Search

The paper deals with the conflicts associated with the so-called 'Dieselgate' affair. It explains the interaction of civil society, law firms and political actors which reshapes the legal systems in Europe. Once the federal government in Germany had decided that European car owners should not get any kind of financial compensation, a transnational coalition of consumer organizations and law firms successfully initiated a legal mobilization campaign to counteract the political decision. As a consequence, collective litigation rights were strengthened in Germany and at the European level. Theoretically, the paper refers to the literature on adversarial legalism. Whether this judicialized style of conflict resolution is spreading to Europe ('Eurolegalism') has been a hotly debated topic in political science. Our main argument is that the Dieselgate case is a catalyst event to foster the transformation process towards 'Eurolegalism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judicial and political power are inextricably linked, but at this point in time that link seems more important, more pervasive, and more fragile than ever before. Courts are now under stress in many, even consolidated, democratic countries, becoming one of the most stimulating topics for understanding European politics. Indeed, bringing Courts back to the centre of political analysis is a privileged perspective for understanding how and why democracies change. By highlighting the characteristics of the complex political context of conflicting actors, institutions and political processes, this special issue of European Politics and Society reveals the different dynamics and patterns of the role of Courts in contemporary European politics. This paper presents the phenomenon of 'Courts under stress' and the related research questions. In addition, it introduces the articles that make up this special issue, which are indicative of the maturation of Courts as a crucial topic in European political science. Indeed, each article emphasizes different aspects of their role, bringing out new perspectives and complementary theoretical approaches and methodologies, thereby advancing comparative studies of judicial behaviour and constitutional jurisprudence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No detailed account is necessary for tracing the historical background of several football clubs and national football teams in Europe. While certainly not rejecting the obvious merits in detailing football's history at local and national level, it is of equal importance to identify that specific, but often undefined, element that so elaborately encapsulates the essence of any given football team in a profoundly symbolic manner. While also addressing concepts denoting to political culture, political symbolism, and political identity, this paper examines the often-ignored finer details of a team's crest, also decorating the sport shirt of football players, since the association between football fans and the iconic crest of the club and nation they support unreservedly are an integral part of their distinct football identity. The identity of a football team is effortlessly illustrated on its crest, thus succinctly expressing an abundance of historical and cultural evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contributes a better understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the intertwining of national and religious identity at the individual level in (some) former Communist and socialist European countries. It starts by retracing from a historical perspective the place religion occupied under the regimes, then paying attention to how, once politicized and ethnicized by the hand of a new class of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, religion became "the hallmark of nationhood." This excursus allows us to better contextualize both the theoretical argument and findings. The intertwining of national and religious identity is investigated from two main theoretical sources. The first is the debate within sociology and political science on different ideas of nationhood, while the second consists of socio-psychological models of intergroup relations. The empirical investigation is based on survey data from the European values study (EVS, 2017). A comparative approach is used that includes four countries having Catholic large majorities (Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, and Hungary) and, as a benchmark, Romania, having an Orthodox majority. To test the hypotheses, a structural equation model is specified. The causal model seeks to unravel to what extent different conceptions of nationhood (ethno-religious vs. civil), together with national attachment, influence the intergenerational transmission of religious values and distrust of people of another religion/nationality. The research results are in line with the current European trends pointing in the direction of a stronger overlap between the religious and the national in tailoring collective identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is easy to discern an inherently optimistic outlook in much of the COVID-19 literature. The pandemic perhaps represents an opportunity to redesign the existing parameters of society or even initiate new forms of the social contract. This article seeks to examine to what extent, and in which ways, post-pandemic official political agenda-setting realistically reflects these hopes. Through a comprehensive conceptual framework consisting of ethical, pragmatic, contractual and temporal sets of notions, the article analyses post-pandemic governmental programmes and prime ministers' speeches in six European countries, paying attention to general descriptions of the world, issues of security in the context of multiculturalism, as well as work and resilience. The article's main argument contends that similarities prevail across the countries, implying a functionally shared European polity informed by a general crisis modus, but these similarities do not contain any profound transformative elements with regard to future policies or societal developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, affective polarization (AP) has become an increasingly salient topic in both public discourse and political science. Several different measurement instruments have been developed to empirically capture this phenomenon. With the rising interest that affective polarization is now also enjoying in Europe, it has become of the utmost importance to assess what these different measures capture, and to what extent their application travels to different contexts. In this study we test several AP measures on a student population with various European nationalities. We assess their overlap and effectiveness in mapping AP, to help future research working towards greater empirical clarity, and making informed choices on which kind of measures to include in questionnaires and data collections. The results indicate that, while different items usually produce different point estimates and sometimes different answer patterns, the measurement of affective polarization appears relatively indifferent to the choice of items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent empirical evidence from post-communist Southeast Europe suggests that state capture is no longer limited to opportunities for rent extraction and the economic gain of businesspersons, oligarchs, tycoons, and individual politicians. Rather, it offers political parties a potent means of survival, allowing them to win the next elections and maintain political office. In this article, I look into what kind of research these developments, which have been seen across Southeast Europe, demand. I revisit the three issues that have remained understudied from the perspective of party state capture since the publication of initial research on the topic by O'Dwyer and Grzymała-Busse in the mid-2000s. These are the organization of political parties, the nature of public administration, and the measurement of state capture. I claim that party patronage has become the regional political parties' main activity, with parties being transformed into a pool for the recruitment of future party-loyal public officials tasked to extract public funds. As a consequence, the public administration sees a radical re-politicization, the elimination of professional standards, and the large-scale abuse of public funds. These changes enable a more objective measurement of the cost of state capture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the politics of immigration in destination countries has been a prominent topic of research in comparative political science in Europe, the same does not apply to emigration and to the perspective of peripherical EU countries. This is true even though the flows of people moving from east to west and from south to north pose potentially significant challenges to 'sending countries' in Europe. This article sets up a research agenda aimed at contributing to redress this imbalance. It highlights the need to explore more systematically themes such as (1) the impact of emigration on the political behaviour of both those who stay and those who leave and (2) and how emigration is framed and politicized by relevant societal actors. Ultimately, it draws attention to the fact that a lot of the questions that have been asked about 'entry' (immigration) need to be asked about 'exit' too (emigration). