Summary: The chapter reports about the political science conditions in Italy in the past twenty years. The first and second sections report about Political science teaching in the Italian universities. The third section presents the Association of the Italian political scientists. The fourth and fifth ones briefly report about the Italian political scientists’ research topics and methods. The last two sections shortly deal with two boiling issues, the international university networks and the graduate job market. The concluding section summarizes the state of the Italian political science as it is undergoing through the bottleneck of the current economic crisis.

Introduction

Today, the Italian political scientists look to their place in the national community of high education and research with pride, confidence and some anxiety as well. On one side, they know their disciplines, political science and its sub-disciplines, were not on the schedule of any student attending social sciences programmes in Italy's universities around sixty years ago while today those disciplines are in the course list of a good number of bachelor and master programmes, and in some of these they enjoy the compulsory course and exam status. Italian political scientists remind themselves also that in the early past century empirical knowledge about politics was the content object of a few books, although of remarkable quality thanks to scientists like Mosca and Michels, while today the catalogues of social science publishers in Italy are regularly fed with political science studies and researches. On the other side, they know that social sciences do not enjoy the good reputation the hard sciences have in the mind of the policy-makers that appropriate resources to the institutions of high education and advanced research. business, and that the sociology disciplines are remarkably stronger in number and reputation than political science within the university departments. Last, there are good reasons for being uneasy with the future of political science as public spending cuts are on the present agenda of the governments to exit from the economic crisis.