awareness of the weaknesses and strengths of the discipline, and thus of the related challenges. They all distinguished between internal and external environments in terms of the discipline’s strengths and weaknesses.

As regards the internal environment, meaning the academic role of political science, the major strength that emerges from our interviews is its capacity to provide a detailed, full, and in a certain way configurative, image of the complexity of political phenomena. As a young lion observed:

[W]e are able to make the connection between politics and policy, which we do not see in other disciplines … economists usually do not understand the economic policy side of things very much. And if you look at sociology, sociologists usually do not fully understand policy either. So, I think we are the only one who can make this link between politics, party competition and party expectations on the one hand, and policy action on the other. So that’s how I see European political science: we are able to consider political factors, environmentally related factors and policy action. And I think we are quite unique in this.

Obviously, this image of the discipline is at risk of appearing ecumenical, when we consider all of the divisions we have been emphasizing up until now. However, it also looks to be the genuine aspiration of all of our interviewees.

At the same time, one concern emerging from our respondents’ considerations is the capacity of political science to defend its borders from other disciplines, especially economics. This point is clearly raised by various interviewees. For example, one “young lion” mentioned a certain well-known problem that political science has (the fact that it is a net borrower of concepts and approach from other disciplines), stating that:

it is a young discipline and it lies between other disciplines that I think have a greater competitive edge than political science does. I mean, political science mostly focuses on political processes, it doesn’t focus on outputs like economics or psychology or even law do, for example … the story of political science has centred on political process … and I think this makes political science a weaker competitor than its neighbouring disciplines, also because everyone can proffer their opinion about political processes. In some way they use the same vocabulary that political science uses when talking about democracy, when talking about representativeness. … I think this fact that political science deals with topics on which most people are qualified to have an opinion, is one of its weaknesses. We don’t possess a highly specialized topic and we don’t possess a specialized approach.

As we know, this weakness is a structural problem inherent to political science, a science that focuses on political phenomena which are not the exclusive preserve of political science and political scientists. However, the fact that the younger generations of political scientists see this problem as a kind of disciplinary handicap is somewhat worrying for the discipline’s future. This point is strongly reiterated by older scholars who have been familiar with this issue for a long time, and thus have seen it develop over time. This is clearly testified to by the concern expressed by one particular senior scholar:

academically one thing I see as a problem (it’s quite a longstanding problem) is that to some extent political science relies on, or simply adopts, theories that have been developed in other disciplines econometrics, econometric modelling … in my view, basically you study economics but with a focus on some kind of political topic. … In extreme cases you could say that if you have children who want to become political scientists you can tell them: “you have to study mathematics, and then read the political science textbook and move over to that discipline” … this in my view is the real challenge facing our discipline, since if you just import methods and theories from other fields, this can be detrimental. And I see this tendency to a certain extent.

Thus, there is a shared awareness that the greatest academic weakness lies in the difficulty of defending the borders of the object of one’s analysis—the disciplinary borders previously mentioned—and the tendency towards the quantification/economization of the discipline, which could destroy its (already problematical) identity.

What is interesting is that the individual accounts we gathered from our interviewees reveal a genuine two-edged perception of what academic political science is, and of its inherent precariousness. While scholars are very proud to belong to a discipline capable of grasping the complexity of political phenomena, they are also concerned about the risk of other disciplines, considered more powerful from the scientific point of view, encroaching on its sphere of operation. This comes across as a kind of inferiority complex inherent in the discipline, and one that persists despite the significant level of academic institutionalization of political science.

This inferiority complex strongly emerged when we asked our interviewees about the strengths or weaknesses of the discipline in terms of its social relevance. What is astonishing here is the shared belief that political science is really weak in terms of the way it is perceived from the outside, and thus is not particularly relevant.

On this point, a “young lion” offered the following clear-cut, pessimistic opinion:

I think, definitely, governments have absolutely no idea what we do, unless we are traditional style, and we comment on elections or that kind of stuff, or you deal with public policy; but I do a lot of work on public policy, so it might be easier for me in my subfield, because there’s always been a kind of direct link between government and public policy, as long as it is public policy evaluation, for instance. So, I do not see why I always have to justify my existence as a scholar, but I can see that may be different for the discipline as such. … I’m usually contacted because I’m a public policy specialist, rather than because I’m a political scientist, so I can see the difference. I think for other subfields the approach may be a little bit different, but I do not think we possess any kind of trademark. And I don’t know, sometimes I wonder whether we are good at anything. I think we are good at most things, but we are not as strong as economists in terms of our predictions, and we are losing ground to data science. So in in terms of big data we have never evolved as political scientists, I think we completely lost that opportunity, as did the Americans, not just us Europeans, but I think we in Europe are getting overwhelmed.

