Feminist Comparative Policy: Leading European Political Science into the Future

A lively debate about the contours of contemporary political science in Europe unfolded in the initial issues of European Political Science among a group of scholars who represent the diversity of the study of politics in Europe today. At the core of the discussion was whether political science in Europe is developing into a strong and autonomous discipline. Missing from the debate was any significant treatment of the contributions of feminist scholarship to the state of the discipline in Europe, past, present, or future. Brief remarks from Sapiro and Siim, both experts of gender and politics, do clearly indicate that ‘political research on gender’ (Siim, 2001) is a part of European political science, and constitutes one ‘of the particular strengths of global intellectual leadership already exerted from Europe’ (Sapiro, 2001); however, the general frame of the debate failed to give credit to a new area of European political science, Feminist Comparative Policy (FCP).