This is our first issue with a commercial publisher, Palgrave, and we would like to begin by expressing our thanks to the Palgrave team, and Emma Jones in particular, for their professionalism and assistance in making this transition a smooth one. We look forward to a long and successful partnership with them.
The decision to publish with Palgrave represents a new and significant step in the development of the journal in several respects. EPS will continue to publish three issues a year, but an additional fourth ‘reviews’ issue will be added, edited by Peter Kennealy at the European University Institute and published every winter from 2005. The move to Palgrave will also greatly enhance the journal's online presence and raise the profile of EPS outside Europe, providing greater access to a global audience for the research, teaching and professional issues of concern to Europe's political scientists. To that end, we have also put in place new International Advisory and Editorial Boards. We anticipate a strong and productive working relationship with their members in contributing to the development of the European political science community, enhancing its capacity for self-reflection and analysis and promoting engagement with a wider international academic public.
The basic orientation and aims of the journal remain unchanged. EPS will continue to focus on the practice of political science in Europe in research, training and teaching, while also publishing articles with a political science perspective on matters of current topical interest. Although it has a short history, EPS has already built up an important archive of articles reflecting on the main challenges to the discipline. Over the last year or so, single-topic symposia have become a key feature of each issue and we will continue to use them as a means of highlighting our core concerns. In addition to its focus on issues specific to the discipline – such as the changing face of graduate training and recruitment, the need to avoid parochialism in research and the need for a more vigorous dialogue between its sub-fields and theoretical perspectives – EPS will continue to campaign against a rarefied and ivory-tower-bound political science. The journal's new profile will assist us in improving the visibility and increasing the relevance of the European political science profession.
This issue engages directly with these concerns in its focus on graduate training and the reproduction and development of the profession and its scientific skills-base. In his provocatively entitled ‘Is Political Science Producing Technically Competent Barbarians?’, Bo Rothstein strongly criticises the trend towards methodological and technical specialisation in the profession. He argues that unless we infuse training with a strong dose of political philosophy, reconnecting the discipline with its neglected ‘normative side’, not only will we further rarefy research, but we may actively prevent our students from becoming ‘good citizens’.
The symposium on doctoral training addresses a set of related issues, although from a different perspective. While Rothstein is concerned with the dangers of introversion and a neglect of ‘real world engagement’ in favour of technical sophistication, the authors in our symposium are rather pre-occupied by the inadequacies of training in Europe across the board and the dangers to the profession's future that this poses. Thorlaksen sets out the various approaches to doctoral training in Europe and detects an improvement in the trend away from the traditional ‘apprenticeship’ and ‘lone scholar’ models towards convergence on a more standardised programme model. Laver vigorously criticises the failings of what he calls the ‘standard, almost mediaeval’ European style of training. He advocates in its place a move towards a ‘hard science’ approach of group-oriented research for doctoral candidates, that is also supportive of both student marketability and the effective reproduction of the profession. Kaase, Eymeri and Heywood analyse three different national experiences, in France, Germany and Britain: of the three, only the UK appears to have an effective national strategy for developing professional training and skills, although at the cost of an increasing concentration of resources on fewer institutions.
And yet, as Jonathon Moses and his colleagues argue, despite those weaknesses, there are clear signs of the health of the European profession and of its capacity to modernise and adapt. They point to a remarkable growth in methodological sophistication in the European profession and the spread of new skills of comparative large-N and medium-N studies, thus narrowing the long-standing divide between European and American political science, but perhaps also thereby widening a more recent divide on both continents between explanatory and interpretive approaches. But a more critical divide – that does betray the weaknesses of the profession and its institutional environment in Europe – is indicated by the very uneven spread of new skills and the attendant methodological debates. As Moses et al point out, the vigorous dialogue between theoretical perspectives to which we are devoted at EPS is difficult to discern in many of Europe's national political science communities. Many scholars (be they senior or junior) – and therefore many students – remain unaware of the sort of methodological debates they discuss.
The overall impression gained from this issue is that while Rothstein rightly alerts us to the dangers of imbalance in political science training, we should be equally concerned with the critical institutional weaknesses of European university systems that threaten the future of skills-provision as such across the political and social sciences.
