Search

The relevance and impact of political scientists' professional activities outside of universities has become the focus of public attention, partly due to growing expectations that research should help address society's grand challenges. One type of such activity is policy advising. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding the extent and type of policy advising activities political scientists engage in. This paper addresses this gap by adopting a classification that distinguishes four ideal types of policy advisors representing differing degrees of engagement. We test this classification by calculating a multi-level latent class model to estimate key factors explaining the prevalence of each type based on an original dataset obtained from a survey of political scientists across 39 European countries. Our results challenge the wisdom that political scientists are sitting in an "ivory tower": the vast majority (80%) of political scientists in Europe are active policy advisers, with most of them providing not only expert guidance but also normative assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines shifts in the structures of Ukrainian higher education and research based on historical institutionalism with a focus on the dynamics of change and stability during critical junctures. We show how critical political junctures influence higher education, how institutions of higher education and research have experienced conversion and drift, and how international trends such as quality assurance and the concept of the research university have been implemented in Ukraine. We find that gradual institutional change (conversion) and deliberate non-change (drift) in a political environment characterized by widespread corruption have resulted in a high degree of diversion of both financial and intellectual resources. Due to a lack of political support for the implementation of reforms and rampant political favoritism, organizational forms frequently are mismatched with their core organizational tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the seminal contribution by Gornitzka and Maassen on hybrid steering approaches in higher education as a foundation, this paper offers three main contributions. First of all, an analysis is provided of how the concept of hybrid steering approaches has been used since 2000 in the higher education literature. Second, the paper delivers a theoretical underpinning for the existence of hybrid steering in higher education stemming from institutional theory and policy analysis. Third, the paper deepens and broadens the concept of hybrid steering emphasizing the permanence of hybrids, their potential homogeneity and convergence over time. Furthermore, their relation to multi-level governance arrangements as well as interaction between global scripts and national filters is addressed. In the conclusion, several avenues for future research are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]