African politics long revolved around ‘personal rulers’ who either overstayed in office or were quickly ousted by coups. The multiparty reforms of the 1990s were meant to change and regularise the way in which African rulers access and are removed from office. There is, however, a dearth of systematic data through which the evolution and implications of leadership transitions can be examined. We thus built a comprehensive Africa Leadership Change (ALC) dataset covering all 54 countries in the continent from 1960 to 2015. The dataset provides information for all leaders who held power in the region, the modes of access to leadership and several other key election and regime variables. An exploratory analysis illustrates how Africa’s reforms affected the dynamics and timing of leaders’ replacement, as well as their socio-economic implications. A comparison with existing datasets shows that ALC is more suitable for investigating leadership transitions in Africa.

This Note introduces the Heads of Government dataset, which provides summary information about the ideological orientation of heads of government (left, center, or right, with separately provided information about religious orientation) in 33 states in Western Europe, the Americas, and the Asia–Pacific region between 1870 and 2012. The Note also describes some intriguing empirical patterns when it comes to over-time changes in the political prominence of left-wing, centrist, and right-wing parties.

Social media are the great social leveler – or so some commentators would have us believe. Social media put the power of communication directly into the average person’s hands. They also present opportunities for politicians to improve their contacts with the common person – to directly share their messages with and better understand the concerns of constituents. This study explores whether and to what extent the potential for such citizen–politician engagement is fulfilled. Deploying an original dataset of tweets from politicians in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this exploratory study examines the interlocutors with whom politicians engage reciprocally via Twitter. The results show that a large share of politicians’ genuinely reciprocal exchanges includes average citizens. Although there is much room for improvement, this study suggests that Twitter is indeed opening spaces for citizens and policymakers to engage one another on matters of political import.

This paper focuses on the democratic quality of ‘new’ modes of EU governance. Since these innovative governance arrangements are more likely to demonstrate democratic features of a deliberative nature, the criteria for an ideal type of deliberative democracy are developed based on the well-known work of theorists Jürgen Habermas and Iris Marian Young. The empirical test case of the Industrial Emissions Directive and, more specifically, the selection and deliberation processes of its Technical Working Groups are assessed using these criteria. The research reveals how a particular new mode of EU governance works in practice and how it performs from the perspective of deliberative democracy.

In the 20 years after its introduction, the principal-agent model has seen increasing use to study political processes in virtually all policy domains in which the EU is active. Relaxing the strict assumptions that guided the original economic applications has greatly widened the scope for potential applications. This very phenomenon has also created an existential challenge to the model’s contemporary use, which is combining the reductionist aims of the model (from which it derives its strength) with the complex empirical settings to which it is increasingly applied. To facilitate this balancing exercise, we propose a two-step approach to principal-agent analysis, in which the mapping of the principal-agent proof relation is separated from the effective analysis that examines the reasons, modalities and consequences of delegation and control in the EU. In doing so, we show how the principal-agent model can continue to provide new insights at the various stages of the research process.

Massive open online courses (MOOC) have been considered by some observers as a powerful opportunity to improve distant learning. The Université catholique de Louvain was the first Belgian university to deliver a political science MOOC (Louv3x) in French, entitled ‘Discovering political science’ (Découvrir la science politique). This paper seeks to explore the challenges a pedagogical team faces when transforming a ‘traditional’ political science introductory course into a MOOC. The paper also explores how the use of a MOOC might impact the learning outcome within on-campus and worldwide students.

In Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide, Frederic Charles Schaffer makes the case for an interpretivist approach to social science and the concepts used by social scientists. Schaffer adopts an approach to concepts that he calls ‘elucidation’, and the approach involves relating social science concepts to their everyday use by laypersons. The reviewers in this Book Review Symposium – Joe Soss, Douglas C. Dow and Ahmed Khanani – are all sympathetic to the interpretivist approach to social science concepts, but challenge Schaffer on important points. Above all, they focus on three broad questions: how does the researcher gain a critical distance from what she studies, and what does this mean for the concepts she is using? What is the nature of concepts, that is, what is the concept of ‘concept’ we use? And, what is the relationship between concepts and visual signs such as paintings?