Veronica Anghel
It is three years since the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic, on 11 March 2020. Veronica Anghel conducts a retrospective analysis of the impact of the health crisis, from all social scientific perspectives. Did political science rise to the challenge? Read more
Ian Budge
Jean Blondel, comparative political scientist, founder of the University of Essex Department of Government and ECPR, died peacefully on Christmas Day 2022. Tracing his career, Ian Budge says he was a Napoleonic figure who reshaped European political science structurally and intellectually; and had a striking influence on the discipline throughout the world Read more
Matthew Barnfield
Political scientists use experimental methods to study cause-and-effect relationships in politics. Sometimes these approaches involve exposing people to false information about their political reality. Matthew Barnfield argues that this practice of misinformation is not only unethical, but also an ineffective way of learning about the political world Read more
Dawud Ansari
De-orientalising the scholarship on the Arab Gulf states is crucial, argues Dawud Ansari. Commentaries and datasets generalise them as ‘monarchies’, erasing vital differences between these countries. New terms are a starting point for transforming research on the wider region – an urgent objective given new crises and freshened global interest Read more
Avery Reyna
Social scientists are increasingly using quantitative interdisciplinary research methods in the hope of obtaining more nuanced, concrete findings. However, Avery Reyna argues that without proper foresight, relying on these approaches to describe interactions between people, countries, and more complex sociopolitical systems may be harmful to the field overall Read more
Phil Paine
Phil Paine is reminded of the caterpillar who, when asked in which order it moved each of its feet, found itself ‘distracted in a ditch, wondering how it walked’. He suspects that there are misapprehensions about the role of definitions in advancing democracy Read more
William Horncastle
Most nations employ some form of regulation on political finance. William Horncastle explores the different approaches that are taken and presents his recently published open access dataset on political finance systems: the Regulation of Political Finance Indicator Read more
Sonia Bussu
Sonia Bussu argues that the way we understand democracy has been colonised by ‘liberal democracy’ and capitalism. As a result, democracy is far removed from our daily lives. We need to free ourselves from these constraints to see the possible alternatives, which are embodied in democracy as a way of living Read more
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