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaft is the property of Transcript Verlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The unauthorized movement of people across national borders, on land and sea, continues to be a matter of life and death for many migrants. In 2022, more than 2,000 people died attempting to cross the Mediterranean (Statista [2023]) and more than 800 died on the US–Mexico border (Villarreal [2022]). In both Europe and the US, migration remains a significant political issue and one that has a strong visual component: it is through visual representations of boats, bodies, and borders that most non-migrants apprehend the phenomenon. Visual surveillance from the air and at crossing points is a key part of state attempts to control migration. With the increasing availability of smartphones and social media platforms, migrants themselves are also visually documenting and sharing their experiences. This chapter focuses on six texts published within 2022 which explore aspects of visual culture in relation to migration. This has several facets: representation of migrants and associated colonial tropes; visual and 'postvisual' surveillance of migrant bodies; and digital self-representation and reclaiming the gaze through creative practices. In line with this, the chapter is divided into three sections: 1. Visual Policing; 2. Visual Narration; 3. Artistic Disruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across North America, Europe and Latin America, multiple sub-state jurisdictions have declared themselves to be migrant "sanctuaries". By adopting sanctuary status, sub-state jurisdictions signal their welcoming attitude towards migrants as well their opposition to the state-level policies that target them for exclusion. In this article, I examine the place of sanctuary in the broader literature of political resistance and opposition in democratic states, and then whether it can be justified all things considered. I locate my examination in the political theory of federalism, to identify an expectation of cooperation – which, it appears, sanctuary jurisdictions are refusing to accept, usually with respect to immigration enforcement efforts. I refer to this form of opposition as "democratic non-cooperation" and identify its key features. I describe a "cooperation continuum", to suggest that non-cooperation takes four main forms – evasion, non-engagement, disruption and obstruction – which I describe both in general terms and in relation to sanctuary practices in particular. Finally, I observe that the form of opposition that sanctuary is, is not limited to sanctuary: that is, there are other cases of this form of opposition in other policy domains, and moreover, not all of the objectives taken by those who deploy this form of opposition are progressive. Ultimately, this article's central contribution is to fleshing out modes of opposition in democratic spaces in general, by examining the morality of sanctuary actions taken around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gender & Language is the property of Equinox Publishing Group and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Grassroots Innovation is a typology of innovation that develops in civil society and is driven by social and ideological concerns. This paper focuses on the strategies of resistance developed by Grassroots movements in response to capture and mainstreaming processes and on the role that ideology has in the evolution of Grassroots Innovation. The study refers to the Arenas of Development framework. The adoption of a flat ontology allows to overcome the dichotomy between niche and regime and the focus on market breakthrough. It permits to consider social and political issues, and interactions between different arenas with different perspectives. The notion of actor-world used to define arenas' focus and boundaries allows to stress the role of ideology in evolutionary pathways. The analysis is based on a case study on Organic in Europe, that leads to consider three different arenas: the Grassroots arena, the EU Common Agricultural Policy arena, and the Global retail/agrifood arena. The arenas approach Organic with different lenses, interact and co-evolve. The recent ideological repositioning of the Grassroots arena brought it to the development of a strategy of resistance based on alliances with other arenas of civil society and on both confrontation and separateness with the other Organic arenas. • The actor-world concept allows to stress the role of ideology in innovation paths. • Arenas engage in multiple directions, beyond the societal function of reference. • Ideological cleavage can be constitutive for Grassroots arenas. • The Grassroots Organic arena engages in the creation of a cultural counter-hegemony. • IFOAM 3.0 strategy fits with a reflexive recognition of existing Organic arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innumeracy, that is, the inability to deal with numbers and provide correct estimates about political issues, is reported to be widespread among the public. Yet, despite the recognition that a conspiracy mindset is an increasingly common phenomenon in Western democracies, this has not been considered as a potential correlate of innumeracy. Using data from an online sample of respondents across 10 European countries, we show that those with a higher propensity to hold a conspiracy worldview tend to overestimate the actual share of the immigrant population living in their own country. This association holds true when accounting for country heterogeneity and other cognitive, affective and socio-demographic factors. Employing a comparative design and refined measurements, the article contributes to our understanding of how a conspiracy mentality may influence perceptions of relevant political facts, questioning basic processes of democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts from the observation that most voters know relatively little about positions and plans of political parties, especially when European Union politics is concerned. One reason for this could be that the main sources for political information, party communication and mass media coverage, provide voters only little concrete information about positions and plans of political parties. We ask how concretely, respectively vaguely, political parties and mass media communicate political positions prior to the 2014 European Parliament elections. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of all European Union–related press releases from 46 national political parties and of all European Union–related articles of 14 national quality newspapers from 7 European countries 12 weeks before the 2014 European Parliament elections. Our analysis shows that press releases as well as media coverage contain more concrete political positions on European Union issues than vague political statements. Other than expected, newspaper coverage provided the public with less concrete information than political actors did. Nevertheless, countries vary with regard to the extent to which party communication or newspaper coverage contain vague statements. We cannot find empirical support that the communication of concrete political positions depends on a party's "extremity" of issue position or on the type of issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]