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In this paper we explore how a Citizens' Assembly project in Auroville – the largest intentional community in the world – sought to prefigure new practices in collective decision-making. A Citizens' Assembly model is a democratic innovation that enacts a deliberative mode of political decision-making by everyday citizens. It has been used by diverse bodies, from social movements to nation-state governments around the world. Auroville's 2021 Citizens' Assembly pilot – concerning a water vision for Auroville – is a unique case study that enables us to make a distinctive contribution to the existing academic scholarship concerning Citizens' Assemblies and prefigurative politics on two grounds. Firstly, Auroville is an intentional community shaped by specific spiritual and self-governance values – an uncommon setting for a Citizens' Assembly that supports us to make specific empirical offerings not seen in the literature on Citizens' Assemblies to date. Secondly, given that Auroville's pilot Citizens' Assembly sought to prefigure the community's foundational ideals of "human unity" and "unending education" in its collective decision-making practice, we connect our analysis to the academic scholarship concerning prefigurative politics. In doing so, we uniquely draw together the scholarship concerning Citizens' Assemblies and the literature concerning prefigurative politics to explore whether such democratic innovations have a transformative effect on the political contexts they are embedded in, which we freshly consider with a focus on local scale, and the role that institutionalisation might have in terms of ensuring the reproduction, and thereby lasting impact of such experiments, or conversely their nullification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concludes a special issue on multispecies relations in Southern Africa, focusing on Namibia, South Africa, and Zambia. The authors emphasize the importance of understanding the historical and political contexts that shape these relationships, including precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial histories. They discuss the significance of including marginalized species in the analysis and explore the cultural aspects of these relationships. The article also examines the politics of nature conservation, including the effects of global capitalist markets and the displacement of indigenous communities. Overall, it provides insights into the complex and evolving nature of multispecies relations in Southern Africa, highlighting the need to address inequalities and include neglected narratives in contemporary discourses. [Extracted from the article]

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit many regions, including the Eastern Mediterranean. It has profoundly affected Cypriot communities and caused political, economic, and social consequences. The profile article aims to investigate the relationship between the pandemic threat on the island and decisions made by the Greek and Turkish Cypriot administrations. What aspects and to what extent has the pandemic affected relations between the two Cypriot communities? How have these changes influenced the bilateral dialogue and political decisions made by the Greek and Turkish Cypriot administrations? Is the pandemic conducive to developing cooperation, or does it extend existing divisions? The profile article argues a relationship between the emergence of the pandemic and the re-isolation of both Cypriot communities, which is one of its consequences, and the initiatives to resolve the Cypriot conflict by sanctioning the existence of two independent states. Such a change is noticeable, especially in the Turkish Cypriots, owing to the presidential election, the government crisis, and interference by Turkish authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in democracy has been suggested as an inherent value of democracy by allowing citizens to participate in political decision-making. Since the 2000s and, more particularly, after the creation of the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention and the Council of Europe's Faro Convention, there has been a call for a participatory approach to heritage management. In 2008 Norway ratified the Faro Convention justifying the existence of statutory participatory practices and community engagements. This paper assesses these practices as they read at the national legal provisions to evaluate how Norway articulates participative processes regarding cultural heritage management. The results indicate that the legal framework long for an active role of inhabitants in local administration and planning and heritage management but prevent them from influencing governance beyond the elections. Accordingly, cultural heritage management is still far from being considered a 'sharing responsibility' between citizens and authorities as the Faro Convention calls for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relation between education, voting and representation, and, in particular, the argument that more highly educated people should have more votes, as they should be better at judging important political decisions. In the past this issue attracted the attention of great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Newman and Mill. In the UK there is also a practical precedent, rarely recalled today, where for centuries university graduates had their own representatives in Parliament. There are also some interesting contemporary arguments on the topic put forward in favour of an epistocracy (as some call it) by social scientists, but not educators. It seems that most educators would not now dare to suggest that the more highly educated might be given more votes, largely on the grounds of equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of AI technology into resort-to-force decision making would give machines influence over decisions determining the life or death of countless people. Despite this prospective impact on entire societies, many AI developers have only a rudimentary ethical understanding of their AI. Moreover, if AI development is ethically unreflective, minor flaws can spiral into harmful machine-made decisions. So how can we ensure responsible military AI development, especially in the context of AI-supported decision making on the resort to force? We argue that harmful 'path dependencies' of AI systems can only be avoided by providing developers with clear training on ethical and developmental issues arising during the AI lifecycle. Based on lessons from applied human systems exploration, we