The editorial to the symposium briefly contextualises current debates on the European ‘public sphere’ and/or on absence thereof. In light of concern with the EU's so-called ‘democratic deficit’, the issue of how to create a polis without a demos has focused, in part, on the role of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) with respect, for example, to the mass media, law, and organisations within civil society. The editorial introduces the individual papers and seeks to identify their potential contributions to academic and policy debate within and beyond the EU.

This article examines the idea that the EU could export its promotion of the public sphere. The Commission perception of the public sphere is unclear and the EU is not exporting a public sphere paradigm in any comprehensive manner. The EU nevertheless continues to attempt to export its integration experience. The concept of a public sphere is particularly pertinent to certain advanced democratic societies. Its exportability and relevance for other parts of the world are limited.

The emergence of a pan-European public sphere based on a common language, discourse and media sphere is generally held to be unlikely, if not impossible. Research has therefore mainly focused on measuring different degrees of Europeanisation of existing national media spheres. In applied research however, the notion of ‘Europeanisation’ often remains very fuzzy. The new agenda of ‘Europeanisation’ has been mainly applied as a pragmatic research strategy. As such, it still lacks theoretical grounding and methodological coherence. With this in mind, the article will raise the question of standards. This regards first of all theoretical standards to determine how Europeanisation relates to the transformation of the national public sphere. Second, methodological standards indicating how to measure Europeanisation must be set. Finally, public-sphere research must critically address the question of normative standards to determine whether Europeanisation meets the criteria of democratic legitimacy.

In the 1990s most scholars saw European citizenship as a purely decorative and symbolic institution which added little new to the ‘pre-Maastricht’ regime of free movement rights. In addition, many felt the need to defend the primacy of national citizenship by highlighting the derivative nature and weak content of European citizenship. Accordingly, its transformative potential remained at the margins of the debate. Despite such assessments, European Union citizenship has matured as an institution, owing to a number of important interventions by the European Court of Justice and legislative initiatives, such as the Citizenship Directive (Dir 2004/38).

This paper focuses on the role played by civil-society organisations in three policy sectors – environmentalism, regionalism and anti-racism – at different territorial levels. The paper describes routes of Europeanisation, and highlights the crucial role of mediators between national and European levels of governance in building alliances and transnational networks.

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.

Science shows that 50 per cent of births in urban areas are male while 50 per cent in rural areas are female, and that this is a universal social pattern. Research on 4,473,559,500 live births in OECD countries, 1950–2000, demonstrates beyond all doubt that the party control of local councils has a statistically significant impact on sex at birth, as well as age at birth, sex of mother, and whether Lloyd George knew the mother.

This article considers the transformation of higher education in Europe and the challenges it has to face in particular in the field of research. The article argues that national systems have developed from very different traditions but that they are now confronted with similar issues and problems. There is an ongoing process of Europeanisation from the bottom (networks, benchmarking) and from the top (Bologna process, European Commission). But the challenge of the future is the need to play at a ‘global’ level and to compete worldwide with the best university systems.

The Research Assessment Exercise and its successor – the Research Excellence Framework – are examined as contemporary examples of a perversion of academic discourse in British universities that threatens to spread to the rest of Europe. It is claimed that conventional political science is of limited use for understanding the true inanity of such bureaucratic initiatives and instead fiction and psychoanalytical theory are proposed as highly useful intellectual resources with which to understand the truely perverted essence of research bureaucracy. The work of literature-inspired writers such as Žižek, Kafka, Sloterdijk, and Hašek is used to illustrate this claim.

This article reports on a survey of seventeen national political science associations in Europe, which was undertaken as part of discussions leading up to the first Annual General Meeting of a European Confederation of Political Science Associations (ECPSA) held in Spain in summer 2008. The survey provides a detailed overview of the landscape of associations which are widely divergent in size and resourcing but which generally attempt to fulfil similar roles and functions. The responses indicate the forces driving the movement for a new confederation to encourage and enable closer working relationships between national associations.

As far as institutions are concerned, there certainly is a European political science: the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) has now been embodying it for more than thirty years. This paper uses a comparison between three political science journals – the European Journal of Political Research, the French Revue Française de Science Politique and the British Political Studies – from 1973 to 2002 to show how much the ECPR political science differs from national political science traditions.

This article discusses three effects of the Bologna Process: the transformation of higher education in almost all European countries since 1999, an institutional reform by universities that was triggered by the Bologna initiative and the creation of a new international institution influencing higher education. The article also discusses some implications and challenges for political science resulting from the Bologna reforms.