Understanding of the relationship between constitutionalism and democracy among legal and political philosophers reflects an idealised account of the US constitution and the nature of judicial review. This view is normatively and empirically flawed. The US constitution is built on pre-democratic assumptions and its counter-majoritarian checks and balances are largely regressive, benefitting privileged minorities over the underprivileged. By contrast, ‘actually existing democracy’, involving competing parties and majority rule, is constitutional in its process and effects, treating all with equal concern and respect, upholding rights and maintaining the rule of law. Judicial review undermines these beneficial qualities.

Legal changes stimulated by economic liberalisation and European Union governance have led some observers to speak of the ‘Americanisation’ of European law. Focussing on the dynamics of legal change and resistance in European member states, this article questions the extent of trans-Atlantic legal convergence, noting six important differences between European and American law that are unlikely to disappear.

Adversarial legalism, an approach to law and regulation long considered distinctive to the US, is spreading across the European Union (EU). The EU's institutional structure and its ongoing project of market integration generate political incentives and functional pressures that encourage EU policy-makers to rely on adversarial legalism as an approach to governance.

European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights rulings create a form of transnational social citizenship. European judicial activism appears reminiscent of US politics, but is rooted in distinctively European commitments to solidarity. Yet because rights rely on domestic programmes, social citizenship remains vulnerable to retrenchment. This article argues that reforms threaten to transform European social citizenship into a civil citizenship that moves Europe closer to the minimalist US model of social protection.

The British system of quality assessment of research in universities, known as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), has recently been the subject of major public policy review and debate. The system of research quality or performance assessment has been running for over twenty years, although many of its facets have changed as has the increasingly marketised political economy. Nevertheless, the UK RAE has been the prototype for the growth and development of such systems internationally, although how different countries have conceived of such forms of review has varied greatly. The question of the relationship between research quality in higher education and the public funding of research lies at the heart of what has become a contentious and acrimonious debate in the UK. While these issues can be seen as fundamentally about social and economic matters, in fact the social sciences as an organised group of subjects or interests have not played a key role in the public arena. This article outlines the contours of the recent debates in the UK, by comparison and contrast with the ways in which such systems of performance and quality assessment have been debated inter alia in Australia, New Zealand, France and the Netherlands. In essence, the issues have centred upon questions of measurement of performance known as metrication, and bibliometrics versus social judgments about research quality.

The following transcript from an interview with the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso (conducted in July 2007), illustrates how bridge-building between the academic and policy worlds can bring profit to both sides. Barroso discusses his time as a student and teacher of political science at the University of Geneva, Georgetown University, and in his native Portugal, as well as his active membership of the European Consortium for Political Research, and how his academic experience shaped both his world view and political career.

A Ph.D. is not a qualification to decide a country's foreign policy, but it should not be a disqualification from communicating with people whose choices are not entirely rational. Founders of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) learned to do this in occupied Europe during the Second World War. I learned it in libraries and working on newspapers. So, instead of talking about Iraq in an Oval Office meeting with President Bush I offered a parable about Northern Ireland, supported by quotations from Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin.

The academic field of Public Administration is quite diverse in Europe, ranging from applications of basic public law on the one hand to analyses of the ‘hollow state’ on the other (where it is difficult to find any clear-cut ‘public’ organisation). Nonetheless, in the light of societal changes towards late modernity, post-modern conditions and globalisation, there are some common challenges that sooner or later may knock at the door of all universities teaching Public Administration: how might we best conceptualise Public Administration as a field?; what are the field's relations to practice?; how can we best teach our field in a globalising world?; how adequate are our theories?; and how can we reach out and meet the demands to come down from our ivory tower?

This essay aims to review the contemporary debate on citizenship with a focus on the present dilemma of the institution of citizenship between equality and difference. Citizenship today seems to have become stuck between a categorical commitment to either universalism or particularism. It is as if there is no alternative but to opt for either assimilation (national citizenship) or group fetishism (the end of citizenship). In this essay, however, I argue that citizenship today is not as helpless as it looks. I suggest that rethinking the categories of equality and universality may save modern citizenship from this dilemma between equality and difference. Perceiving equality as equality of differences and not homogenisation and pursuing a contingent notion of universality may, I argue, be of some use in coping with the dilemma in question.

Empirical comparisons of political systems can hardly avoid shortcomings. Many political scientists have turned to quantitative analyses of mass data, because case studies are assumed to have only explorative value. A variable-oriented design for comparisons with a small N would provide a basis for bridging the gap between the two empirical efforts. Until now, scholars who have dealt with this problem have not identified the key variables for the selection of cases, and for this reason the issue has never been discussed previously.