Such is the pace of technological innovation in the early years of the millennium that many young people, according to a recent survey, no longer like e-mail, preferring more ‘modern’ forms of communication such as instant messaging, Skype or SMS. Will e-mail, one wonders, soon be joining the list of other ‘dead media’ that have fallen into disuse, forgotten and defunct, described on the site of ‘The Dead Media Project’ (www.deadmedia.org)? Any of us with children or family younger than ourselves can see how realistic this scenario could be. Reading through the articles making up the present edition of EPS, one is struck by the thought that one of the common threads running through most if not all of them is the impact of technology and innovation on what we do as political scientists, and the need to stay abreast and exploit these changes if we, as a profession, are to survive and thrive.
This is most obvious in the case of our symposium where Sarah Hale presents five articles describing a range of innovative responses to the challenges of teaching at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As Hale points out, recent years have seen a range of public policy initiatives impinging on the profession that the profession is well placed to analyse and criticise but to which it has also been under pressure to adapt in terms of teaching. Many of the resulting innovations – in areas such as interactive e-learning, work placements and problem-based learning – are often difficult to implement, but worthwhile.
In the field of research matters, Michael Nentwich has important things to say about the prospects and challenges of political science on the web, especially with regard to the fast-growing area of electronic publishing. The future, Nentwich argues, is likely to be one in which not only electronic journals, but also living reviews, hybrid forms and hypertext publications among others, play an increasingly significant role. And the implications of his argument are that the pressures are likely to be self-reinforcing. As information not available electronically – or else relatively inaccessible because you have to pay for it – is less and less used (and, one might add, as research is increasingly evaluated in terms of how frequently it is cited), so the pressures driving the open access movement and similar developments are likely to become irresistible. Meanwhile, Mirjana Kasapović offers insights into the trajectory – and therefore into possible future developments – recently taken by political science in Croatia, thus usefully building on the reports on developments in the discipline in other eastern European countries carried in previous editions of the journal.
Finally, Jon Tonge in his article describes an important innovation in terms of professional matters when he describes the challenges for the UK Political Studies Association (PSA) in developing its external links. The attempts to coordinate the roles of the national political science associations through the creation of a European Confederation of associations is a development that will be discussed further through articles to appear in future issues of the journal. In the meantime, we hope that Tonge's will be the first in a series of articles on the national political science associations. If their authors add their own perspectives on the projected Confederation, then they will make a significant contribution towards fulfilment of the journal's remit to assist the emergence of European political science as a self-conscious community of practitioners.
All that speaks to the issue of what the future of political science in Europe is likely to look like. But what ought it to look like? Here, not surprisingly, there is considerable disagreement. Jürg Steiner focuses on the ever-present problem of concept stretching arguing that this danger has become serious in relation to the term deliberation – whose use has become faddish and which ought to be much more clearly distinguished from terms such as strategic bargaining. Should the term be reserved only to situations in which deliberators only assert what they believe themselves, or is it useful to apply the term less restrictively? In the debate between Steiner, Austen-Smith and Feddersen, Goodin and Schneider, the reader will find a variety of responses.
Equally varied are the responses to the highly interesting initiative described by King and Marian who recently surveyed political scientists worldwide on what they considered to be the discipline's ‘essential meaning, purposes, and trajectory’. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most impassioned disagreements were methodological in nature. Thus, reflecting somewhat the position taken by Esping-Andersen in our ‘leaders of the profession’ piece, a number of respondents emphasised the importance of formal modelling and rigorous testing – while others complained of an ‘excess quantification and the pretence of “science”’. Asked about the future of political science, respondents mentioned both research and professional matters.
The professional matters mentioned are worth dwelling upon for a moment since some respondents were pessimistic, seeing more original and dissenting approaches stifled by the sources of available funding, government pressure and the ‘corporatization of the university’. Two points seem worth making in this vein. First, most readers of this journal will presumably wish to avoid such dangers, whatever be their position on ‘dissenting approaches’, by virtue of their commitment to the search for truth and therefore to the principles of scholarship. Second, therefore, if to whatever degree these dangers exist, then many are likely to regard as not at all helpful the UK PSA's decision to accept the skewing of research funding (see the article by Tonge) – and thus to hope that the other European PSAs do not follow suit. The decision is one that would appear to overlook the exquisitely political principle of divide et impera and that assumes consensus on the criteria conventionally used to make comparisons in terms of ‘research excellence’. There is a fundamental arrogance underlying the idea of assessing research in terms of citation scores, journal prestige rankings and so forth: had they existed in his day, they would, no doubt, have brought handsome rewards to Joseph Priestley and his determination to cling to phlogiston theory. The only problem is, phlogiston theory turned out to be wrong.
