Requiem for a Dream? Academic Career Opportunities for Young Political Scientists in Germany

We describe the current career system for youngpolitical scientists in Germany academia. The situation is still dominated by the apprenticeship model in which youngPhD graduates undertake a second supervised piece of research. Recently introduced junior professorships are still too few and far between to have a major impact and represent only a half-hearted effort. The current system is still unattractive, unproductive, and uncompetitive. A lecturer tenure-track system would shift insecurity to the beginning of a career and would have built-in incentives and resources for young political scientists to engage in high-quality research

Measuring salience in EU legislative politics

To describe and explain legislative politics in the European Union and to assess its democratic quality we need to measure the political importance (salience) of legislative proposals. The existing literature uses several indicators to measure salience. This article compares measures of salience based on three types of data source (expert interviews, text analysis and media coverage) using a large number of legislative proposals that cover a variety of policy fields and types of proposal. Different measures of salience often do not yield similar values