introduce an educational regime: '10 pillars of responsible AI development.' Each pillar is broken down into detailed questions, helping developers reflect on their decisions throughout the AI lifecycle. This article is thereby situated between political science, normative theory, and computer science and contributes to this collection's treatment of the risks of integrating AI technology into resort-to-force decision making by focusing on the AI development process itself, particularly on the role of developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind" by Judith Butler explores the concept of interdependency and vulnerability in the era of the Anthropocene. The book emphasizes the ethical reflection that should inform political decisions and actions, promoting equality and recognizing the vulnerabilities and desires for revenge in others. Butler does not provide specific solutions but highlights the importance of understanding and negotiating our dependency on others. The ultimate goal is to establish an egalitarian imaginary that extends the equal claim to a livable life to all, transcending divisions and embracing ambivalence. The text also discusses the psychological and moral complexities of vulnerability, self-protection, and hatred, and suggests that the force of nonviolence lies in the desire for the other's desire to live. The author concludes by urging readers to have faith in hope and to work towards a future that values life and promotes collective well-being. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses two books, "Unmaking the bomb: environmental cleanup and the politics of impossibility" by Shannon Cram and "Unparalleled catastrophe: life and death in the third nuclear age" by Rhys Crilley, which examine the impacts of the nuclear age on health, the environment, social and economic justice, and human security. Crilley argues that we are currently in the third nuclear age, characterized by increased danger due to the abandonment of arms control, massive spending on new nuclear weapon systems, and the questioning of commitments to remaining nuclear weapons-free. Cram's book focuses on the devastating health and environmental impacts of nuclear weapons production, particularly at sites like Hanford. Both authors emphasize the need for a more informed and engaged citizenry to eliminate nuclear weapons and address the interconnected issues of the nuclear age. [Extracted from the article]

Managing scarce water resources has been central to the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB) regional development story. The article puts water into a broader context of key drivers in development in the MDB. In addition to water markets and water policy, key issues include climate change, the changing relative resilience and viability of urban centres, the role of government, the impact of technological change, underlying exogenously set commodity prices and exchange rates. All these factors have had a significant impact on development, some with little discussion but others, such as water, have been contested and bitterly fought over. The article also examines these drivers and how they might affect future development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and practitioners endorse public participation in the decision-making process as enhancing the health of democracy, justice, and effectiveness of policy outcomes. To sustain or even increase the number of participants in the long run, it is crucial to start raising a new politically active generation already during their youth and even early adolescence. This article presents School Forums as an extracurricular participatory method involving early adolescents (11–15 years old) in decision-making concerning their school and municipality. We made a field experiment on a sample of 480 Czech secondary school pupils to examine the potential of School Forums to enhance prerequisites for youth's political engagement. Our results revealed a positive effect of School Forum attendance on the sense of internal political efficacy and interest in local affairs. The results suggest a high potential of participative extracurricular programmes in raising a new generation of politically active citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fake research produces results that are invalid from the start. I take such research to be characterised by three jointly sufficient features. It is severely methodologically defective, and the relevant defects support certain nonepistemic (social, political, economic) interests and objectives, while the relevant objectives typically concern the interference with attempts at political regulation. I deal with two kinds of claimed fake research. One is agnotological ploys in which scientific dissent is created by interested parties from industry or politics in order to support their own partisan goals. Another one is the populist antiscience movement that suspects fake research in the scientific mainstream. I suggest three remedies to reduce or eliminate the impact of fake research: disclosing fallacies, improving the understanding of scientific methods, and distinguishing more clearly between science and politics in political decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes moral sense of the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. It does so by applying classical just war thinking. The classical bellum justum, it argues, can make a distinctive contribution toward evaluating the decision to leave Afghanistan, a decision that continues to be discussed controversially. The article points out that classical just war thinking did not introduce distinct moral categories beyond jus ad bellum, such as jus in bello or jus post bellum. Exactly because classical just war thinking was meant to apply to all phases of a war, the article goes on to argue, it provides important lessons for just war as a tool of statecraft that seeks to inform political decision-making. Applying the wisdom that is encapsulated in the classical bellum justum to the withdrawal decision in Afghanistan, the article, although it is critical of its execution, generally sides with the Biden administration's course of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on exploring equity among regions regarding public service delivery. An analytical framework is established to measure the level of public service delivery considering input (resources) and output (results), and an equity analysis is conducted from temporal and spatial perspectives. The results show that there are disparities in the level of public service delivery