A modern discipline with a longer pre-history

Political science is not seldom described as a young discipline in Europe. It developed into one of the major disciplines within the social sciences after the Second World War after a modest beginning in the latter part of the 19th century, sometimes more or less from scratch. With roots in the early 17th century, Swedish political science would seem to be something of a deviant case. Already in 1622, the foundation of the Johan Skytte Chair in Eloquence and Government at the University of Uppsala marked the birth of a new discipline in Sweden. The donor who gave his name to the new chair wanted to promote eloquence among Swedish civil servants and diplomats, and the professor of politics and eloquence initially presided over what may be described as a professional training programme rather different from modern political science. Still, the chair provided an organisational platform for the new discipline, the contours of which were readily visible in the late 1800s and early 1900s, in Uppsala and Lund.

Founded in 1477, Uppsala University is Sweden's oldest university followed by Lund University almost two centuries later (1666). Political science was introduced here in 1877. Pontus Fahlbeck – founder of the Swedish Journal of Political Science (Statsvetenskaplig Tidskrift) – served as professor of political science for a few formative decades (1889–1915).

Introduction

Year 2000 marked important changes that affected higher education in Romania after the country embraced the Bologna process. These changes questioned the universities’ focus on teaching, modified the curricula and the structure of undergraduate and graduate programs, and allowed for increased autonomy and academic freedom from the Ministry of Education. This chapter first reviews the historical and institutional context in which political science reappeared in 1989 after decades of communist restrictions, and then details the structure, enrolment and recruitment patterns of the 13 public universities with political science departments. It argues that political science has become a respected academic field and a university programme popular among the country's best high school graduates. Unprecedented requirements introduced in 2005, which asked faculty members to test the value of their research by seeking publication in top peer-reviewed scholarly journals with international reputation in their fields, seek to connect Romanian political scientists with their peers abroad but are yet to make a real impact. Political science departments, as other fields of Romanian higher education, still struggle with inadequate funding, academic dishonesty, and parochialism of aging academics.

Political science as a distinct field of study and research did not exist institutionally in Lithuania until the beginning of the 1990s. The appearance and development of political science correlated in a consistent manner with democratic changes in society and the reconstruction of statehood. Gradual formation of a civil society and independent political science is possible only in a democratic society. Democracy and citizenship can only flourish when the possibility of free science is guaranteed. However, political science in Lithuania was ot built up from scratch. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

Institutionalization of political science

It is impossible to understand the contemporary political science in Lithuania without taking into account the political history of this country – the establishment of state in 1918, the Soviet occupation in 1940 and the re-establishment of independence in 1990.

Introduction

To write about an academic discipline means in an elder tradition to define the subject, to lay out where it comes from, to identify the main topics and to talk about current developments. In a modern understanding there can be a different approach. Referring to King, Keohane and Verba (1994, p. 7), a scientific approach is “designed to make… inferences on the basis of empirical information about the world” and to draw conclusions thereof. Thus we have to formulate diff erentquestions, like what is the institutional setting, how many students are enrolled and got graduated, what is the number of the teaching personnel, how many political scientists hold adequate jobs, what is the relationship to other subjects in the academic field, what role does political science play in German politics, what do German political scientists contribute to the international community, what is the standing in comparison to other European countries and the United States? This article will combine the two approaches.

Reflections collected here come from researchers from various academic centres in Europe and support the notion that political science, with its long tradition of analysing the development of societies in nation-states, is constantly searching for ever-newer ways to describe and explain the modern world. This search is visible in the undertaken research problems, methods and techniques used and the way research and education of political science are organised. This should not come as a surprise, as it seems highly probable that we are caught in the middle of a process of breaking up the continuity of social development and are witnessing a deep transformation. The changes seem to have outpaced not only science but also politics. We may be in need of a new approach, a different strategy for how the discipline of political science functions and how research is organised in order to truly see this new world being born.

