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The Research Committee on Political Socialization and Education of the International Political Science Association is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year 2019. The RC was recognized by IPSA in 1979 following a solid and successful pioneering phase in the 1960s and ‘70s. The RC flourished with a full board during 40 years, more than fifty RCPSE panels at IPSA World Congresses, more than thirty RCPSE conferences in thirteen countries, more than 60 RCPSE sponsored books, and its RCPSE journal during 27 years. Research highlights include four international comparative political socialization studies and several political socialization panel studies. For more than thirty different political orientations and behaviours it has been investigated whether political socialization contributes to the explanation of the variance therein. Research focused on eight political socialisation agents and about thirty specific political socializers in these domains. Forty years of research has yielded a lot of insights and an auspicious theory development. Some topics deserve much more attention than they have received so far while new political, economic and social developments require a retest of what was discovered about political socialization in the past and a study of the many new ways, forms and contents of political socialization at the present time and in the future.

Vol. 8, Issue No. 2 of Politics, Culture and Socialization addresses the issue of methods for studies in politics, culture and socialization. Scholars from Belgium and Switserland in their articles present us with their novel methodological approaches. In the first article of this issue, Stéphanie De Munter and Philippe De Vries (University of Antwerp, Belgium) explain how they used Twitter Application Program Interface for investigating election tweets. From their article which is entitled “To Tweet or not to Tweet? An analysis of Twitter use during the 2014 Belgian elections” can be concluded that there is no significant association between the number of tweets and the number of preferential votes. The second article by Peter Rieker shows us how adults used problem-centered interviews for interviewing children. Samir Boureghda, Jurriaan Middelhoff, and Christ’l De Landtsheer (University of Antwerp, Belgium), finally, apply a method for profiling political leaders to the Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi. For the purpose of expending the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC) to include a more potent assessment of narcissistic personality traits, NPI items were infused in the MIDC method as devised by Immelmann (2004). We leave the exciting conclusion from this article, which is entitled “Narcissism and Leadership: What we can learn from a case-study of Silvio Berlusconi” to the readers.