Whether we like it or not, English has become the lingua franca of political science. The symposium presents three thoughtful essays about the pros and cons of this domination and what can and should be done to mitigate the negative consequences.

Linguistic diversity and multilingualism have implications for our understanding of politics that should be debated more thoroughly in connection with key epistemological and methodological issues in political science. Finding an appropriate approach to the linguistic frame of all political activities, and of the analysis of these activities, remains a crucial concern for those scholars in our discipline who are convinced that understanding politics requires understanding political culture, and that political cultures tend to overlap to a significant extent with linguistic cultures. From this perspective, the dominance of English in scholarly communication at the global level must be counterbalanced by a strong commitment to fostering and sustaining a multilingual ethos in our immediate academic environment.

Studying a sample of recently published papers in the main Economics journals, I find that these American journals mostly publish work on American data, written by members of American universities. I argue that this state of affairs is not essentially because of a language problem, but is explained by the domination of US universities on the international academic market in Economics. This domination has thus direct consequences for the topics of research, and thus for the accumulation of knowledge, in Economics.

English’s role as political science’s lingua franca should inspire reflection but not alarm. Greater multilingualism would undercut academic exchange and provide only a mirage of linguistic equality. The profession should nonetheless recognize and work to mitigate advantages held by native speakers.

Assessments of party decline and decline of traditional forms of political participation often rely on the argument of party membership decline. Most studies analysing trends in party membership over time focus on aggregate country-level data at a few points in time. While they allow grasping general membership trends, they are not without shortcomings. This article presents the Members and Activists of Political Parties (MAPP) dataset related to the MAPP project. The dataset makes a large amount of data on party membership available to the larger public. The dataset provides 6,307 party membership data observations (M) covering 397 parties in 31 countries, mostly between 1945 and 2014. The article discusses the existing literature and data on party membership trends, how membership trends have been assessed so far, and the potential added value of the MAPP dataset.

The aim of this article is to examine and quantify the relationship between regular immigration and voting for anti-immigration parties in Italy’s eight Northern regions – from 1992 to 2015 – and in Italy’s forty-five Northern provinces from 2004 to 2015. Firstly, we identified the Lega Nord as Italy’s main xenophobic party, then we used a fixed effects regression model for panel data to test our hypothesis, while controlling for a series of social, political and economic variables. Our results suggest that there is a positive and significant effect: an increase of 1 per cent in the number of new regular immigrants is associated with an increase of more than 2 per cent in the votes given to the Lega Nord; voter-turnout is significantly and negatively associated with Lega Nord’s vote-share, and a high perception of crime – but not actual crime – is positively associated with anti-immigration votes. At the provincial level, we also found a positive association between Muslim foreign population and Lega Nord’s vote-share. These results ought to be considered along with the fact that Northern Italy is highly representative of the wealthiest and most densely populated regions of Europe, suggesting the possibility that similar phenomena could be witnessed in other comparable contexts.

The study analyses the stock and the change of social capital in Greece at the onset of the economic crisis and tests for the effect of soft social capital elements on civic participation scores. Public servants are analysed separately as a potentially distinct group of citizens in terms of their civic engagement profile. At the empirical level, we identify social capital via the measurement of six main constructs, namely, social trust, social altruism, equality, tolerance, humanitarianism (soft social capital elements) and civic participation (a hard social capital element). Data are drawn from the European Social Value surveys Rounds 4 and 5. Results show that the country experienced a statistically significant decline in its social capital level during the 2008–2010 period, although public servants show higher (albeit also declining) levels of social capital. More importantly, soft social capital constructs do affect civic participation scores for the society as a whole but not for public servants.

We introduce a web application, the Case Selector (http://und.edu/faculty/brian.urlacher), that facilitates comparative case study research designs by creating an exhaustive comparison of cases from a dataset on the dependent, independent, and control variables specified by the user. This application was created to aid in systematic and transparent case selection so that researchers can better address the charge that cases are ‘cherry picked.’ An examination of case selection in a prominent study of rebel behaviour in civil war is then used to illustrate different applications of the Case Selector.

This article examines four lines of scholarly difference in European Union (EU) studies – meta-theoretical, (sub)disciplinary, epistemological and methodological – and whether these are linked to the geographical and institutional affiliations of the authors operating in the field. The study uses a novel dataset based on a quantitative content analysis and human coding of 1597 articles in leading journals dealing with the EU published in the period 2003–2012. The article shows that USA-based scholars score on average – though in many cases, not significantly – higher when it comes to indicators of a comparative politics approach to the EU, use of a rational choice, positivist and statistical vocabulary, and articles coded as quantitative. However, on most of these indicators scholars in some European countries, and especially some institutions, score significantly higher, suggesting that we should disaggregate ‘Europe’ when discussing scholarly differences in the field.

We investigate the role of domestic legal infrastructures on Member State behavior at the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Article 234 cases from 1961 to 2006. The ECJ issues preliminary rulings on the interpretation of European Union (EU) law when requested to do so by national judges, which promotes consistent application of EU law within national legal orders as well as a larger legal discourse about the scope and boundaries of integration. Scholarly interest in Article 234 observations arises from the consequences of these cases for both Member State compliance and European integration. Using a new data set of Member State observations, we demonstrate that the number of observations submitted by non-party Member States is affected by the strength and weaknesses of domestic legal infrastructures that facilitate cases being brought before the Court.

Experimental methods are on the rise in Political Science, and we have a growing demand for teaching experimental methods within university courses. This article is an update on an article published in European Political Science (EPS) in 2012 titled ‘Teaching Experimental Political Science’. It presents an alternative teaching concept, where experiments are not just experienced but also designed by students. Consequently, this article argues that teaching experimental methods in Political Science should include students working on their own research projects.

This article discusses the advantages and drawbacks of a new pedagogical tool that is short games series. As an illustration, it introduces what could be called the ‘International Relations Games Show’, a series of six short games that have been played with bachelor students to experience theories of International Relations (IR). These games were played twice during three academic years in IR introductory courses with 100 students each on average. They illustrate, respectively, the logics of (i) Classical Realism, (ii) Neo-Realism and Neo-Liberalism, (iii) Neo-Marxism, (iv) Heterodox International Political Economy, (v) Constructivism, and (vi) Critical Theories. The article is organized in two parts. Part 1 discusses why short games series are potentially interesting pedagogical tools. It includes a reflection on students’ evaluations of games. Part 2 develops the International Relations Games Show. The conclusion summarizes the main arguments and proposes ways forward. When adequately organized – not too long, with debriefing after the game and during the lectures, and with clear rules, short games series can improve attention, understanding, memory, general learning atmosphere, and favour success for all.