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Throughout the last decade, the goal of acknowledging and alleviating energy poverty has made its way to the core of energy policies across the world, including the high‐standing SDG7 as a benchmark. While much debate is still devoted to conceptual and empirical clarifications, its measurement through indicators, or the appropriate policies aimed at tackling it, there is widespread acceptance that energy poverty impacts tens of millions of lives across Europe and beyond. More recently, energy poverty has been deepened by a succession of international crises. We argue that the responses currently enacted to address energy poverty, in the context of these overlapping crises, point to a more profound problem that pre‐existed the crises and reflects the current paradigm for household energy access. In this article, we aim to tie some of the loose ends in debates around the right to energy. We address some essential underpinnings of a rights‐based approach to energy, by connecting existing narratives to the broader scope of the social contract, used as a concept which bears implications on the social and economic arrangements emphasized by the fundamental pillars of SDGs. We argue that, because energy markets are highly sensitive to instability and crisis contexts, there is a need to shift the paradigm from energy as a commodity purchased by consumers from markets towards energy as a right of people living in modern political communities, and tailoring energy policies around the right to energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Energy poverty has gained much traction over the last decades, holding both high multidisciplinary conceptual value, but also profound implications from a social policy perspective, being closely linked to the quality of life and well-being. The goal of our study is to evaluate recent measures aimed at tackling energy poverty in Europe by analysing the extent to which they are innovative on technological and governance dimensions. We do so by building an analytical tool which combines evaluation criteria along these two dimensions and by employing it for the analysis of twenty measures aimed at tackling energy poverty that have been designed and employed in ten European countries. These measures were selected with the support of an expert panel. Results: We identify three categories of innovative measures aimed at alleviating energy poverty: (1) measures with high technological scores, (2) measures with high governance scores, and (3) measures with high scores on both axes. The measures in the third category incorporate a variety of actors in sustainable partnerships and implement monitoring tools throughout the process, complementary to incorporating new technologies into the domestic sphere and promoting consumer awareness and consumption pattern transformation. Conclusions: Our findings allow for a better perspective on the shape innovation takes in the context of energy poverty policies. Based on our research, we argue that combining technological innovation and governance innovation has a better chance of generating more articulate and scalable, and potentially successful measures with respect to their purpose of tackling energy poverty, since the drivers of energy poverty rarely pertain to only technology or only governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following six rounds of national parliamentary elections disputed under a closed-list PR system, in 2008 Romania adopted an electoral reform. The new system is triple-layered and combines proportional representation with voting in single-member districts. Its first use reveals discrepancies between the logic of proportional representation, for which it was chosen, and the produced results. By focusing on the system's functioning mechanisms, this article highlights some of the immediate consequences. The most important are the seat allocation procedures and the impact on the dynamics of political competition both at the inter-party and intra-party levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a comparative analysis of the evolution of ethnic parties in the three most important ethnically divided societies in post-communist Europe (not including the former Yugoslav republics): Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia. The starting point of the analysis is the fall of communism, when ethnicity re-emerged as a salient issue in each of these three states and a potential source of conflict. In these contexts, the ethnic parties formed by each of the most important minorities in these states became crucial actors of transition, but also highly relevant at the level of highly volatile party systems. In contrast with the wide majority of the literature, which focuses on single case studies, this exploratory study allowed for a comparative multi-dimensional account of the development and evolution of several ethnic parties, paying attention to the national contexts. Rather than reaching major conclusions that can be generalized for ethnic parties in general, this article provides a good base for further comparative studies on ethnic parties as crucial actors in divided societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complex dynamics of inter-ethnic relations in post-communist countries leads to a puzzle: why do some ethnic minorities mobilise to obtain political representation whereas others do not? We use qualitative comparative analysis to capture complex causal patterns explaining the formation of ethnic parties and to analyse the combined effect of social, economic and political variables. Our article bridges a significant gap in the existing literature that usually focuses on simple explanations for the existence of ethnic parties. The analysis reveals that the political mobilisation of ethnic minorities is explained by institutional elements often underemphasised in existing theories and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]