This article contributes to our understanding of merits and weaknesses associated with the subnational comparative case study. Despite its methodological strengths and the increasing importance of subnational units in politics, the subnational comparative case study remains underutilized in comparative politics. The root cause of the method’s merits lies in the substantive importance of subnational units in politics; at the same time, however, the difficulty of abstracting theory from local specificities hinders the wide utilization of this method. Through examining some important studies in comparative politics and Chinese politics that use comparative case studies, I identify problems in case selection and in achieving generalizability in research design of subnational comparative case studies.

Experiments are taking on greater significance in political science. However, academic courses on methods at German higher education institutions rarely focus on experimental political science. This article presents a methodological course on experiments in political science at the University of Muenster based on the conveyed contents of the course. It analyses the course from the students’ and lecturers’ perspective. The article aims to provide an incentive for future courses on experimental political science.

This article compares political science to another discipline, with which it has much in common. That discipline is architecture. The political-science-as-architecture analogy has a long history in political thought. It also has important implications for the ends, means, and uses of political science. It follows from the political-science-as-architecture analogy that political science is necessarily a heterogeneous and pluralistic discipline. It also follows that political scientists have a common purpose, which is to conceive of institutional structures that allow humans to live together in societies, just as the purpose of architecture is to conceive of physical structures in which humans can live together.

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.

Voluntary and nonprofit sector studies are relatively young and still seeking common intellectual ground. One vehicle for accomplishing this task is the systematic literature review (SLR). SLRs approach knowledge generation through a rules-driven comprehensive process for finding and analyzing prior knowledge. SLRs support the voluntary sector’s current emphasis on data transparency in publication. They also support the growth of voluntary sector empiricism by offering a greater claim to reliability and generalizability of findings. Finally, they support goals of inclusiveness and knowledge unification that are important to the voluntary sector academy, its funders, and its constituents. This explanatory article draws on examples from the nonprofit and voluntary sector to describe the rationale and methods of the SLR.

As other authors have said, analysing publications is a suitable method for illustrating the development of a discipline because publications are among the most important aspects of a branch of learning. To answer the two major questions posed in the introduction to this symposium – what is published? and who publishes? – we examine the evolution of Political Science in Spain, by focusing on the Political Science and International Relations articles published in top-ranked journals in Spain and at the European and international levels for the period 1999–2014. The relevance of this work is twofold. On the one hand, this symposium focuses on the evolution of the discipline in non-leading countries, providing new knowledge and data, as this has previously been neglected by discipline. On the other, our approach complements previous work that focused on other aspects of the field in Spain, such as institutionalisation and the status of women. In general, our data indicate that Spanish Political Science publications are concentrated at the country level, and there is low presence in European and international journals. Concerning the temporal patterns of publications, little change over time is observed at the national level but at the European and international levels a recent rising trajectory can be seen.

Indexical associations are a crucial construct in third-wave variationist work, but little is understood about how perceivers incorporate indexical information over the course of sociolinguistic perception. In classic speaker evaluation, participants listen to a stimulus and report evaluations after listening, limiting our access to the moment-to-moment process of updating social percepts. Studies developing in-the-moment tools have combined methods development with substantive theoretical questions, hindering assessment. We test a continuous evaluation tool using a gestalt style shift and the English variables (ING) and like. The tool captures the expected reactions but has poor time granularity and very high variability. Divergence between slider responses and after-the-fact ratings suggests that the tasks may depend on a different mix of processes, underlining the multiplicity of sociolinguistic cognition processes.

Multi-party coalitions are an increasingly common type of government across different political regimes and world regions. Since they are the locus of national foreign-policy-making, the dynamics of coalition government have significant implications for International Relations. Despite this growing significance, the foreign-policy-making of coalition governments is only partly understood. This symposium advances the study of coalition foreign policy in three closely related ways. First, it brings together in one place the state of the art in research on coalition foreign policy. Second, the symposium pushes the boundaries of our knowledge on four dimensions that are key to a comprehensive research agenda on coalition foreign policy: the foreign-policy outputs of multi-party coalitions; the process of foreign-policy-making in different types of coalitions; coalition foreign policy in the ‘Global South’; and coalition dynamics in non-democratic settings. Finally, the symposium puts forward promising avenues for further research by emphasising, for instance, the value of theory-guided comparative research that employs multi-method strategies and transcends the space of Western European parliamentary democracies.