This point is reinforced by a senior scholar not belonging to the public policy subfield, who observes that:

I do think that political science can be relevant, indeed should be relevant, to society. But I do feel that there is a distinction between what I think political science is and what I might think about public policy. And it seems to me that if you’re a political scientist, or if you’re a scientist, you’re going to be sceptical … you might believe something, but your belief in it might not be total. So, you might have a certain amount of belief in something but how much do I believe? 60% or something? I’m sceptical, I’m always questioning things. If you’re working in the public policy field, you don’t do that. You can’t go to the government and say: Well, this might work or that might work. You’ve got to say: Do this! You’ve got to be convinced and convincing. So, I think if you’re doing public policy, you’ve got to really push things, even if you’re not totally sure about them, because otherwise government won’t listen, and people won’t listen.

In one way or another the internal and external dimensions of political science, in terms of its weaknesses and strengths, come together and present a few challenges regarding the academic side of the discipline in its external role. The first challenge concerns the capacity to work on important social problems. As an Emeritus scholarly has clearly stated:

I think political science should deal with problems that are relevant to the community, and not problems driven by the endogenous interests of the discipline. We don’t only have to sharpen the data analysis, but need to look around and say: what’s really the most urgent problem as perceived by the political community or at all levels now? And start from there, and then ask research questions about important differences. We have to formulate “why” questions and try to offer answers to those “why” questions? Why do labour market policies produce different outcomes in response to the challenges of COVID in different member states, for example? And then look to see whether there are theoretical answers already there or whether empirical material needs to be looked at, in order to come up with new hypotheses, with new answers which very often come from the data, if you really look into the data.

The focus on important social and political problems can strengthen political science’s sense of disciplinary identity and can also help to deal with the problem of applicability and prediction (the second challenge), which political scientists too often think is not part of their job. Too often political scientists think that they cannot predict future developments, whereas according to one senior scholar:

[P]olitical science can predict types of events; it can predict certain things regarding collective action on problems. It won’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but it understands the nature of the problem, it knows how certain mechanisms work. So I think it can predict, it just can’t predict in the way in which policy analysts and politicians want us to.

To sum up then, according to the accounts our interviewees provided us with, political science ought to be more aware of its own potential, and political scientists should believe more strongly in their scientific capacities and in the advice that they can offer to the outside world.

4 In Pursuit of a Model of Political Scientist

4.1 One Syndrome and Three Myths

The analyses developed in this chapter, based on various Proseps databases and the in-depth interviews conducted for the same project, confirm that notwithstanding political science’s weaknesses and fragmentation, European political scientists are not overly concerned by the discipline’s state of health. This is confirmed by the data we collected just before the emergence of the pandemic. In other words, the “normality” of the period before year 2020 is considered by the scholars we interviewed and by surveys as, if not exactly a golden age, then a reasonable period of maturity of the discipline.

At the same time, several asymmetries and variances emerge. National and sub-disciplinary specificities, different sensibilities, inter-generational gaps and a persistent gender imbalance characterize the contemporary scenario. The more we delve into the details of the professional and intellectual essence of political science, the more complicated the picture becomes. The optimism displayed by the political science community a few months prior to the emergence of the pandemic was based on one simple argument: if we remain faithful to our “giants”, the virtuous cycle of political science will continue and any “tragedies” will be avoided. The problem is that the giants in question are extremely diverse, and each brings different, somehow contradictory examples to the table.

Looking through the feedback from our interviewees, what emerges is a certain agreement on the need for political scientists to possess several specific capabilities. Now, we want to select the most crucial capabilities in order to relate them to the possible ideal-types of political scientist that remain valid models for the members of the current community. In doing so, we have decided to have a little fun with the definitions of select ideal-typical figures, by giving each of them the name of an epic hero. We chose such an impertinent adaptation of mythological figures instead of undertaking the difficult task of placing real political scientists in one category or another, as this operation would in any case be biased and partial.

We start with the selection of two fundamental attitudinal dimensions, representing the basic drivers of effective action towards increasing the capacities of the discipline (Fig. 2.4). These dimensions are:

Fig. 2.4

The two-dimensional space of the most relevant capabilities for political scientists

• a. Individual propensity to achieve the collective goals of the discipline. In short, this means holding the view that the profession of political scientist is a collective effort on the part of a body of scholars. The mission is therefore that of increasing the impact (in terms of both teaching and research outcomes) of the collective community of scholars. The focus is therefore on those capabilities that enhance the discipline at a systemic level, namely: presence in the academic curricula, number of scholars recruited, quantity and quality of the departmental/national publication record, ranking of curricula and PhD schools and so on.

  When this dimension is maximized by the scholar’s attitude, the discipline is considered to be strong, since it produces a great number of scholars who adapt to the needs of the scientific community in order to achieve collective goals.

• b. Individual propensity to impact the public sphere. This attitude focuses on the idea of a discipline which is the sum of individual contributions. Therefore, political scientists directly add value to the discipline in the social and public sphere, when they are, as individual researchers and intellectual, more vocal, visible and prestigious at an individual level. The recognition and social penetration of each outcome are more important than the collective impact of the community. The focus here is on the effective influence of each single action (specific and specialized publications, the role of individual political scientists in the media, the individual careers of political scientists within academia etc.). As a consequence, the discipline is considered to be strong when it produces a considerable number of scholars who share approaches designed to ensure social visibility and personal relationships with politicians, decision makers, academic élites and the media.

