Can the study of peace be separated from the study of war? In The Question of Peace in Modern Political Thought, editors Toivo Koivukoski and David Edward Tabachnick attempt to present an interrogation of peace as an independent strand of philosophical inquiry. While Alexander Blanchard suggests that challenging the conflation of the study of war and of peace may not be fully achieved, he welcomes the volume for exploring philosophers not usually associated with the concept of peace and for providing timely reflections on the question of cosmopolitan rights in the light of the current refugee crisis.

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or non-reductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behaviour, individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) non-reductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring non-reductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory.

Political science’ is a ‘vanguard’ field concerned with advancing generic knowledge of political processes, while a wider ‘political scholarship’ utilising eclectic approaches has more modest or varied ambitions. Political science nonetheless necessarily depends upon and is epistemologically comparable with political scholarship. I deploy Boyer's distinctions between discovery, integration, application and renewing the profession to show that these connections are close woven. Two sets of key challenges need to be tackled if contemporary political science is to develop positively. The first is to ditch the current unworkable and restrictive comparative politics approach, in favour of a genuinely global analysis framework. Instead of obsessively looking at data on nation states, we need to seek data completeness on the whole (multi-level) world we have. A second cluster of challenges involves looking far more deeply into political phenomena; reaping the benefits of ‘digital-era’ developments; moving from sample methods to online census methods in organisational analysis; analysing massive transactional databases and real-time political processes (again, instead of depending on surveys); and devising new forms of ‘instrumentation’...

Criticisms of academics, particularly of political scientists, have dominated recent academic and media debates amid claims that the professionalization of the discipline has led to the subject becoming detached from public life. However, Peter John challenges the notion of a long-lost golden era and argues that in fact engagement is improving and has benefited from new digital tools.

Writing in response to Peter John’s defence of political science, Dr Mark Pack argues that research on party funding is not an academic success story but rather illustrates that political scientists simply do not know enough about what is really going in with British politics.

Political science is not more visible or more relevant than before. There is a real problem that must be addressed. Matt Flinders argues that our choice is to continue drifting amid frequent criticisms or seek to proactively steer a course towards illustrating our capacity for social engagement, impact and relevance.

Lewis Baston is a UK political analyst and commentator writing on topics ranging from elections, history and corruption. He tells us how his interest in political science was influenced early by his father’s academic career and their proximity to the University of Southampton library with its endless amount of books in politics and history. He deeply admires David Butler’s election studies for giving narrative excitement to the UK’s most defining elections and explains how these studies continue to inform his approach to politics.

A Model Discipline continues the long-running debate on the role of formal, mathematical models in political science and whether purely theoretical work should be published in top journals. Benjamin Lauderdale finds the larger points in the book compelling despite disagreeing with its arguments on what should actually be demanded of theoretical models.

John Sides has been bringing political science research to current events since he co-founded his political science blog in 2007. Here he discusses the need for political science in journalism and the role that such detailed research can play in adding to a news story, for the benefit of journalist, reader and academic.

Criticisms of academics, particularly of political scientists, have dominated recent academic and media debates amid claims that the professionalization of the discipline has led to the subject becoming detached from public life. However, Peter John challenges the notion of a long-lost golden era and argues that in fact engagement is improving and has benefited from new digital tools.

Writing in response to Peter John’s defence of political science, Mark Pack argues that research on party funding is not an academic success story but rather illustrates that political scientists simply do not know enough about what is really going in with Britain’s political finances.

Political science is not more visible or more relevant than before. There is a real problem that must be addressed. Matt Flinders argues that our choice is to continue drifting amid frequent criticisms or seek to proactively steer a course towards illustrating our capacity for social engagement, impact and relevance.

"Political Science Research Methods: Exploring America at a Crossroads." Cal Clark. World Scientific. October 2013. --- With this textbook, Cal Clark aims to provide clear descriptions of the major statistical techniques used in political and social science research for undergraduate students. This is a rewarding read that flows coherently from concepts recognizable to most schoolchildren up to complex statistical techniques without losing its focus, finds Nicholas Thomason.

"Political Philosophy: A Beginner’s Guide for Students and Politicians." Third Edition. Adam Swift. Polity Press. October 2013. --- This new edition of Adam Swift‘s highly readable introduction to political philosophy includes new material on global justice, feminism, and method in political theory, as well as updated guides to further reading. This book aims to bring the insights of the world′s leading political philosophers to a wide general audience, and employs plenty of examples in an attempt to equip readers to think for themselves about the ideas that shape political life. This is a fluent and well written introductory text for students of political philosophy and it serves as a very good jumping off point for studying the issues involved in more depth, writes Steven Harkins.

Most analysis of political advertising questions how it matches up to the normative standard of providing information to voters. It tends to treat advertising as a core, and often debased, resource for deliberation. However, advertising as a form is less suited to complex information and more to engagement of interest. Despite this, political advertising normally is both constructed and analysed as information carriers. While commercial advertising attracts interest through pleasure and popular discourse, political advertising remains wedded to information. The persuasive strategies of political and commercial advertising are marked as much by dissimilarity as by similarity, the former aiming at plausibility and the latter at pleasure. The article analyses party election broadcasts in the UK over two general elections, according to a scheme that elicits both the informational content and its aesthetic and emotional appeals. Both the analysis design and the underlying rationale may have application beyond the UK. They help answer the quuestion: why does political advertising seem so dull and so bad to so many people?

