Over the last two decades, several Romanian political parties advertised inclusive and open candidate selection but often ended up with decisions taken by central-level elites. Demos, a party formed in 2018, is the first to use deliberative democracy for candidate selection. The deliberation included the party members and took place online in December 2018–January 2019, with several moderators and facilitators coming from the party ranks. This article analyses the effects produced by this deliberation process for the internal life of the party and for its external image. The analysis uses interviews conducted with party members who coordinated or were actively involved in the deliberation process.

The Czech Pirate Party is one of the most electorally successful Pirate parties in the world. In this article, we analyse the effect of its intra-party deliberation preceding participation in an executive coalition in the second biggest Czech city, Brno, after the 2018 local election. The study relies on a combination of party open online discussions and discourse from local party elites. We focus on the effects on the coalition formation process, especially the relations with coalition partners, the intra-party effects on the whole party, and the local party organization.

The Danish political party Alternativet is an example of a party based on deliberative values, which quickly gained electoral success after its formation in 2013. It has been represented in the national parliament since 2015 and subsequently in local councils. One of the party’s stated goals is to promote a “new political culture”, which is embedded in six debate principles that stress the importance of listening sincerely to arguments and always providing justifications for ideas. This article analyses how the party has juggled with upholding these ideals whilst also maintaining electoral competitiveness and pursuing influence in legislative assemblies.

Research on intra-party deliberation focuses extensively on its normative aspects and its potential benefits for democratic quality. Little is known about how deliberation functions in practice and the consequences it has. This symposium aims to fill this gap in the literature by bringing together four examples of political parties that use deliberative practices: the Czech Pirate Party, the Danish Alternativet, the Romanian Demos, and the Spanish Workers’ Socialist Party. The symposium maps the use of deliberation and identifies effects such as high quality of internal decision-making process, legitimacy of those running for public office, and electoral performance.

In the midst of the great recession, the Spanish Socialists Worker’s Party (PSOE) lost the Government and experienced a process of instability while trying to reconnect with its electorate. The party’s strategic response was embracing highly inclusive deliberations on both key institutional and policy issues that eventually sparked tensions and division. These internal debates led to the introduction and implementation of other democratic innovations, such as direct votes and consultations that substantially transformed key features of the PSOE’s organizational model. The article discusses the main features and problems of such deliberations and democratic innovations, and their wider consequences.

One of the most important challenges facing Political Science Faculty is the way in which the curriculum engages with, and responds to, the populist tide that has spread across a significant number of countries in recent decades. Over recent years there has been an increased level of research activity that has sought to explain the factors for the rise in populism. Yet less attention has been focused on the way in which the political science curriculum could, or should, respond to this change. This article provides an introductory landscape that sets out these challenges and identifies the contextual background for the three articles which comprise this symposium.

Gender and politics research faces a crossroad in the age of populism. On the one hand, gender and sexuality research is on the way to institutionalisation across a growing number of academic systems in Europe. On the other, gender and sexuality research has become increasingly contested and attacked, and has become the bête noire of the populist and radical right. This contribution contends that gender research is under threat not only because of the gender component, but also because of the scholarly research. There are thus lessons to be drawn for the wider discipline of political science. This article first sketches out the dualization in the institutionalization of gender-related research. It then situates the hostility towards gender and sexuality research in the broader (and growing) opposition to gender + and sexual + equality. It concludes with some preliminary observations about the how this hostility may be part of a wider contestation of academic expertise and scholarly knowledge that is being led, at least in part, by populist forces of all stripes.

Currently, we are facing a challenge in quality citizen participation from populism, which is bringing not renewal of democracy, but corrosion—and potentially its dismantling—from the inside. Many people are being misled by nationalist entrepreneurs who are not committed to democracy or solving the problems which the average person faces, but to their own power and personal egos. Whether the challenges come from the political left or right, democracy needs consistent and quality participation by all of its citizens. As a significant part of the citizenry fails to fight for democracy, factual evidence, and the rights of all of the people, I argue that political scientists must re-examine what we are doing inside and outside of the classroom to foster students’ and communities’ growth in political knowledge, democratic skills, and democratic values and habits. This essay explores three points—content, quality of information, and context—to demonstrate how we can improve teaching and learning in civic education. Collegiate-level educators can ensure that we are positively contributing to the preservation and advancement of our democracies and battling the forces that seek to undermine our democracies.