From academic years 2011–2012 until 2015–2016 (inclusive), the authors developed an innovative formative peer review assessment strategy to build undergraduate students’ academic writing skills within the framework of a second year introductory International Politics module. This involved students anonymously reviewing assigned fellow students’ draft essay introductions and indicative bibliographies, supported by a bespoke rubric delivered via Turnitin Peermark. This article recounts the educational research-driven rationale underpinning the peer review educational design and implementation in the International Politics module, before qualitatively exploring its perception and reception by learners through key “student voice” data, complemented by commentary from learner focus groups. Following the best traditions of learning and teaching articles in this journal, we conclude by sharing the challenges and benefits of implementing such a formative assessment strategy. We also offer practice-based advice, drawn from our experiences, for colleagues who may want to emulate our approach, and we acknowledge the limitations of our qualitative practice-based study alongside a potential avenue for expanding on this study.

In this critical commentary, John Keane defends, extends, and reasserts the role of history in democratic theory through an articulation of seven methodological rules: (1) treat the remembrance of things past as vital for democracy's present and future; (2) regard the languages, characters, events, institutions, and effects of democracy as a thoroughly historical way of life and handling of power; (3) pay close attention to the ways in which the narration of the past by historians, leaders, and others is unavoidably a time-bound, historical act; (4) see that the methods that are most suited to writing about the past, present, and future of democracy draw attention to the peculiarity of their own rules of interpretation; (5) acknowledge that, until quite recently, most details of the history of democracy have been recorded by its critics; (6) note that the negative tone of most previous histories of democracy confirms the rule that tales of its past told by historians often harbor the prejudices of the powerful; and (7) admit that the task of thinking about the past, present, and future of democracy is by definition an unending journey. There can be no Grand Theory of Democracy.

Challenging the contention that statistical methods applied to large numbers of cases invariably provide better grounds for causal inference, this article explores the value of a method of systematic process analysis that can be applied in a small number of cases. It distinguishes among three modes of explanation – historically specific, multivariate and theory-oriented – and argues that systematic process analysis has special value for developing theory-oriented explanations. It outlines the steps required to perform such analysis well and illustrates them with reference to Owen's investigation of the ‘democratic peace’. Comparing the results available from this kind of method with those from statistical analysis, it examines the conditions under which each method is warranted. Against conceptions of the ‘comparative method’, which imply that small-n case-studies provide weak grounds for causal inference, it argues that the intensive examination of a small number of cases can be an appropriate research design for testing such inferences.

The sub-field of political party research is an interesting case study of the broader development of the discipline of political science over the past 20 years as it demonstrates the reflexive and evolving relationship between politics researchers and the organizations that they study. Party research has moved on from crises of existence, to studying the resilience and adaptation of these organizations with new and evolving methodologies that have taken party research into the twenty-first century and fostered more collaborative, specialist and increasingly internationalized relationships within the research community. In the last two decades, expectations around research engagement and impact have heightened in response to changes in the research funding environment and the political pressure to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of the discipline has intensified. The increasingly heterogeneous, specialized and quantified nature of the subfield has enabled party scholarship to find impact and relevance through the provision of technical advice to parties and policymakers, thereby affecting how parties organize. However, while political party researchers have been able to engage audiences outside academia with this specialized and technical advice, the sub-discipline has shifted away from some of the “bigger picture”, normative questions surrounding the role of parties in modern representative democracies.

This paper presents a critical analysis of present approaches to studying not-for-profit performance reporting, and implications of research in this area. Focusing on three approaches: content analysis of publicly available performance reporting; quantitative analysis of financial data; and (rarer) mixed/other methods, we consider the impact of these on our knowledge of not-for-profit performance reporting, highlighting gaps and suggesting further research questions and methods. Our analysis demonstrates the important role of regulation in determining the research data available, and the impact of this on research methods. We inter-connect the methods, results and prevailing view of performance reporting in different jurisdictions and argue that this reporting has the potential to influence both charity practices and regulators’ actions. We call for further research in this interesting area. Contribution is made to the methodological literature on not-for-profits, and ongoing international conversations on regulating not-for-profit reporting.