Suchergebnisse

Considering the importance of political science as an academic subject in our time, it is surprising that more attention has not been given, until now, to the history of political study and teaching. As Professor Anderson?s book makes clear, an understand

1. Introduction -- 2. An American preamble -- 3. Foreign policy and political competence -- 4. A common point of departure -- 5. The behavioralist mood -- 6. A logical analysis of polyarchy -- 7. Empirical research on polyarchy -- 8. Arguments in defense of democratic participation -- 9. Power and powerlessness under polyarchy -- 10. Epistemological reservations -- 11. Modern political science and rationalization -- 12. Modern and old-fashioned politics.

Taking his work as a point of reference, this book not only provides an illuminating history of political science, told via Dahl and his critics. It also offers a revealing analysis as to what progress we have made in our thinking on pluralism and democracy, and what progress we could make, given social sciences epistemological constraints. Above and beyond this, the development and the problems of pluralism and democracy are explored in the context of the process of modernization.

We study the impact of political knowledge on the attitudes of European citizens towards the possible distribution of responsibilities between European level institutions and national governments in three policy areas: foreign policy, defence and immigration policy. The hypothesis tested is that if citizens are not knowledgeable about how the EU works, they are more likely to be wrong about the consequences of a mismatch in the allocation of competences. In order to identify the causal effect of political knowledge on attitudes we use an instrumental variables approach. The results show that more informed citizens have a considerably higher probability of being in favour of the process of EU integration