Thomas Piketty's imposing volume has brought serious economics firmly into the mainstream of public debate on inequality, yet political science has been mostly absent from this debate. This article argues that political science has an essential contribution to make to this debate, and that Piketty's important and powerful book lacks a clear political theory. It develops this argument by first assessing and critiquing the changing nature of political science and its account of contemporary capitalism, and then suggesting how Piketty's thesis can be complemented, extended and challenged by focusing on the ways in which politics and collective action shape the economy and the distribution of income and wealth. Although Capital's principal message is that ‘capital is back’ and that without political interventions active political interventions will continue to grow, a political economy perspective would suggest another rather more fundamental critique: the very economic forces Piketty describes are embedded in institutional arrangements which can only be properly understood as political phenomena. In a sense capital itself – the central concept of the book – is almost meaningless without proper consideration of its political foundations. Even if the fact of capital accumulation may respond to an economic logic...

Though the civil-military relations field has seen a lot of theoretical work in recent years, the field still lacks consistent overarching theories. This dissertation argues that the field requires a new and better theoretical framework. Scholars do not agree about how to define key concepts or how these concepts affect one another. They therefore have a tendency to talk past one another when debating and developing theories of civil-military relations. This dissertation develops a new and more sophisticated theoretical framework for elite civil-military relations. The field’s current theoretical framework was developed by Samuel Huntington in The Soldier and the State. This dissertation uses his framework as a starting point for a larger conceptual analysis, where political and military sociology, international relations, political theory, and military science are used to define the key concepts of civil-military relations. There are two heterogeneous types of civil-military relations that should be studied separately: societal civil-military relations and elite civil-military relations. Political science approaches to civil-military relations, such as this dissertation, typically focus on the latter type. Elite civil-military relations consist of two separate fields of study: civilian control and military effectiveness. Elite civil-military relations function as a system that essentially depends on civilian overall preferences...

This work measures whether MPs are held individually accountable for their actions through a novel analysis of the 1997 and 2010 UK general elections. Previous research suggests that MPs’ behaviour has little effect on their careers; however, developments in the media’s aggressive reporting style, the rise of personality politics and decline in traditional voting patterns indicate that this is an opportune time to examine the effect of political controversies (including scandals) on MPs’ careers. This analysis focuses on three crucial stages that form a chain of accountability: (1) exposure: the media publicises the controversy and a perception is formed; (2) internal sanction: an MP retires before an election; (3) electoral sanction: voters punish MPs at the polls. Data on MP-specific controversies between the 1992 and 1997 and the 2005 and 2010 elections was sourced from The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and their respective Sunday editions. This work also contains an original analysis of the 2009–2010 MP expenses scandal that utilises British Election Study panel survey data to examine how information on MP malfeasance affects voters’ perceptions of MPs. The findings indicate that political controversy is linked to whether an MP retires...

This thesis contributes to the study of the role of information in elections and public policy formation. Its main focus is on information acquisition and voting behaviour. Chapter 1 discusses the motivation of this research and presents a survey of related literature. Chapter 2 focuses on electoral turnout, Chapter 3 on public policy, and Chapter 4 on mass media. Chapter 2 studies the impact of information on electoral turnout. Since incentives to be informed are correlated with other incentives to participate in public life, a model of information acquisition and turnout is introduced to isolate potential instrumental variables and try to establish a causal relation. Results are tested on the 1997 General Election in Britain. It is shown that information, as well as ideology, matters for turnout. It also contributes to explain the systematic correlation of turnout with variables like education and income. Voters' knowledge of candidates and of other political issues is also substantially influenced by mass media. Chapter 3 presents a model that links the distribution of political knowledge with redistributive policies. It argues that voters can have private incentives to be informed about politics and that such incentives are correlated with income. Therefore redistribution will be systematically lower than what the median voter theorem predicts. Moreover...

This dissertation studies political dynasties in democratic countries. Dynasties are common in all professions. However, for the profession of politics, in which succession depends no longer on dynastic succession but on running successful electoral campaigns, understanding how and why political power can be bequeathed is particularly important. Factors such as name recognition (the voter demand side) and political networks (the elite supply side) are potential explanations of the continued presence of dynasties in parliaments. This dissertation studies both the voter demand side and the elite supply side of the phenomenon. I first discuss the related literature on political dynasties, political selection, political quality, and the personal vote. Voting for dynasties can be rational, and the presence of dynastic legislators perfectly legitimate. Political dynasties may thrive in electoral systems that encourage personal voting, such as is used in Belgium. In a first paper, I show that in the Belgian 2010 General Election voters preferred dynastic candidates. Institutional changes may change such (dynastic) elite equilibria. In a second paper, we exploit the constituency-level variation in the franchise extension associated with the Second and Third Reform Acts in Britain. However...