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Is anyone's esteem for political science better suppressed than a political scientist's? Ordinary modesty is admirable, but his is professionally destructive. For, not only hiding his light under a bushel, he follows the more nihilistic course of blowing it out. Granted that many political scientists neither deprecate their discipline nor permit a low regard for it to stultify their work, I have been repeatedly assured by members of the profession that no social science is more retarded and none less promising for systematic theory. Thus they hide—even from their own eyes—their discipline's accomplishments. This I shall try to show, offering two books as evidence. There is other evidence, too. When even politically ignorant undergraduates complain that the major in political science is thin, no imaginable poverty of the field explains enough. Such a phenomenon proves concealment, either deliberate or unintended.

EUROPEAN POLITICAL SCIENCE IS DIFFERENT FROM, NOT INFERIOR TO, THE AMERICAN VARIETY. AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE IS UNDOUBTEDLY MORE PROFESSIONALIZED AND, IN THIS SENSE, MAINTAINS MORE CONSISTENT STANDARDS THAN ITS EUROPEAN COUNTERPART. THE AMERICAN PROFESSION HAS CERTAINLY PRODUCED A GREATER VOLUME OF TOP-NOTCH RESEARCHERS, BUT THIS IS PRIMARILY A FUNCTION OF NUMBERS. IT IS DOUBTFUL WHETHER THE AVERAGE AMERICAN SCHOLAR IS MUCH DIFFERENT FROM THE AVERAGE EUROPEAN. AMERICAN STANDARDS HAVE NOT BECOME THE BENCHMARK FOR QUALITY POLITICAL SCIENCE RESEARCH CONDUCTED OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES, EITHER IN CONCEPTUAL OR METHODOLOGICAL TERMS.

John Micklethwait is editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, and Adrian Wooldridge is political editor of the Economist, and author of their Bagehot column. In their latest book they analyse the disastrous failure of many western countries to control the Coronavirus, and what it exposes about the weaknesses of their systems of government. It is a wake up call to learn from the more successful responses of countries like Singapore or South Korea. What are the lessons in better government the west can now learn from the east? To discuss the UK's capacity to learn such lessons, and the likelihood of its doing so, they are joined by Philip Rycroft CB, former Head of the UK Governance Group in the Cabinet Office, Permanent Secretary in DExEU, and now Visiting Professor at Edinburgh University.

The political scientist is a teacher of public men in the making, and an adviser of public men in activity; "public men," that is, men who are taught, invited or assumed to feel some responsibility for the exercise of political power; "political power," that is, concentrated means of affecting the future.Obviously we can not affect the past, or that present moment which is now passing away, but only what is not yet: the future alone is sensitive to our actions, voluntary if aimed at a pictured outcome, rational if apt to cause it, prudently conceived if we take into account circumstances outside our control (known to decision theorists as "states of nature"), and the conflicting moves of others (known in game theory as opponents' play). A result placed in the future, conditions intervening in the future, need we say more to stress that decisions are taken "with an eye to the future," in other terms, with foresight?

In recent years, speech inciting hatred, peddling dissemination, and encouraging self-harm has proliferated on social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, prompting calls for regulation to force platforms to tackle these challenges more aggressively. One of the most ambitious proposals is the UK's own Online Safety Bill, which looks likely to be passed (in some form) by the current government and will grant Ofcom substantial new powers over social media. Yet the Bill is highly controversial, prompting concerns over censorship of legitimate speech. What will this regulatory regime look like in practice? Will it effectively prevent harm? And is there merit to the concern that it will undermine free speech? To confront these issues and more, we are joined by leading experts and practitioners from academia, civil society, and Ofcom itself.

Politics has changed hugely in the last 40 years; so has the press; and so has the interaction between them.

This essay portrays the capacities of political science in Western as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. The discussion is divided into four subtopics: (1) the political and social context in which European political science developed after World War II, (2) its degree of institutionalisation as an academic discipline, (3) its professional organisation and communication structure, and (4) its capacity to represent the discipline's education and research interests in the European area. The analysis concludes with a plea to create a database which, in a comprehensive way, allows for a comparative self-description of the discipline in the European area of higher education and research. Adapted from the source document.