We believe that reflection on political science as a scientific discipline at the dawn of the 21st century can become a good reference point to open a discussion among competent researchers, on the basis of which they could work out thorough and informed suggestions regarding revisiting the organizational structure and the basic programme to be taught to students of political science. Our activities should be aimed at making political science an important field of knowledge indispensable in political practice, a discipline which not only describes and explains but also allows us to make sense of the rapid changes taking place in the political organization of society and a discipline capable of improving the quality of state-society relations.

The rapidly growing complexity of the modern world, the Internet, new methods of communication and co-operation, and an incredibly fast-growing stream of information force ever more narrow specializations to be created, ever newer questions to be asked and areas to be researched within the field of political science. They also make the old question relevant again: How do we study such a multifaceted phenomenon as ‘politics’? How can we even begin a theoretical and generalizing reflection on a set of completely new events and tendencies associated with politics today? How can we understand them as unpredictably varied as they are? For we do not even know the boundaries of politics.

Introduction

The birth of Political Science in Portugal was rather late when compared to our European counterparts or other scientific domains. This discipline was consolidated mostly in the nineties and has encompassed many sub-disciplines such as International Relations, unlike the practice followed, for instance, in England, the United States or, more recently, Brazil. This article has four building-blocks in order for us to be able to make a critical appraisal of the state of Political Science in Portugal.

Firstly, we need to contextualise the birth and the initial stage of the discipline. In this section, we will be looking at the legacy and nature of the dictatorship as well as the importance of other disciplines such as Law and Sociology. This background is very important to understand why Political Science was only consolidated in the nineties.

Introduction

Modern political science in Hungary – as in the whole Eastern and Central European region – could not start before the late 1980s, since the undemocratic conditions of the communist regimes as well as their tight ideological control on the academia simply did not allow genuine political science research to flourish. What has the discipline achieved in the past less than three decades? Has it been possible to catch up with other social sciences, like sociology or economics, which have a longer history, and therefore a better disciplinary organization, with more departments, researchers, journals and achievements? Or is political science still “in the making,” as Arató and Tóth (2010) argued a few years ago?

We believe that political science in Hungary has undergone a remarkable development since the late 1980s and early 1990s when the fundaments of the discipline were laid down. Note that it is not more than 25 years ago when the first handbooks were published; the first par excellence political science research programmes got started; the first university departments were founded.

The 1990s hallmark the years of early developments. On the one hand, this was the period when different research schools and paradigmatic approaches took form; and this marks an important step in the development of the discipline.

Political science in Norway is a creation of the post-war world, but one that has since experienced strong growth. From humble beginnings, political science is today taught at all Norwegian universities and at a number of university colleges and Norwegian political scientists have been, and are, highly active both domestically and internationally. It is now 2014, and since its Norwegian origins in 1947, the field has turned 67 years old, coincidentally the normal retirement age for a Norwegian citizen. But this is not a field that is ready to retire. Instead, the first 67 years has easily been a success – this is a vibrant 67-year old, and for much of the lifespan of Norwegian political science, it has punched solidly above its weight. In 1947, the University of Oslo (UiO) became the first Norwegian institution to grant a degree in political science (although for a full decade taught primarily by legal scholars and historians).

Brief history and structure of the discipline

In the history of the social sciences, Austria, and its capital Vienna in particular, has long inhabited a special role, despite the precarious status of many of its proponents at the fringes of the academic world. People like Marie Jahoda or Paul Felix Lazarsfeld who became world famous upon their arrival in the U.S. with its more receptive academic culture made their first steps as social scientists here; however, the issue of scientifically assessing the domain of politics and policy-making remained almost exclusively in the hands of jurists (even though some of them were open towards matters of analysing political regimes and contributing to democratic theory, such as Hans Kelsen) (Ehs, 2010). With the consecutive regimes of authoritarianism, then fascism, then restorative democracy between the early 1930s and the late 1960s, the voices of emerging social scientists were almost entirely suppressed and forced to leave (Fleck, 2011). Thus, unlike most of the other European countries on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, Austria did not develop a separate discipline of political science during the conservative decade of the 1950s.