among regions in China (mainly due to inequality in resources), and within-region inequality has a greater influence on overall regional inequality than between-region inequality. The proposed analytical framework can help governments make better decisions about public service delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to examine the role of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) in peacebuilding in the Great Lakes Region (GLR) by focusing on its conflict transformation approach to peacebuilding. The region is made up of a complex network of political and economic resources that have had tremendous effects on peace and security. The region has experienced many atrocities, caused by heavy violations of human rights and the violation of the state sovereignty principle. This has opened avenues for illegal armed groups from within and outside the region, encouraged illegal mining, and led to conflicts becoming intractable in nature. The GLR has also registered intercommunal conflicts in Uganda and South Sudan which continue to compromise peace and security, affecting the safety and livelihoods of people. These intractable intercommunal conflicts do not affect the GLR alone but also the entire continent. This has led scholars, non-governmental organisations, international organisations, and intergovernmental organisations such as the ICGLR to seek to end the conflict in the region. This article finds that conflict persists because the ICGLR's structures are ineffective. Furthermore, despite the strides made in areas such as the illegal exploitation of mineral resources, human rights violations, sexual gender-based violence, and democracy, there are factors that hamper progress, including understaffing and unqualified personnel, coupled with a lack of political consensus in decision making and implementation, which has led to malfunctioning in the ICGLR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the reasons for citizens' refusal to participate in public deliberation through the Georgian mechanism of the General Assembly of a Settlement (GAofS) in the remote communities of Georgia. This paper draws on the existing academic literature on effective deliberation processes and reasons behind the public's disengagement from them to explain Georgian public's withdrawal from the deliberation processes. By applying the analytical framework on effective deliberation and logic of non-participation, this article uses the case study approach and qualitative research methods to show how façade deliberation processes cause public disenchantment with engagement in local decision-making processes and reinforce the public image of civic participation mechanisms as pointless efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the US-China great power competition intensifies, public opinion polling may help gauge internal drivers of foreign policy decision-making. Using Pew Research Center data, the authors analyzed how American and Chinese respondents viewed their own and each other's countries between 2008–2016. They further examined how American attitudes towards China varied by political affiliation between 2008–2019. Both Americans and the Chinese displayed ingroup bias (i.e. rating their own country more positively than the other) and viewed China as a challenger to US hegemony. However, while the Chinese exhibited higher levels of ingroup bias overall, there was no evidence of increasing bias over time. Meanwhile, Americans showed increasing ingroup bias, primarily due to their souring evaluations of China, a tendency that was strongest among Republicans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments even in consolidated democracies have adopted drastic measures, temporarily constraining individual freedoms and expanding executive political decision making. In light of this trade-off between public health measures and democratic norms, it becomes crucial to assess the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on public support for democratic versus authoritarian regimes. Following insights of the affective intelligence theory, emotions, and not only rational considerations, are key to understanding behavioural and attitudinal responses to crises. In the article it is argued that the pandemic threat of COVID-19 affects regime preferences by evoking distinct negative emotions, in particular anger and fear. Using original survey data in six European countries, it is shown that COVID-19-induced anger and fear have divergent effects on regime preferences. While democratic regime preference has declined for angry respondents, there is also a message of hope: fearful respondents display increased support for a democratic regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism and technocracy represent a challenge to pluralist party democracies. The first promotes the rule by 'the people', while the second demands the rule by independent experts. The literature on populism and technocracy as challenges to party democracy is burgeoning. Less is known about citizens' attitudes towards the ideas that underpin both populism and technocracy. In this article these opinions are explored in a survey conducted in Spain using a comprehensive battery of items tapping into technocracy and populism. It is found that populist attitudes correlate with two dimensions of technocracy: anti-politics and pro-expertise sentiments. A latent-class analysis shows that the largest sample group simultaneously endorses rule by the people and the enrolment of experts in political decision making. In the article this group is named technopopulists. The article challenges extant views of populism and technocracy as separate alternatives and spurs works on voter demand for the involvement of experts in politics. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2027116. