Abstract
The article analyses the nature and prospects of political science in a country where a number of historical and cultural constraints have so far hampered a broad presence of the discipline. The article focuses in particular on the last twenty years, a period in which there has been a radical transformation of the Italian university system. After assessing the penetration of political science in recent academic programmes, the article provides an analysis of the internationalization of the products of Italian political science. The final section discusses the recent achievements and the persisting problems that continue to plague this academic discipline in Italy.
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Notes
This article is an abridged version of the report presented to the conference International Political Science: New Theoretical and Regional Perspectives. Concordia University, Montreal, 30 April – 2 May 2008. We thank Marcello Carammia for his assistance, and Giorgio Freddi and Leonardo Morlino for their suggestions.
We consider here the formal classification of academic disciplines adopted by the Italian Ministry of Higher Education. In fact, since 1980, the content and borders of academic subjects in Italy have been established by law. At the moment the number of disciplines is fixed at about 380 ‘academic sectors’. Each professor belongs to a single academic sector. Following this ministerial classification, we counted as political scientists all those belonging to the sector SPS/04 ‘Political Science’. Obviously this choice could be disputable because a few scholars belonging to other sectors are in fact political scientists. This could be the case for sectors such as ‘Political Sociology’, ‘Political Philosophy’, ‘History of Political Thought’. At the same time it should be underlined that there are some scholars belonging to the sector ‘Political Science’ who are not definitively involved in the mainstream of the discipline. However, these differences would be hard to quantify, and in any case not very significant: indeed, about 95 per cent of the people included by the Ministry in the sector ‘political science’ are members of the Italian Political Science Association, and the number of scholars coming from other sectors who are members of the same association is rather limited. Therefore, we opted for counting Italian political scientists following the formal ministerial classification.
At the beginning of 2009, 81 per cent of the tenure positions in political science were within the faculties of political sciences. Two faculties of sociology had a relevant number of political scientists (eight in Trento, four in Napoli Federico II) while the rest of the positions were dispersed in other faculties of Law, Humanities, Economics, Architecture and Sociology.
As a result of a new law approved in 2004, a re-styling of national degree groupings is now in progress, reducing the bachelor's degree groupings to forty-three and the master's degree groupings to ninety-four.
For a detailed presentation and analysis of these data, cf. Capano and Verzichelli (2008).
In order to select these books we adopted two criteria: first, we collected all the titles indicated by Italian political scientists in the 2008 Yearbook of the Italian Political Science Association; secondly, we collected other titles from the catalogues of international publishers present at the ECPR joint sessions of workshops between 2006 and 2008.
As a matter of fact, the low ranking of Italian departments is partially due to the fact that in Italy there are not departments in Political Science strictu sensu, with the one exception of the Department of Political Science at the University of Bologna. Indeed, because their low number and distribution among universities, political scientists usually belong to interdisciplinary departments (with historians, sociologists, lawyers) where they have a minority position. In his very interesting and enlightening piece, Hix does not take into account this structural feature that is very relevant in comparative perspective.
We basically used the list of ‘main political science journals’ selected by Hix (2004), excluding the group of journals with a lower impact score, area-studies journals and some inter-disciplinary journals.
The last articles published in the APSR and written by Italian scholars working in Italy date back to 1988 (Sergio Fabbrini's contribution to a symposium on the return of the state) and 1970 (the classic article ‘Concept misformation in comparative politics’ by Giovanni Sartori).
In the same period covered by Table 2 we have coded thirty-nine articles published in SESP by Italian scholars working in Italy and sixteen by Italian scholars working abroad.
Using the acronyms in Table 2, they are CPS, EJIR, EJPR, EUP, GO, IPSR, ISQ, JCPA, JEPP, JPP, JTP, PP, PC, PT, RIS, WEP.
To provide some figures, the Italians serving as workshop directors at the Joint sessions since 2006 were four (Nicosia), two (Helsinki), two (Rennes) and there will be three Italian workshop directors in Lisbon (2009). It is the same story for the panel chairs at the ECPR general conference: four in Marburg (2003), two in Budapest (2005), five in Pisa (2007).
Only thirteen Italian scholars published three or more articles in the international journals we have taken into consideration, during the ten-year period covered by our data collection.
In early 2009 the Italian government was implementing a number of decisions involving a significant reduction of public funding to the Universities, the introduction of some forms of ‘differentiated grants’ for the most virtuous universities, a new reform of the academic recruitment system and finally the introduction of a possible transformation of single public universities into ‘foundations’.
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Capano, G., Verzichelli, L. Good But Not Enough: Recent Developments of Political Science in Italy. Eur Polit Sci 9, 102–116 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2009.43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2009.43