What is the link between scholarship and democracy? What role do academics play in sustaining democratic values? Why should concerns about the hollowing-out of democracy include a focus on the changing governance of higher education? Offering the first comparative analysis of how both democratic and autocratic politicians are seeking to control the research funding landscape, this book reveals a very worrying shift in the relationships between the state and universities: With higher education politically redefined as a mere tool of economic strategy, the space for academic autonomy, intellectual independence and critical thinking is being closed down. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned about democratic governance and the future of higher education. 

Rainer Eisfeld is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Osnabrück University, Germany, and also taught at UCLA as a Visiting Professor. 

Matthew Flinders is Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre and Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Chapter 1: Understanding Scholarly Shifts A Matter of Relevance.- PART I FOUNDATIONS AND CONCEPTS.- Chapter 2: Incentives for Impact: Relevance Regimes Through a Cross-National Perspective.- Chapter 3: Towards a Tyranny of State-Directed Relevance? Co-option, Control and Research Funding.- PART II COUNTRY CASE STUDIES.- Chapter 4: Research in a Racially Structured State: The Role of the U. S. National Science Foundation.- Chapter 5: Australias Politics of Research Funding: Depoliticisation and the Crisis of the Regulatory State.- Chapter 6: The Unplanned and Underfunded Co-Option of Political Science in France.- Chapter 7: Political and Social Forces Shaping Political Science Research and Knowledge Transfer in the Netherlands.- Chapter 8: When Illiberalism Meets Neoliberalism: The State and the Social Sciences in Present Hungary.- Chapter 9: Undermining the Role of Political Science: State-Directed Research Funding in the Visegrad States.- Chapter 10: Political Science or Science in the Service of Politics: Internal and External Co-option in Belarus.- Chapter 11: Social Sciences as an Instrument of National Development? The Case of Qatar.- PART III ANALYSIS AND IMPLICATIONS.- Chapter 12: From Deference and the Politicization of Research Funding to a New Politics of Political Science