PS Matters

This lecture assembles scholars to discuss the extent to which both the East and the West are artificial constructs and shortcuts attempting to simplify the complex reality of contemporary democracy, and how to move beyond this outdated paradigm – bridging the East-West divide.

After half a century of nearly constant expansion and institutionalisation, political science and political scientists are at risk in many countries. This Lecture explores the threats to democracy and academic freedom, exposing the risks to political science in Europe and call for the urgent development of a strategic response.

According to most policy analysts, academics and public commentators, there is a major risk of reversion to authoritarianism in some of the European Union's Eastern member states. However, the status of liberal democracy in post-communist countries is more fragmented and muddled than it would first appear.

There is a widely held view that liberal democracies have experienced an upsurge in nationalism in recent years, and that this is best explained as a form of backlash against social and cultural change. In this lecture, David Miller challenges the underlying Enlightenment narrative used to support this explanation.

In our first-ever hybrid lecture, live streamed from Luiss University, Vivien Schmidt presents a Paper that, using discursive institutionalist analysis, theorises and investigates the varieties of populist anti-system ideas and discursive networks in Europe – with illustrative examples from EU and national level. This lecture was sponsored by the Journal of European Integration.

In this roundtable, leading scholars of the EU engage in a reflexive and prospective dialogue on EU policy developments since the start of the pandemic. We ask them whether the handling of the pandemic challenges existing scholarly understandings of the EU, the heuristics of their own work and could thus influence the research agendas of EU studies.