Figure 2.4 shows the ideal space formed by the intersection of the two dimensions: obviously, if the position in both the dimensions is close to zero, the risk of frustration will be high, since political scientists realize their lack of effective capabilities and therefore feel useless. On the other hand, only when the position in both dimensions is maximized will political scientists perceive their capabilities in all possible professional missions to be considerable.

As said, it would be very difficult (and certainly very debatable) to position each individual famous political scientist in this space. Much more simply, and provocatively, we try to fine-tune a typology within this space, in order to reveal the myths of several generations of scholars, and their possible obsession with the risk of oblivion. Figure 2.5 shows the four ideal figures we wish to propose as possible “models” of the political scientist.

Fig. 2.5

One syndrome and three myths for European political scientists

Hence, the figure represents a potential space for our vision of today’s political scientists in Europe. Ideally, all of them should endorse a simple assertion based on the assumption of the rational, synoptical capabilities of all members of the scientific community: political scientists should therefore preserve the capacity to maintain high professional standards to adapt their research agenda, to update their paradigms and to gather evidence-based knowledge. At the same time, political scientists must be capable of prioritizing the most important actions to be taken at each given moment in their professional lives. This ideal type of a good professional attitude can be seen as the linear projection of the positive assessment made so far by this variegated scientific community. We associate the mythical figure of Aeneas with this perspective: a devoted political science “hero” continuously dedicated to achieving the collective goals of the discipline (including research, teaching and other academic obligations), who is always in control, is able to prioritize and if necessary to renounce all individual goals for the sake of the collective.

We know, however, that human beings are not always capable of meeting their responsibilities. In any case, a modern political scientist who wants to pursue the two aforementioned virtues would not lead a very happy life: due to the scarcity of resources and time constraints, he/she would often have to settle for more modest goals. For this reason, we have hypothesized that the propensity to produce a general impact and the propensity to achieve the collective goal of the discipline tend to cancel one another out, and the actual space of applicability of the two capabilities is shown by the coloured triangle in Fig. 2.5.

While the mythical figure of Aeneas is difficult to emulate, we all have a clear idea of the opposite attitude, that of a counter-ideal-type, which is sometimes a true obsession for political scientists: working each day without any certainty that one’s efforts will be duly recognized. This may apply to individual research agendas (especially when these are not connected to key networks or debates), and even to all academic outcomes concerning teaching obligations and civic engagement (when a discipline is neglected or not adequately recognized in the academic environment). As a matter of fact, the impression of constantly producing research and academic results with no relevance can be a common frustration in the academic environment. Political scientists are no strangers to this frustration, because despite being proactive, internationalized, passionate scholars, they are not always recognized and rewarded by their own cultural and academic systems.

We now bring Sisyphus into the discussion, since this counter-hero can represent the feeling that one has worked hard for nothing, and that all progress achieved by modern political science until now leads nowhere. This is a real danger we all have to face right now, particularly as it may be necessary to reorganize the whole research and higher education system in a post-pandemic scenario (see Chap. 4).

However, the likelihood of a strongly regressive trend characterized by the marginalization of political science, at least in those European countries where the discipline is institutionalized, is a limited one; as is the prospect of seeing an army of budding Aeneas. When a political scientist wishes to emulate a specific virtuous model, it is more likely that he or she will select a specific talent to the detriment of other capabilities. On the basis of the above analyses, we deduce that two capabilities are particularly difficult to combine in one single action: the capability to envisage political science’s collective goal and the capability to impact the public sphere. These two dimensions are theoretically distinct, but a particularly clever approach could in theory marry the two. However, due not only to the limited rationality and the egoism of individuals, but also to the scarcity of resources, it is quite likely that scholars will end up selecting one of the two aforementioned capabilities.

In the first case, scholars will be more oriented towards cultivating the skills required to assure a future for their scientific community. We have chosen the myth of Odysseus to indicate the corresponding ideal-type, since the good of the community for some political scientists may be somewhat akin to the love for “family” and “followers” that Odysseus displayed during his hardships. A modern-day Odysseus in the political science field is a scholar who performs best when considering the collective values of the discipline, and thus the impact that his/her work could have on future generations of scholars. Using a more contemporary definition, we can consider this ideal-type as being close to the concepts of mentor and institution builder.

Achilles, on the other hand, is the equivalent of the ideal-type political scientist focussed mainly on the impact of his/her work—or rather, all disciplinary achievements but in particular his/her own work—on public debate. Talent and scholarship may certainly help this kind of scholar to contribute towards major collective enterprises. However, he or she does not appear very interested in this kind of impact. Rather, he or she assumes that the future of the discipline is somehow subject to its capacity to reach out to policy-makers, the media and ordinary people. The modern-day Achilles as political scientist does not tend to share the values of, or a commitment to, the “collective community” of scholars, but seems more interested in individual action; he or she basically craves for glory and fame and attempts to reach a “collective audience”. The figures that we often label as public intellectuals or independent scholars to a degree fall into this ideal-type category.