The political pressures that prevent the public service broadcaster in Montenegro from performing its public role have existed since its establishment, and are reflected in its editorial bias, program quality, level of technological development, and the level of professionalism among its employees. In that context, an important factor to be considered is if and how the funding model of the public service broadcaster in Montenegro contributes to its editorial and financial independence.

Public Service Broadcasters (PSB) in the countries of the Western Balkans – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia – are in crisis. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the state-level public broadcaster BHRT announced that it would stop broadcasting its programs in July 2016 due to the lack of funding, highlighting the deep structural crisis of the PSB system in the country. ¹

New trends in research and data transparency are evidence of the way that technology has influenced the academic world.  Namely, the latest topic on the minds of social scientists has been the so-called DA-RT initiative – short for Data Access and Research Transparency. DA-RT is an attempt to address shortfalls in social science research, including a lack of transparency, a lack of replicable research results, lax methodological tools, and the effects that these shortcomings have on the legitimacy of the discipline itself. Political scientist Andrew Moravcsik has been one of the most prominent advocates of the initiative, suggesting that new technologies necessitate social scientists to actively ensure transparency in their research. He suggests that research transparency is crucial to lending the discipline credibility with peers and the public, and that focusing on replicable results will lead to social science being taken more seriously.

Since Croatia’s accession to the European Union in 2013, the prospects of EU membership of the rest of the Balkans (the ‘Western Balkans’) have been unclear, and some may argue that the process has stalled. Indeed, the EU seems to be suffering from what is often called ‘enlargement fatigue’, with their enthusiasm for enlargement tempered by the economic crisis, worries of individual member states about migration and overburdening of the welfare state, and subpar experiences in previous accession rounds (such as the entry of Bulgaria and Romania before they were strictly ready and the evident problems in adhering to the EU acquis).

Conducting research in the domain of public policy inevitably implies concerns of an ethical nature. Such questions, among others, can relate to research participants, potential conflicts of interest among researchers, authors, or publishers, their approach to data, respect of copyrights, as well as respect for methodological assumptions and duties geared towards quality of research. Equally, public policy research should respect basic ethical principles that are usually applied in other fields of scientific research and market research analysis.