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The agri-food tech sector is touted for its potential to disrupt established industry. Yet research reveals that incumbent agribusinesses are buying their way into the sector through startup investments and acquisitions. Drawing from extensive qualitative research, we show that incumbent influence also shapes agri-food tech in more subtle and pervasive ways. Startups rely on incumbents' social and material infrastructure to achieve the rapid growth demanded by their venture capital funders. Incumbent influence, we argue, is ambient, continuous, and frequently indirect. It saturates the spaces where malleable startups take shape, influencing even those with whom incumbents have no direct contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The predominant view in the reviewed literature on how the IOC dealt with the Spanish question during the Civil War is that a conservative, aristocratic IOC, ideologically close to the Spanish rebels, swiftly recognised the Francoist Spanish Olympic Committee (SOC) set up in November 1937 to the detriment of the Republican equivalent based in Barcelona; that is, the IOC took sides and somehow betrayed the legitimate Republican SOC. The IOC undeniably sympathised with the insurgents and empathised with the persecuted members of the Spanish Olympic movement. Yet at the same time, by officially recognising the SOC reconstituted in San Sebastián by the IOC's representatives in Spain, the IOC was fulfilling its duty in the legal sense, as according to their statutes, a national Olympic Committee was valid only if constituted or supported by the IOC delegates in the incumbent nation. Moreover, the Republican SOC was disbanded in July 1936. Both its president and its general secretary escaped abroad to avoid political persecution. The Spanish Olympic Movement, therefore, did not split into two branches during the Civil War; it simply disappeared from the Republican side, ignored by those in command, in contrast with the 'Olympic proactivism' of the Francoists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India and Japan are the only two non-dollar issuing countries that have signed dollar-denominated bilateral swap arrangements (BSAs) with foreign central banks. These arrangements indicate that India and Japan are committed to protect their BSA partners’ financial security even at the expense of their own dollar reserves. What has motivated the two countries to make such policy choices? This article argues that India and Japan’s dollar-denominated BSAs not only enhance financial security but also limit the recipients’ motivations to look for alternative settlement currencies for trade or investment. Even if the BSAs are not directly aimed to contain China, therefore, this effectively limits the potential expansion of the RMB’s influence and allows India and Japan to maintain their structural power by supporting regional dollar dominance. This article finds, therefore, that India and Japan’s dollar-denominated BSAs serve as a tool in the geoeconomic competition with a rising China in support of the incumbent regional powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating a contingency perspective with status-quo theory, this study investigates how to break the inertial use of incumbent payments to use mobile-payment services in South Korea. We surveyed 330 Korean respondents from March 2021 to May 2021, using a non-probability purposive and web-panel sampling method. Our hierarchical regression estimation results reveal that the status-quo inertia of incumbent transactional method negatively influences user behavior regarding mobile payment adoption. Moreover, from a contingency perspective, individual factors, including gender and age, and technology environmental factors, such as technology diversity, weaken the effect of status-quo inertia. Meanwhile, regulatory environmental factors, such as institutional inertia, strengthen status-quo inertia's effect on the intention to use mobile payment. More attention has been given to the questions of how and why leapfrogging from traditional transaction methods to mobile payment has not yet been replaced. In this context, our findings could provide answers for both academic and industry experts who have explored how to break inertia to adopt mobile payment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the balance between interoperability and innovation within the context of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and competition law. It discerns vertical interoperability obligations (Article 6(4) and 6(7)) from the horizontal interoperability obligation (Article 7) and highlights the following. First, the EU competition law is more experienced in dealing with vertical interoperability which favours innovation incentives for SMEs and new entrants over those for established incumbents (the incentive-balance test). This approach may encourage sustaining innovation at the downstream level by fostering competition and could eventually lead to disruptive innovations as new entrants gain experience and resources. Secondly, EU competition law is not well-versed in horizontal interoperability obligations. While Article 7 may boost innovation through increased competition, considerations related to privacy and standardization make its (potentially benign and adverse) effects on innovation uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractNew political parties can sometimes achieve remarkable election results. The 2022 parliamentary elections in Slovenia highlight that while appeals centred around anti-corruption, competence and newness contributed to the Freedom Movement’s ability to win over one third of the vote, its victory owed much to tactical voting. Data from a specially commissioned survey conducted immediately after the election highlight that voters jumped on the new party bandwagon as the best vehicle to defeat the incumbent prime minister’s party. Voters’ tactical choices help explain not just the appeal of new parties and the continuation of the new party subsystem in Slovenia but also the wider instability of party politics in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on catch-up strategies often provides insights from the technology-related perspective and ignores some non-technological factors. Through the