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short piece engages contributions to Renée T. White and Karen A. Ritzenhoff's Afrofuturism in Black Panther (2021) to argue that the film outlines some ingredients needed to cultivate universal first-class citizenship. The inclusion of council-structured political decision-making modeled in Wakanda combines pre- and post-1960s modes of progressive political organizing that, as Dolita Cathcart argues, build on ideas of both historical Black reformers and revolutionaries. Still, absent Neal Curtis's insistence, through the figure of Erik Killmonger, on the indispensability of continued radical dissent, these political arrangements could easily collapse into a progressive conservatism in which would-be queen Nakia's argument for diasporic relational responsibility is easily dismissed. Commitment to bringing the radical outside in therefore proves central to imagining how a polity whose wellbeing was premised on isolationism can enter a Global Southern anti-imperial and anti-enslavement internationalism, centering diasporic imaginings of Blackness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how childcare vouchers were introduced in the context of the Swedish welfare state by examining vital political decisions from the prohibition of publicly funded private preschools in 1984 and onwards. Basing our argument on theories of political institutions and historical institutionalism, we argue that this remarkable shift in preschool policy was due to a set of specific historical premises that included an expanding preschool sector and incremental reforms that did not abolish public preschools, but merely complemented them with private preschools. Instead of perceiving childcare vouchers as the mere results of marketization ideology, we interpret this reform as the result of a sequence of decisions, institutional layering, vested interests, and positive feedback mechanisms, where the expansion of the early care and education sector played a significant role. In this context, we argue that the marketization may be seen as a successful support of the rapidly growing sector of publicly funded preschools in Sweden. Although the Social Democrats lost the battle of marketization, they certainly won the war on publicly funded preschools for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flourishing debate on the relationship between acceleration and governing is dominated by a view which identifies the increasing pace of the world as an exogenous reality of political decision-making. At the same time, interpretive perspectives have highlighted that governing is not only confronted with but actively involved in the construction of time. This paper argues that these two largely disconnected debates actually deal with two sides of the same coin. Building on a twofold theorization of time derived from Luhmannian systems theory, it is shown that the perceived speed of the world is contingent upon how governing relates to pasts and futures. More specifically, the paper discerns four temporal semantics of decision-making – planning, prevention, resilience and experimentation – and decodes how they establish more or less accelerated presents. The paper thus draws atheoretically and empirically more nuanced picture of the mutual constitution between time and (democratic) governing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion is understudied as a variable in nuclear-proliferation and nuclear-deterrence policies. This article issues a call to scholars, activists, and practitioners to improve knowledge and strategic intelligence about the connection between religion and nuclear weapons. Such a research program is necessary to fill gaps in the scholarly literature on nuclear norms and nuclear decision making. It is also policy relevant. This is especially true in the Middle East, where all states profess to want a nuclear-weapon-free region and where religion is often used to legitimize political authority and decision making. Efforts to create in the Middle East a zone free of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (a Middle East Zone) are currently hamstrung by conventional diplomatic concerns over sequencing, monitoring, and the security dilemma. This article posits that interfaith dialogue—one possible manifestation of a reinvigorated research program on religion and nuclear weapons—could both enhance our knowledge of how religious belief influences nuclear decision making and stimulate progress on achieving a Middle East Zone by reframing discourse on such a zone in terms of Abrahamic identity. The proposition is deductive and rooted in constructivist theories of change. It is not idealistic: a constructivist approach and a role for religion does not necessarily indicate pacifism, nor does it require unanimous buy-in for a religious normative order to prevail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies the demoi-cratic theory to EU energy governance and policy, and explores whether the demoi-cratic criteria of equal legislative powers between statespeople and citizens and the supremacy of multilateral law through participatory jurisprudence apply to EU energy affairs. More specifically, it zooms in on democratic pathogenies deriving from lack of citizen engagement in energy policy-making at national, transnational and supranational levels; the impact of the lack of citizen participation on the output legitimacy of energy decisions; and democratic externalities and their consequences in the energy realm. It concludes that energy policy-making fulfils neither of the demoi-cratic criteria. This is due to the top-down mode of EU energy policy, and the dual EU failure to benefit from citizen engagement in the design and implementation of energy policy, and to recognize and deal with the democratic externalities emanating from the heightened democratic interdependence within the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moreover, in addition to the number of published petitions on a certain topic, an indicator of the interest and importance of the problem presented in a petition may be the number of votes in favor garnered by the petitions. The following information was recorded for each e-petition: region; petition level (local, regional, federal); the citation of the petition at the ROI website; the signature collection deadline; the petition author's code; the number of votes cast in favor of the petition; the number of votes cast against the petition; the petition title; and its text. The Electronic Petitions of the Russian Social Initiative Portal (2013-2017): What the Trend in Social Priorities Says The topics of the 10 percent of petitions that received the most voting support In order for an ROI portal petition to be considered, it must collect 100,000 votes; most petitions, however, do not receive that amount of signatures. [Extracted from the article]

The article claims that the manifestly without reasonable foundation (MWRF) jurisprudence of the United Kingdom Supreme Court (UKSC) shows judicial deferential attitude to political decision making and judicial readiness to intervene where policies impact individuals. It argues on the appropriateness of MWRF doctrine to scrutinizing government action affecting protected rights including in the leaseholders rights to enfranchise cases James V. United Kingdom and Stec v. Uniked Kingdom.

