The question of democracy—for or against? Is less a dichotomous choice than a matter of sliding scales. All agree that the people ought to have some involvement and virtually nobody believes that all must govern all the time. This Introduction presents a tour d’horizon of the historical debate and presents a brief summary of the different arguments in this Symposium.

Ballot box voting is the main mechanism of political choice in modern liberal democracies. It is also often thought of as the essence of political freedom. Traditional voting has significant virtues. But as a mechanism for exercising political freedom, ballot box voting has serious flaws. The average citizen has almost no chance of affecting the outcome of an electoral process. In part as a result, he or she also has strong incentives to make ill-informed and illogical decisions. “Voting with your feet” is a superior option on both fronts. It is thereby often a superior mechanism of political freedom.

The Great Recession that hit the world in 2008 functioned as a critical juncture, nurturing socioeconomic but also political transformations. Some of the political developments during the crisis have challenged civil, political and social rights, triggering a Great Regression. In the geographical areas that have been hardest hit by the financial crisis, particularly in the European periphery, waves of protest have, however, challenged the austerity policies adopted by national governments under heavy pressure from lending institutions including the European Central Bank, the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund. This has put democracy under stress, but also triggered at some capacity for innovation. While some have considered the multiple crises as proof that governments need more technical expertise, others have blamed an “econocracy” that has taken over political decisions while pretending they are not political. Siding with this second vision, I will suggest in these notes that what we need is more, rather than less participation in democracy. I develop my argument by summarising some recent reflections in the social sciences on the challenges that the financial crisis poses to democracy, and the ways to address those challenges.

Research on the effects of referendums and citizens’ initiatives in the USA and Switzerland have shown that provisions for institutions of direct democracy (referendums and initiatives) are statistically associated with lower inequality, lower budget deficits and higher levels of GDP per capita at the state/canton level. This paper breaks new ground by replicating the American and Swiss research on nationwide referendums in European democracies. The results differ in some respects from the Swiss and American results. While, this paper to a degree corroborates the association between equality and citizens’ initiatives, there is no evidence in support of the proposition that citizen-initiated referendums are correlated with lower public debt. And, contrary to the findings of the earlier research, the paper finds evidence that provisions for referendums lead to lower GDP per capita. Moreover, the analysis cannot point to specific exemplars of countries that showcase the relationships. It remains difficult to point to any specific policy effect of referendums and initiatives in Europe.

The political consequences of climate change have been topics at numerous political science conferences. Contrary to the plurality of discussions at these meetings, it is striking that there is no systematic account of the carbon footprint of political science conferences themselves. Applying a GIS-based approach I estimate the travel induced greenhouse gas emissions of the last six ECPR General Conferences (2013–18). The results show that for the five conferences that took part in Europe the average emissions per attendee were between 0.5–1.3 tons CO2-equivalents. At the 2015 conference in Montreal it were even 1.9–3.4 tons. Compared to estimations based on the latest IPCC reports which call for a reduction of per capita emissions to 2.5 tons by 2030 and even 0.7 tons by 2050 in order to keep on track with the 1.5-degree goal, the travel induced GHG-emissions of ECPR conferences are very high. Yet, further estimations demonstrate that significant emission reductions are possible: by choosing more central conference venues, promoting low-emission landbound means of transportation and introducing online participation for researchers from far away, the carbon footprint could be reduced by 75–90 per cent. The article also gives concrete recommendations how the carbon footprint of conferences could be reduced.

Election studies are an important data pillar in political and social science, as most political research investigations involve secondary use of existing datasets. Researchers depend on high-quality data because data quality determines the accuracy of the conclusions drawn from statistical analyses. We outline data reuse quality criteria pertaining to data accessibility, metadata provision, and data documentation using the FAIR Principles of research data management as a framework (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability). We then investigate the extent to which a selection of election studies fulfils these criteria using studies from Western democracies. Our results reveal that although most election studies are easily accessible and well documented and that the overall level of data processing is satisfactory, some important deficits remain. Further analyses of technical documentation indicate that while a majority of election studies provide the necessary documents, there is still room for improvement.

International relations (IR) as a discipline have had a troubled history in Italy. Indeed, the previous academic literature on the topic has highlighted how the lack of critical mass and influence of Italian IR scholarship have negatively impacted its visibility at the international level (Lucarelli and Menotti in Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica 32(1):32–82, 2002; Friedrichs in European approaches to international relations theory: a house with many mansions, Routledge, London, 2004). However, there are few systematic studies that focus on the scientific publications of Italian scholars in IR. In order to fill this gap, the article presents the results of a study assessing Italian scholars’ impact in peer-reviewed international journals. Specifically, this work aims to make a broader assessment of Italian scholars’ publications from 2011 to 2017 using a database that includes 25 high impact-factor international peer-reviewed journals and five Italian journals. It also aims to identify the gender, geographic origin, affiliation and academic role of Italian scholars, as well as the topic, area, theoretical approach and methodological underpinnings of each article, so as to generate previously unexplored findings on the solidity and impact of Italian IR research both in Italy and abroad.

The electoral franchise has become more universal as restrictions based on criteria such as sex or property have been lifted throughout the process of democratisation. Yet, a broad range of exclusions has persisted to this date, making the suffrage non-universal, even in established democracies. In this article, we present ELECLAW, a new set of indicators that captures the subtle and variegated legal landscape of persisting electoral rights restrictions. We measure the inclusiveness of the right to vote and the right to stand as candidate across four levels and three types of elections for three categories of voters: citizen residents, non-citizen residents, and non-resident citizens. ELECLAW currently covers fifty-one democracies in three different continents (the Americas, Europe, and Oceania) depicting the legal situation in 2015. The article introduces the methodology used for building the indicators so as to make it transparent to the broader research community. To this aim, it successively unpacks the conceptualisation underlying the indicators, explains the measurement by providing specific examples, and discusses the merits of a differentiated and context-driven method of aggregation.

Changes within the higher education sector have started to redefine some aspects of the relationship between the learner and the learning institution. In particular, there is now significantly more emphasis on ‘the student voice’, whether as a form of ‘customer’ feedback or as a vehicle for change in which students become active agents supporting enhanced provision within their learning environments. Institutions have become increasingly cognisant of the need to increase the amount, timeliness and ease with which students can provide feedback. This article will explore the design, implementation and impact of a project to introduce a new student discussion platform, Unitu, into the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading from 2015 to 2016. It finds that this form of online engagement, together with the functionality of the platform, has the potential to encourage student feedback, indicate how representative this feedback is, support the role of student representatives, enable timely staff–student dialogue and enhance the visibility of institutional responses in order to help improve teaching and learning provision.