The Bumpy road to relevance: Croatia, Hungary and Lithuania in perspective

ENThe emergence and introduction of political science in Europe’s new democracies was accepted as a natural given within the context of democratisation; however, how far our selected countries have travelled down the road to relevance - a common theme in the well-established political science communities - remains largely unexplored. This gap needs to be bridged for two main reasons: it seems that now the newcomer countries’ academia face similar challenges and constraints to those in the ‘West’; at the same time, however, certain differences concern the institutionalisation of political science, which is still an important, often open question in some of the latecomer political science communities. We shall operationalise relevance on the basis of the ‘Western’ debate on the relevance issue, while we shall argue that certain additional aspects should also be considered when we explore relevance in our cases. We fundamentally accept that ‘Relevance in its narrow sense means addressing issues that lay citizens care about, or should care about…/and/Relevance in its broader sense means bringing new and useful knowledge to a problem that citizens care about’ (Gerring, 2015, p. 36). In concrete terms, this means how the profession relates to multiple publics, be they ‘normal citizens’ listening to a political science commentary, the student body, or decision makers, and the profession appears to be more relevant the more these relationships are widespread and reflexive. It is more difficult to judge relevance in terms of the quality of the knowledge base that the profession creates and provides to such audiences. This chapter will focus on the concrete dimensions of relevance, leaving quality judgements for later research.