The right to the city theory was born from a desire to challenge power and decision-making processes in the urban space that privilege certain groups over others. Growing neoliberalist ideals have threatened this concept by favoring economic exclusivity over residents' needs, but as the world becomes more densely urban, questions of rights and access for both human and nonhuman residents reappear. Using real-world examples, I answer the questions posed by modern right to the city theorists: (1) whose right, (2) what right, and (3) which city? In the process, I show how similar barriers faced by othered human and nonhuman urban residents lend themselves to developing a multispecies extension of the theory. This extension aims to open the rights to: access the urban space, to self-identify one's needs, and to have active consideration in social and political decision-making processes for the urban residents who currently lack them, human and nonhuman alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the Zionist movement's early days, it mobilised scientific and technical knowledge in order to implement its goals. Economists were also recruited for this mission, but not as decision-makers; they agreed with the political decision makers' goals and policies and were involved in their implementation. The economists' secondary status lasted up until the 1980s, when they helped to overcome the hyper-inflation crisis. They were mobilised to back the politicians, who implemented an unusual heterodox massive stabilisation plan. Its success became the economists' springboard for massive political-economic influence. It was only after the program's success, that their economic position gradually became central. Their position became dominant in the 1990s, after the politicians implemented privatisation, which opened up the neoliberal era in Israeli socio-economic policy. The political echelon accepted the neoliberal ideology as framework, while the economists actually applied it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In periods of uncertainty or during critical junctures, scientific advice may be in high demand to provide legitimacy for political decision makers. This article outlines the evolution of expert forms of knowledge and the way those have shaped Baltic Sea region building, including its consultative and collaborative frameworks of agenda setting. The selected cases include HELCOM, the Copenhagen School of international relations and the Baltic Science Network. This article offers an explanation of how these epistemic collectives have produced consensual knowledge, generated legitimacy, and engendered agency of scientific research findings and knowledge-based decisions in national, transnational, and macro-regional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Turkey, the number of women in the Grand National Assembly has drastically increased from 24 in 2002 to 104 as of the June election of 2018. To date, the explanations for this rise and women's emergence and placement on candidate lists have been inadequate. This study examines these dynamics more closely to attend to the strategic decision-making by the AKP's central party leadership. Using an original dataset, I analyse placement patterns for AKP women candidates across the country from November 2002 to June 2018. The results show that the consequences of dominant party status along with other strategic considerations have allowed the AKP to field women candidates in ways that parties preceding them could not. Their strategic placement of women as candidates is shown to have facilitated substantive gains but also highlights important limitations to the advancement of women's access to national political power in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on the importance of timing, this research highlights the effects of decisions made during the years 2005–2017 that placed the Kurdish political elite on the trajectory towards an independence referendum. The focus of this paper is the struggle between the two major political parties, the implications from the War on the Islamic State (IS), and the change in access to oil revenue. It can be determined that the intersection of these processes over time resulted in the Iraqi Kurdistan independence referendum. Timing has been an aspect of referenda and secessionist movements that has not been given enough acknowledgement and consideration. The opportunities presented to the Kurdish political elite in 2017 were not present in the previous years and the independence referendum's timing was due to the interaction and intersection of these processes. The purpose of this research is to determine why the Kurdish political elite decided upon an independence referendum in 2017, rather than at any other point after the U.S. intervention in Iraq. As more groups within states across the world are aspiring towards self-determination and secessionist movements are arising, the Kurdish question is being