Suchergebnisse

'Political science' is a 'vanguard' field concerned with advancing generic knowledge of political processes, while a wider 'political scholarship' utilising eclectic approaches has more modest or varied ambitions. Political science nonetheless necessarily depends upon and is epistemologically comparable with political scholarship. I deploy Boyer's distinctions between discovery, integration, application and renewing the profession to show that these connections are close woven. Two sets of key challenges need to be tackled if contemporary political science is to develop positively. The first is to ditch the current unworkable and restrictive comparative politics approach, in favour of a genuinely global analysis framework. Instead of obsessively looking at data on nation states, we need to seek data completeness on the whole (multi-level) world we have. A second cluster of challenges involves looking far more deeply into political phenomena; reaping the benefits of 'digital-era' developments; moving from sample methods to online census methods in organisational analysis; analysing massive transactional databases and real-time political processes (again, instead of depending on surveys); and devising new forms of 'instrumentation', informed by post-rational choice theoretical perspectives.

Report prepared for the International political science association.

This symposium explores the ways in which women are descriptively represented in political science, by exploring the ways in which they are positioned institutionally in Spain, Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom. The symposium also explores the ways in which structures may serve to disadvantage women, by analysing HE policy and citation practices. Critical theory reminds us that in observing power structures we can seek to change them, and so our conclusion reflects on some more practical suggestions.

How well is the field of political studies doing and where is it headed? These questions are answered by this broad world overview of political science, its advances and shortcomings, along with prescriptions for the future in the first decades of the 21th century. The volume includes three world regional assessments of the discipline by senior scholars along with an in-depth survey of various sub-disciplinary fields and a concluding critical essay on the future of political studies. Great as a text book, i.e., an introductory global overview.