The articles presented in this symposium explore approaches to political science education that involve students in experiential learning through placements, service learning and community engagement projects. This introduction identifies key themes emerging from the articles and situates these within the wider context of debates on politics, teaching and learning.

In the current theory and practice of politics work placements in the UK a great deal of emphasis is placed on lengthy placements and the cultivation of ‘key’ or ‘transferable skills’. This article presents an alternative model of short research-based placements, which provides tangible benefits for students of politics in terms of both employability and personal development, and which gels with recent attempts to provide a richer account of the nature of employability.

This article seeks through constructive criticism to consider how the ‘knowledge exchange’ agenda might be harnessed for the progressive goal of political education. The article discusses ‘Making Politics Matter’, an initiative that seeks to encourage active learning and teaching of politics, facilitate the development of social network capital among students, and to reach out to the wider community, with the aim of promoting public discussion of political issues.

Signature pedagogies have been defined as ‘types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their profession’ (Schulman, 2005: 3). Applying Schulman's definition of signature pedagogies to political science, this article notes that as an academic discipline it does not seek to train students for a specific profession. It also recognises that political science's signature pedagogy is similar to those traditionally associated with the social sciences and humanities: mass lectures, small tutorials and private study. In recent times newer pedagogies such as problem-based learning, experiential learning and service learning have been introduced in political science programmes to marry theory and practice and promote critical thinking and independent learning. This article focuses on one such approach, service learning, assessing the contribution it can make to teaching in political science with reference to an analysis of its effects in a postgraduate module on democratic civic education in University College Cork, Ireland.

This article reflects on the challenges that social and political disengagement pose within the university environment, and offers an alternative pedagogical solution centred on praxis. To retain the functional role of education for the reproduction of democracy, the article contends that the challenges posed by mass education, the corporatisation of university life and the alienating impact of neoliberal discourse mean that the solution to engagement and participation within university, and beyond, lies in teaching activism.

The subject of this article is the state of the discipline of International Relations (IR) in Poland. In the communist era, IR was an arena of ideological confrontation. The political science approach was based on Marxist ideology. The transformation after 1989 can be described as a transition from real socialism to common sense realism, and hence an approach that is practical, but lacking in more far-reaching theoretical reflection. The closure of this gap is inevitably a slow process. However, it has been possible to sense some creative spirit within the discipline recently, as is attested by the publication of a series of major works by Polish and foreign authors, initiating a debate on the condition of IR and the establishment of the Polish International Studies Association. However, the state of the discipline in Poland will require a raising of the level of teaching at Polish universities, not least through a fuller account being taken of research methodologies and theories.

We live in an era described as ‘fast-paced, fragmented, and data-drenched’. This article will state the case that a superabundance of information, particularly through the internet, is influencing the manner in which individuals learn, and this is creating problems. In particular, there is evidence that many people are accepting information without critical examination, with Donald Leu's study into students’ willingness to accept the existence of the Pacific Northwest ‘tree octopus’ as a celebrated example. Original research at Cardiff University suggests that Politics students are not immune. The concept most associated with attempts to address these problems is information literacy, but this article raises, again, the question whether this concept has become too ‘stretched’ to fulfil the task.

Political science has embraced institutional analysis to the degree that it has become a truism to say that we are ‘all institutionalists now’. Yet, despite this turn towards institutional analysis, most studies have focussed on the political as opposed to the policy implications of institutions. As a result, the direct and indirect effects of institutions on concrete policy output have received scarce attention. This article outlines the developments to date and presents the overall findings of the articles in this volume.

This article discusses, models and quantifies the relationship between the number of parties in government and the degree of policy change or instability. Single-party governments, such as those formed in the United Kingdom for several decades, tend to produce very high levels of policy changes and reversals, whereas multiparty coalition governments, such as the ones in Switzerland or Israel, tend to produce a high degree of stability and little policy change. This relationship is studied for 295 elections and the subsequent governments in twenty-four countries since the Second World War. According to the study, there is a strong negative correlation between the number of parties in government and the degree of policy change. The fewer parties in government the more changes, and vice versa.

When it comes to the impact of institutions such as electoral systems, parliamentary or presidential systems and executive–legislature relations, political science has predominately been preoccupied with their political effects, such as whether they lead to two-party or multi-party systems and whether stable governments result. What has been less discussed and researched are the policy implications of different electoral systems. Do they lead to more economic growth? Does Proportional Representation lead to higher budget deficits? Do majoritarian systems lead to more or less political violence? The shortage of research analysing these questions is surprising. This article critically outlines the research to date, summarises the main results and points to methodological problems in the literature before it outlines a framework for future research analysing how the choice of electoral system affects policy output. The main recommendation is that, before trying to connect policy outputs to broad labels such as ‘Proportional Representation’, which can cover significantly different systems, one should investigate the connection of policy outputs to intervening variables such as the effective number of parties and the mean duration of cabinets.

An intense scholarly and public policy debate concerns the optimal design of institutions for new democracies, particularly those facing deep ethnic or cultural cleavages. This paper surveys the main contending models that have been advanced for ethnically diverse democracies – consociationalism, centripetalism and communalism – and examines the key components of each of those models. It then explores some aspects of their application, arguing that there is much more cross-over between the models than is commonly assumed.

Political science has, in the past 40 years, developed into a multi-dimensional discipline, training thousands of political scientists who have entered a variety of professions. Its development in Iceland over 40 years has been remarkable, from its small beginnings in 1970 to hosting the largest political science conference in Europe in 2011. However, as the ECPR's founders taught us, political science must always be aware of new challenges and be prepared to innovate and adapt to new realities. The financial crisis that hit Iceland and the world economy in 2008 embodies significant challenges to the discipline, but also opportunities – and notably the opportunity to retrieve the dominance that market economics secured in the past over many political economy analyses. The specific experience of Iceland, as a small state in the north, represents a wake-up call for the discipline, raising key questions relating to the contribution political science can make to understanding the current transformation and to the capacity of the discipline to maintain its relevance.