The first two questions that must be addressed in writing about teaching political behavior in the era of Trump are what do we mean by political behavior and what do we mean by the era of Trump. Although political behavior in its full sense encompasses a very broad subject, in this intervention, I focus primarily on the electoral behavior of ordinary citizens. As for “the era of Trump,” my position is that rise of Trump, along with the Brexit vote, and the rise of European populism are very much of a piece—a modern democratic phenomenon rather than a specifically American one. Rather than requiring a fundamentally new approach in how we think about voters, however, they are all the heightened result of things that have been true for a long time, perhaps catalyzed, but not fundamentally caused, by current events. Moreover, these are things that used to be at the core of our teaching and research about electoral behavior, but have largely fallen off the agenda—and need to be brought back to a central position. This contribution is organized under three major headings: (1) how the content of what we teach about political/electoral behavior might be adjusted in the age of Trump; (2) how teaching about politics more generally might be changed in the age of Trump; (3) and the implications of what we are teaching for democracy, and for our role as both critics of, and propagandists for, liberal democracy.

French political science remains an enigma for the rest of our discipline. Despite its early involvement in establishing the study of politics, today it is relatively small, fraught with internal difficulties and largely unknown in the rest of the world. Notwithstanding these traits, this article argues that, over the last three decades, political science in France has institutionalized, internationalized and deepened its engagement with the public sphere. Indeed, not only are student numbers expanding, but colleagues in our discipline consistently produce original and robust data and publications. Based upon statistics and participatory observation over the last 30 years, this piece’s central claim is that although much could of course be improved, contemporary French political science is now well positioned to make more sustained contributions to our discipline as a whole. Understanding better and highlighting the positive aspects of its trajectory provide ways of striving towards this goal.

The debate on regime change has experienced a U-turn. Attention has shifted from the regime transitions occurred during the so-called third wave of democratization to the signals of an incipient reverse trend. However, the actual import and urgency of the problem remain unclear, due to a growing confusion concerning what a process opposite to democratization is, how many distinct forms it can take, and consequently what the empirical referents of the phenomenon are. Building on the notion of “autocratization”, or regime change towards autocracy, the paper elaborates a framework for the comparative analysis of regime changes opposite to democratization. Specifically, we identify political participation, public contestation and executive limitation as the main dimensions of regime variance, define autocratization accordingly, illustrate and systematize the different regime transitions that fall under this label, and clarify what autocratization is not. The proposed conceptual and analytical framework could support future research on comparative autocratization.

The Making Electoral Democracy Work project conducted a unique survey prior to the election held on 21 December 2017 in exceptional circumstances in Catalonia. In spite of a series of major events in fall 2017, overall election results were similar to those of the previous regional election, held in 2015. In addition to standard demographic, attitudinal, and vote choice questions, the survey included novel questions on identity, support for independence, perceptions of corruption, and acceptance of the result by losers. The data will be particularly useful to scholars seeking to assess the impact of long- and short-term factors on vote choice in such unusual circumstances, the crystallisation of public opinion, and voters’ willingness to accept that their side lost the election.

The paper examines the challenges of teaching about the impact of nuclear weapons on international relations to students who were born after the Cold War and suggests a variety of pedagogical approaches for helping them understand this impact including readings, media, and simulations. We first discuss the value of a multi-methods approach to teaching about nuclear weapons and then discuss resources for these different approaches. For readings, we identify key writing framed as debates that have worked with undergraduates like Waltz and Sagan as well as key articles and literature reviews and historical literature about the actual use of nuclear weapons during World War II. We then discuss different multimedia such as movies and music. Finally, we discuss in class simulations with a focus on Nuclear Diplomacy, providing some examples of student reaction to playing these simulations.