The demand for learning Design Thinking (DT) as a path towards acquiring 21st-century skills has increased globally in the last decade. Because DT education originated in the Silicon Valley context of the d.school at Stanford, it is important to evaluate how the teaching of the methodology adapts to different cultural contexts.The thesis explores the impact of the socio-cultural context on DT education. DT institutes in Cape Town, South Africa and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were visited to observe their programs and conduct 22 semistructured interviews with local educators regarding their adaption strategies. Grounded theory methodology was used to develop a model of Socio-Cultural Adaptation of Design Thinking Education that maps these strategies onto five dimensions: Planning, Process, People, Place, and Presentation. Based on this model, a list of recommendations is provided to help DT educators and practitioners in designing and delivering culturally inclusive DT education.

This chapter looks for main differences among local government systems as well as similarities among them. This has been done by the authors with the aim to grasp the institutional setting in which mayors have to act. The authors did it by updating and extending existing typologies and indices of local government systems. Nevertheless, an extension was first of all necessary with respect to vertical power relations because previous typologies considering them took neither the local government systems in Eastern and Central Europe nor the changes in the Western part of the continent into account. Furthermore, reflections about typologies are extended to the present one on public administration at the municipal level. All this have been underpinned by statistical data, the recent work on a ‘Local Autonomy Index’ (LAI; see Ladner et al. Measuring Autonomy in 39 Countries (1990–2014), Regional and Federal Studies, 26, 321–357, 2016) and information collected by the partners involved in the survey.

Trump’s foreign policy vision and Trumponomics is deconstructed in an attempt to find a theoretical framework. It is shown that Trump projects a vision without much ideology but arguably a vision with sufficient potential for pragmatism and Realpolitik. Theoretical and conceptual frameworks, including philosophical, political and economic perspectives, and Trump’s mercantilist groundings are articulated. It is argued that Trumponomics contrasts with the ‘transformational diplomacy’ of previous USA administrations. Instead it is immersed in short-sighted ‘transactional diplomacy’, which will have a significant impact on the values of development aid.

If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions.” Following the premise of this quotation attributed to Winston Churchill, varying perceptions of the European crisis by academic economists and their structural homology to economists’ positions in the field of economics are examined. The dataset analysed using specific multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) comprises information on the careers of 480 German-speaking economists and on statements they made concerning crisis-related issues. It can be shown that the main structural differences in the composition and amount of scientific and academic capital held by economists as well as their age and degree of transnationalisation are linked to how they see the crisis: as a national sovereign debt crisis, as a European banking crisis, or as a crisis of European integration and institutions.

Measures of democracy are in high demand. Scientific and public audiences use them to describe political realities and to substantiate causal claims about those realities. This introduction to the thematic issue reviews the history of democracy measurement since the 1950s. It identifies four development phases of the field, which are characterized by three recurrent topics of debate: (1) what is democracy, (2) what is a good measure of democracy, and (3) do our measurements of democracy register real-world developments? As the answers to those questions have been changing over time, the field of democracy measurement has adapted and reached higher levels of theoretical and methodological sophistication. In effect, the challenges facing contemporary social scientists are not only limited to the challenge of constructing a sound index of democracy. Today, they also need a profound understanding of the differences between various measures of democracy and their implications for empirical applications. The introduction outlines how the contributions to this thematic issue help scholars cope with the recurrent issues of conceptualization, measurement, and application, and concludes by identifying avenues for future research.