This paper explores the emergence of the term 'polycentricity' in education policy research and compares its use in education to its historical use in its 'parent fields' of political science and economics. We focus on the leading role of Stephen Ball and colleagues in popularising the term in education, inspiring other education scholars to…

Scholarship on the role of professional development opportunities for undergraduate students has highlighted the growing importance of internship programs. Different designs of internship programs have emerged as their numbers proliferate. Internship programs vary on key dimensions including integration of academic content, development of…

Simulation methodology has moved toward using different types of real-world scenario-based learning constructs to improve applied understanding of political science concepts and theories. This type of active learning has become popular in the upper divisions of undergraduate and graduate political science. This reflection addresses the variance in…

As a contribution to the Teaching & Learning Symposium on Comparative Politics organized by APSA, this short article discusses the challenges in Introduction to Comparative Politics classes when comparative political behavior is examined. In the tradition of studying political participation, the discipline has witnessed the development of…

This article reveals the meaning and content of the linguistic and cultural studies integration into social and political science course in the training of future politicians. The article reflects the importance of linguistic and cultural studies for the formation of language competence of students as well as skills of political communication, for…

In this short paper, I reflect on the issue of what the decolonisation of political theory might constitute. I consider what it would mean to deparochialise and decolonise political theory for it is within the discipline of political theory, that a charge of eurocentrism is particularly valid. First, this is because what we teach and study as…

Interdisciplines are specialties that connect ideas, methods, and findings from existing disciplines. Political psychology and psychohistory are interdisciplines which should have much in common, but even where they clearly intersect, their approaches usually diverge. Part of the reason for their dissimilarity lies in what each takes and rejects…

Using an example, this article demonstrates how instructors can make use of popular off-the-shelf board games to model politics. I show how the rules of the popular board game "Battleship" can be manipulated to simulate centralization of power and, more specifically, the differences between the Articles of Confederation and the…

Service-learning has been shown to have many benefits, but it is often difficult to coordinate such projects due to increased outside demands on students' time. One option is to make arrangements for students to fulfill their service obligations during regularly scheduled class time. This article examines whether the decrease in face time…

The authors discuss recent developments in services for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the Nordic countries. They note that all of the countries saw important reforms during the 1990s, regarding both deinstitutionalization and decentralization. However, they posit that the litmus test of the reforms is not what happens during reform…

The traditional way of introducing comparative politics to freshmen, which is through the study of institutions, is contrasted with an alternative approach. An everyday-politics approach compares the daily struggles of global youth--how they cope in times of peace and war, and with issues of wealth and poverty, identity, education and employment,…

In this article we report the results from a new survey of political scientists regarding their evaluations of journals in the political science discipline. Unlike previous research that has focused on data from the United States, we conducted an Internet survey of political scientists in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We…

Unlike other disciplines in the social sciences, there has been relatively little attention paid to the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum. This article reports the results of a representative survey of 200 political science programs in the United States, examining requirements for quantitative methods, research methods,…

What happens when you want to use a most similar case study design for a small-N study, but you cannot find a particular pair of cases where all of the relevant, competing explanations are held constant? It is proposed here that scholars and teachers could employ or teach the "accumulated most-similar/crucial case design." This design…

Strategies for researching policy change in higher education from a political point of view are discussed, based on three assumptions: politics is not only power but also research for solutions to collective problems; explanation of policy change calls for configurative models to enlighten relationships between structural and individual factors;…