renewed and has become an important aspect of politics in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a post-structuralist framework, this article seeks to analyse the ways in which English early years curriculum policy has led to different constructions of young children. Although policy is often presented as being logical and factual, policy making can also be seen as a value-laden process in which meanings are socially constructed and can, therefore be deconstructed and reconstructed. In this article, I analyse the different interests that are served by curriculum policy, the intentions of policy makers and how policy levers and drivers might combine to produce potentially conflicting images of the child. I conclude that these conflicting images create tensions between policy makers' pursuit of cost efficiency and the rights of young children in early years settings. However, post-structural analysis suggests that these are political decisions and things do not have to be this way. Those working in early years can challenge policy makers' constructions of young children, to adopt a more ethical rights-based approach to early education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do donor states reward recipient states for signaling a commitment to expanding the role of women in political decision making? Previous studies show that women are associated with positive outcomes for peace duration and governance. We theorize that donor states reward recipient states that make a commitment to women's empowerment in political decision making and test our hypotheses using data on the distribution of US foreign aid to recipient states. We find that recipient states that adopt legislative quotas and include more women in their parliaments receive more aid, although a female head of government is not associated with more aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Madame de Villedieu's Annales galantes (1670)—a collection of eighteen short narratives—helped to inaugurate a genre of fiction known as the nouvelle historique, a concise story that discloses the sentimental conflicts lying behind a specific event or person from French history. This "unmasking" of history often shows the importance of women to historical action, while rejecting the idealism and love discourse of the earlier novelistic tradition. With the Annales galantes, however, Villedieu is less interested in removing masks than in celebrating their use, especially as instruments of hypocrisy and marital infidelity. Drawing upon the cultural meanings of masks in Louis XIV's France, Villedieu creates tales that demonstrate the power of keeping on the mask—that is, maintaining one's autonomy by assuming a new persona. She also uses her anonymity to fashion an authorial mask that justifies her characters' disguises and invites readers to imitate their deceptions. Villedieu ultimately employs the nouvelle historique with great creativity while avoiding historical determinism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs the poliheuristic theory of decision-making (PHT) to analyse German decisions to participate in, or abstain from, multinational military operations. PHT represents one of the leading theoretical efforts at bridging the cognitive-rationalist divide in foreign policy analysis. The theory posits a two-stage model of foreign policy-making: in the first stage, actors rely on a non-compensatory strategy as a cognitive shortcut to eliminate unacceptable alternatives and to reduce the choice set. In the second stage, actors switch to a compensatory mode of information-processing and select the alternative which maximises expected utility. While there is broad agreement that the non-compensatory dimension at the first stage of PHT concerns the domestic repercussions of foreign policy, it is less clear how this 'domestic politics' dimension should be operationalised. This article contributes to this debate by specifying the operationalisation of the non-compenstaory principle in the context of coalition foreign policy making in parliamentary democracies. Specifically, it suggests that the non-compensatory dimension in coalition foreign policy consists of the expected impact of foreign policy on coalition survival. Empirically, the article argues that PHT sheds important new light on arguably some of the most controversial military deployment decisions (Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, Libya) of post-unification Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on 1862 International Exhibition held in London, England and fairs could be exploited as strategic settings for representing their industrial, commercial, and cultural supremacy. It mentions provisional character that offered extraordinary opportunities for host countries to build original and magnificent buildings intended to exhibit a synthesis of the nation's development. It also mentions course of political decisions and their historical development.

