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Due to their special nature, the economic-social rights (ESRs) – compared to civil-political rights (CPRs) – entail distinct legislative methodology. This is still a nascent area of knowledge globally. ESRs are increasingly pivotal in the trending populist governments. Also, there is growing practical clarity on the paradigm of indivisibility and interdependence of ESRs and CPRs. However, unlike CPRs, the ESRs continue to be seen as resource-contingent, and therefore not amenable to legislative regulation but to 'progressive realization' through policies. This article foremost contests that, and instead asserts that ESRs too are legalisable and even justiciable, though differently from CPRs. It illustrates this from a lapsed national health bill of the Indian government, drafted and steered by the author. The matrix comprising the right to health and an Indian legislative initiative is used: the right to health as a particularly complex ESR; and India as a representative democracy with rising influence of privatisation and a declining legislature. Secondly, this experience demonstrates that ESRs need alternative concepts, techniques and practices of legislating. The unfolding nature of ESRs and their deep political-economic entrenchment require nimble and intricate negotiations among competing stakeholders. This makes the ESR laws evolving non-linear processes more than finished end-products. Also, process heaviness makes their legislation necessarily complicated and slow. Thirdly, the case study shows, legislating on ESRs invokes a qualitatively different understanding of democracy. Since ESRs essentially involve multiple interest groups and the larger regulatory framework comprising both the legislature and the executive, they implicate innate democratic values. In the contemporary de-democratisation context, their long-drawn legislative process – even a disingenuous one, initiated only for legitimacy – could counter-intuitively bolster deliberative democracy. For all three reasons, the process itself – besides the enacted law, the product – deserves recognition as an underexamined critical success-indicator of legislative methodology, especially for ESRs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poland is a case of a state in which the role of legislative bodies in the political system has been gradually reduced at the various levels – national, regional, and local. Recently, this process has been related to executive aggrandisement observed in Poland, but the roots of this phenomenon can be traced back to the political transformation of this country observed after 1989. At the national level, the deteriorating legislative role of parliament manifests itself in four general processes: (1) The executive power treats the Sejm (lower chamber) as a subordinate institution. This involves formally introducing laws forced by the government in the form of proposals written by members of parliament (MPs) (as a way to shorten the legislative process and limit public consultations required by law); (2) Speeding up of parliamentary works – the Sejm is treated as a voting machine and not as a forum where debates and discussion take place; (3) Public consultations are superficial and the regulatory assessment impact is minimal; (4) The influence of the opposition on legislative processes is reduced to almost zero. Similar processes can be observed at the regional and local levels. The subnational legislative bodies are often under the control of executives. Instances of voting with no or limited discussions (favouring the governing majority) can be sometimes observed during the sessions of local and regional councils. This paper analyses the weakening of the legislative function in Poland at different levels, using a qualitative approach and data from desk research, media analysis, in-depth individual interviews and focus group interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why does legacy news media move from protecting to undermining democracy? Several studies argue that journalism can facilitate and shape democratic backsliding. However, evidence is scarce and, to some extent, limited to the content analysis of news outputs and editorials. The causal mechanisms of an anti-democratic role for the press and how it is operationalised into specific processes of news production remain largely misunderstood. Using 36 semi-structured qualitative interviews and three case studies, this paper analyses journalistic practices and role perceptions in Brazil within a period of constant decline in the quality of democracy (2016-2021). The results show that labour precarity is a crucial driver in journalistic practices capable of damaging democracy, which challenges previous assumptions that media capture is mostly influenced by the political economy of news organisations. This research also indicates that journalists are not homogeneously dominated by the interests of elites and can engage with them on their own terms to advance personal agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the anti-gender movement in Central and Eastern Europe, as a part of the global phenomenon. Based on both the subject literature and the author's own research, it points out its anti-democratic character and its role in de-democratizing change in the region. Although the main features and strategies of the movement are common on the global or European levels, its developments in the CEE region are unique: the state policies incorporate the political agenda of the anti-gender movement or even the actors of the anti-gender movement effectively affect the state policies. As the main actors apply the strategy of staying behind the curtain and steering from the backseat, the main research problem lies in revealing their role, which is why the most successful analyses result from combining local research with the international exchange of findings and comparative analysis. The anti-gender movement in the CEE region has succeeded in two main fields: anti- abortion and anti-LGBT+ policies, and these two fields are taken into account in the paper, while the others are only mentioned. State homophobia is associated with Putin's Russia, especially after February 24, 2022, it is also typical for several countries of the CE region, including European Union member states. Strict anti-abortion law has been developed in Poland, which is why author's research focuses on this aspect. The case study analysis of Ordo Iuris, the Polish flagship of the local anti-gender movement, offers a significant example of a local level of the anti gender network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable and growing body of literature has engaged in a critical reading of the nature and substance of shifts in not only the business practices, but the conditions for the very raison d'ėtre or telic identifiability of universities under current strategic political arrangements. Moving beyond the practices of academic economy in the business of higher education that reduce the intellectual worker to academic labourer enduring multiple forms of alienation, the paper considers what kind of critical setting there may be for reimagining the university in non-nostalgic ways. While the paper takes its cues pre-eminently from the Australian Higher Education Provider sector, it draws on the overlapping political theorising particularly from the N. American critics Wendy Brown and Henry Giroux. From their critiques of neoliberalism, the paper argues that asking what universities are for does not fare well when higher education institutions are subjected to neoliberal rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The administrative systems of universities attest to a shift towards more managerial forms of leadership. This article outlines how strategic management was introduced in Finland in the 2000s and how this led to a significant de-democratisation of the university organisations, despite academic communities' resistance and explicit preference for democratic self-governance. The article illustrates how strategic management informed the reconceptualization of Finnish higher education in legislation (nationally), to de-democratise and to structurally reform the HE field, and in practice (locally), to drive through desired administrative reconfigurations. This anti-democratic transformation is embodied in a new institutional model: foundation universities, which have been presented as the flagships of Finnish higher education policy, are also vehicles of de-democratisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper theorizes the nature of neoliberal social policy, making three substantial contributions. First, processes of "economization" are identified as a central characteristic of neoliberalism: economization constitutes a "bridge" between Foucauldian and (neo-)Marxist accounts of neoliberalism – two perspectives that are in many respects hardly reconcilable – because extending the economic logic to non-economic areas (neoliberalism as a governmental rationality) also potentially increases the profit-making opportunities in previously uncommodified domains (neoliberalism as a capitalist project). Second, the paper links economization processes not only to projects of austerity and welfare retrenchment but also to the more generous "social investment" agenda. Third, the paper highlights the central paradox of neoliberal social policy, whereby higher degrees of economization are associated with more generous social policy: more "social" versions of neoliberalism are those that ironically downplay the social logic, transforming social policies into economic investments. The paper also discusses the problems related to economization in terms of de-democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although middle powers are expected to behave as supporters of international organisations, cooperation, and as promoters of norms and ethics, as well as providers of international public goods, they are not immune to current global 'de-democratisation' processes. The authoritarian turn challenges the patterns of behaviour of middle powers. This article discusses the changes of middlepowermanship engagement by presenting an analysis of middle powers' foreign policy and their narratives thereof. We analyse whether and how middle powers experiencing democracy backsliding have changed their language of political communication and contribution to international relations. We argue that the redefinitions of middle powers' foreign policy remain in line with their broadly understood foreign policy culture, that is that a middle power embedded within consensus-oriented domestic political context is less likely to change its foreign policy than a middle power embedded within conflict-oriented domestic political context. The argument is substantiated by an analysis of political behaviour of Indonesia, representing the former, and Brazil, representing the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]