This article examines the crisis-ridden path from planned to market economy in Eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By analyzing the history of the highly debated Treuhandanstalt—the so-called Trust Agency and the main actor of the economic reconstruction—the discussion sheds light on the political modes of decision making in the East and especially its long-term effects. The focus is on the negotiations carried out at the Central Round Table in early 1990, the first free elections in March 1990, the deliberations between Federal and East German governments in summer 1990, the discrete bargaining strategy of the Treuhand in 1991–1992, and the massive public debates and scandals connected to the Treuhand in 1993–1994. The organization is interpreted as an exceptional regime of economic experts that managed the socioeconomic “shock” of economic reconstruction as a kind of “shield of protection” for the political system, but at the same time it was unable to buffer the dramatic sociocultural consequences of closures and mass unemployment: Recent debates and election campaigns in 2019 highlight the fact that the Treuhand is still present as a negative myth or “bad bank” of East German memory culture open for populist campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the crisis-ridden path from planned to market economy in Eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By analyzing the history of the highly debated Treuhandanstalt—the so-called Trust Agency and the main actor of the economic reconstruction—the discussion sheds light on the political modes of decision making in the East and especially its long-term effects. The focus is on the negotiations carried out at the Central Round Table in early 1990, the first free elections in March 1990, the deliberations between Federal and East German governments in summer 1990, the discrete bargaining strategy of the Treuhand in 1991‒1992, and the massive public debates and scandals connected to the Treuhand in 1993‒1994. The organization is interpreted as an exceptional regime of economic experts that managed the socioeconomic "shock" of economic reconstruction as a kind of "shield of protection" for the political system, but at the same time it was unable to buffer the dramatic sociocultural consequences of closures and mass unemployment: Recent debates and election campaigns in 2019 highlight the fact that the Treuhand is still present as a negative myth or "bad bank" of East German memory culture open for populist campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religious dimension is increasingly at the centre of political claims from individual citizens and collective actors and puts pressure on liberal democracies asserting the separation of politics and religion. The liberal principle of neutrality allows tracing ontological and normative differences between what is and ought to be properly political and religious. Politics would have the potentiality not-to-be religious and keep itself in a space of indifference to what religious. Better understanding the implications of such political theory in which the political man is called to actuate a (pure) politics raises ontological questions. Mainly, does (pure) politics provide a neutral third position in respect to religion where politics is not subject to any exclusive-inclusive logic such as in the exception? This question is addressed through the notion of potentiality as respectively treated by Agamben and Derrida and placed in the context of the political decision in Schmitt's theory of sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest groups are important intermediary organisations that function as a transmission belt between societal interests and political decision-makers. However, while some interest groups survive over decades, others only last a few years. This article argues that the survival of interest groups depends on their ability to mobilise resources which is crucially affected by interest group type and the public salience of an interest group's policy domain. The theoretical expectations are tested based on a novel dataset mapping the survival of 1699 interest groups registered at the German Bundestag between 1974 and 2012. Using event history analysis, it is shown that interest group type and public salience indeed affect whether interest groups survive. Sectional groups last significantly longer than cause groups, and interest group survival increases with the public salience of their policy area. The results have major implications for our understanding of interest groups and political representation in contemporary democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Galeotti argues that we can gain a better understanding of political decision making by drawing upon the notion of self-deception and offers a rich articulation of what self-deception is, and how and why it exerts influence upon political decision making, especially in high-stakes contexts where the decision seems to be counter to rationality. But such contexts are also explicable from a different perspective, with different theoretical resources. In recent years the field of 'virtue epistemology' has discussed a wide range of epistemic vices – traits of character, and cognitive strategies, that stand in the way of gaining knowledge. This raises questions about how an explanation of political decision making in terms of self-deception relates to an explanation in terms of epistemic vice. Because the notion of epistemic vice applies to self-deception and to other cognitive deficiencies, it is argued that the broader notion of epistemic vice might be explanatorily richer, and more useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class-based analysis has become one of the key academic approaches to examining political behaviour in South Africa. As its usefulness in the context of high inequality is contested, this article seeks to contribute to the debates on its analytical potential based on interviews and group discussions with womxn1 studying at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing on Foucauldian theorising on power of norms and discourses, and theories of intersectionality, this paper shows that the expectations attached to middle classness and eliteness in South Africa contribute to the maintaining of the existing systems of power by seeking to discipline young educated womxn away from becoming political change-makers. The effectiveness of this class-based disciplinary power is in its embeddedness in other systems of domination, including gender, race and age. Thus, only within an intersectional critical framework, does the category offer a useful lens for understanding how power impacts South African politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Curato and Fossati's concept of authoritarian innovations encourages scholars to look beyond the nominal categories in which we may classify political regimes and to focus instead on how political decisions constrain or open up the space for mass political participation. In this commentary, I amplify the editors' productive distinction between regimes and practices, outline the methodological implications of a meso-level approach to authoritarianism, and highlight how a practice-oriented approach complements a range of critical approaches to the supposed emancipatory potential of new media, economic growth, and other social and political phenomena. I conclude by stepping back from these applications of Curato and Fossati's framework to consider whether any measures that restricts public participation is inherently anti-democratic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explores the significant role of the relationship between intelligence analysts and policymakers in the success of institutions, government, and law enforcement. Topics discussed include the way intelligence may help improve the quality of policy decision making, the intelligence requirements of the European and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Councils, and the model of intelligence analysis which involves situational awareness, explanation, estimates, and strategic notice.

For the first time in history, on March 17, 2020, the European Union closed all its external borders in an attempt to contain the spreading of the coronavirus 2019, COVID-19. Throughout two past months, governments around the world have implemented massive travel restrictions and border control to mitigate the outbreak of this global pandemic. However, the precise effects of travel restrictions on the outbreak dynamics of COVID-19 remain unknown. Here we combine a global network mobility model with a local epidemiology model to simulate and predict the outbreak dynamics and outbreak control of COVID-19 across Europe. We correlate our mobility model to passenger air travel statistics and calibrate our epidemiology model using the number of reported COVID-19 cases for each country. Our simulations show that mobility networks of air travel can predict the emerging global diffusion pattern of a pandemic at the early stages of the outbreak. Our results suggest that an unconstrained mobility would have significantly accelerated the spreading of COVID-19, especially in Central Europe, Spain, and France. Ultimately, our network epidemiology model can inform political decision making and help identify exit strategies from current travel restrictions and total lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the politics of the accident? This essay interrogates the accident trope's dual meaning in critical theory and popular narrative as both historically endemic and conditional for a political theory of radical resistance and ethical relation. I explore this in Paul Haggis' 2004 film Crash, a popular narrative that plots the accident to provide an opening for a politics of possibility and ethical engagement. However, this essay critiques efforts to situate accidents, and therefore contingency, as both historically endemic and politically resistant, arguing for the difficulty of reading a specific theory of political and ethical decision into something ontologically given. Crash stretches contingency to incorporate temporality itself, and in doing so nullifies consideration of institutional histories of race and class, which aesthetically foregrounds and troubles related assumptions made by a critical mode that too quickly reads a specific politics and ethics into contingency's deviation from necessary law. The essay re-evaluates the accident's political and ethical coordinates through reference to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theorisation of contingency as conditional for political meaning more generally. Accidents, it concludes, are politically and ethically mobile, if they, as Crash and theories of radical contingency contend, happen everywhere and all the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It may be logical to use majority voting as a decision-making process, if and when there are only two options 'on the table'. When there are more than two options in contention, a binary procedure may not be so logical. Nevertheless, in current practice, either alternative amendments or each of several options are subjected to a majority vote. Election systems vary enormously; many are proportional, some are preferential, a few are two-tier, and so on. With the exception of a few multi-option referendums, however, most political decisions are subject to a (simple or weighted) binary ballot. Just as there are lots of electoral systems by which multi-candidate elections can be conducted, there are several though fewer voting procedures by which multi-option decisions could be taken. This article first questions current practice; next, it looks at different voting procedures and concludes that a preferential points system is the most accurate; and then it focuses on the topic which now dominates British politics: the UK's relationship with the EU. In particular, it analyses Parliament's second Brexit indicative vote in which a multi-option debate was (not) resolved in a series of majority votes; might a different methodology have been more appropriate? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing constraints Pakistani women legislators face despite their entry into politics on a 17 per cent quota in national and provincial assemblies, it is time to rethink how quotas can lead to their political mainstreaming. This article explores quota legislators' views on their own accountability and empowerment based on the first online survey in Pakistan with 200 women in the assemblies (2013-18). Findings show quota legislators resist classification as male proxies and view themselves as accountable to notional voters, although they are indirectly elected. Many report silencing and harassment by male colleagues. Cross-party women's caucuses in each assembly have a mixed track record of facilitating substantive representation, undermined by religious parties and class differences. Respondents favoured further affirmative action mechanisms to increase their political voice, e.g. additional quota requirements within parties, more tickets for general seats and participation in key decision-making bodies of parties. A trajectory for women in politics to move from quota seats (in local bodies and assemblies) to general seats is not yet in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the 2017 Bundestag election, the relaunched government coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD announced in its coalition treaty to consider introducing 'elements of direct democracy' at the federal level, no doubt with the intent to address citizens dissatisfied with German representative democracy. However, it remains unclear which direct-democratic institutions citizens support. We explore this question by arguing that voter preferences for distinct forms of direct democracy differ according to the parties they sympathise with. More concretely, citizens seeking to introduce specific issues more actively support agenda initiatives that promote political decisions. In the German context, this group is mostly found among voters for the Greens and The Left, parties that have long advocated the expansion of democratic participation. In contrast, citizens feeling alienated from representative democracy prefer decision-controlling procedures in the form of mandatory referendums, which divert power away from elected politicians and direct them to the people. Politically, this group supports the AfD, a party that propagates direct democracy as a fundamental alternative to parliamentary democracy. The empirical study based on data derived from an internet panel survey confirms our argument. These findings have important implications for the current debate in Germany and the comparative study of participatory reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]