multi-case study of China's smartphone industry, we develop a theoretical framework explaining how latecomer firms catch up through diverse strategic choices. We identify two strategic paths that latecomer firms follow to catch up and surpass the incumbents. One path is to explore new business opportunities via deep market insights and then combine them with building up product technologies. Another path is from product technology build-up to market insights exploration. Firms following this path usually start with building up essential technologies and act as fast followers for new market insights. Then, as they continue developing their technological strengths, these firms devote efforts to improving their ability to capture new market insights. This study challenges the 'first imitation, then innovation model' discussed in the literature and shows that latecomer firms can pursue cutting-edge innovations in their early activities. The research also shows that, unlike previous studies, the technology build-up is not the only path to help latecomers catch up and challenge incumbent leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online-to-offline (O2O) business mode has on-demand features to offer consumers instant fulfillment from a local store upon their online order. The O2O mode has attracted many more consumers recently. Using empirical evidence from a leading O2O platform in China, our study focuses on the market entry issue in the O2O context. Upon the new entrant entering the market, existing listed sellers implement a higher overall promotion to their consumers by enlarging the direct promotion extent but reducing the other types of promotions, including coupon, bundle, quantity, and gift promotions. However, the O2O platforms reduce the promotions level to the consumer orders from the existing listed sellers. The platform's and existing listed sellers' promotions increase consumers' purchase frequency but lower their purchase amount per order. The extent of these impacts depends on the geographic location of the new entrant. Our findings provide guidelines for the O2O platforms and listed providers to implement appropriate promotion strategies to attract consumers when considering the impact of certain new providers entering the O2O market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an overview of the trajectories of lithography technology with a particular focus on technology lock-in. Based on the theory of technological evolution, the paper exploits the contribution of different knowledge sources. The results show that four phases of technological development characterise the evolution of lithography. Phases 2 and 3 from 2002 to 2011 are characterised by the persistence of particular standard technology and path dependence, suggesting the existence of technology lock-in. By highlighting the characteristics of technology lock-in and path dependence, we discuss the core technology gap between incumbents and latecomers. We find that the lithography industry was dominated by U.S., German, and Japanese core technologies in the early stages. However, knowledge diversity has gradually increased in recent years, with Korea and Taiwan contributing more to the current lithography technology, possibly breaking out path dependence. This study contributes to the existing literature on indicators and connotations of technological lock-in and path dependence. It provides insight into the window of opportunity for latecomers by identifying core lithography technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the survival of the AKP in Turkey's late stage of autocratization (2017-present) through its strategy of shifting the primary drivers of competition from individual parties to pre-electoral alliances. Confronted with a decline in popular support in 2015 June elections, the article argues that the AKP created uneven patterns of competition via the system of pre-electoral alliances so that it could institutionalize a 'Rikerian offense' on the salient Turkish-Kurdish cleavage and establish an authoritarian power-sharing mechanism with its former challenger, the Turkish nationalist MHP. To illustrate the shift toward uneven patterns of electoral competition via such incumbent strategies, the article conducts a two-part analysis: It first examines the landscape of competition among parties (2002-2015) and second, evaluates competition among both parties and alliances (2018-2023) at the national and district levels in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Turkish economy presented a complicated picture ahead of the 2023 election, with significant currency depreciation and soaring inflation yet robust growth and stable employment levels. How did voters' economic perceptions shape election results in such a context? Drawing on Turkish Election Study surveys, this study reaches two main conclusions. First, while the average evaluation of the economy in the electorate was quite poor, there is a sharp divergence across incumbent supporters and others: The incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) supporters' evaluations have changed little since the previous election in 2018, yet those of other voters have deteriorated significantly. Second, the opposition seems to have failed in convincing large parts of the electorate that they would manage the economy better than Erdoğan. Overall, economic voting appears to have worked as expected, and the unwavering economic evaluations of likely AKP voters and the perceived incompetence of the opposition seem to have helped Erdoğan to win another term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As incumbents strive to collaborate with start-ups in the pursuit of cutting-edge digital solutions, the complexities posed by disparate partners and their innovative endeavours often lead to intricate tensions. Our research underscores the critical role of innovation intermediaries in enabling a successful digital co-creation, yet a deeper understanding of this novel and evolving context is required. Through a comprehensive study of two innovation intermediaries, five incumbent companies, and eleven start-ups, we shed light on how intermediaries can effectively mitigate the hard-to-manage tensions that emerge. Our analysis uncovers three primary tensions: incompatible digital co-creation cultures, divergent digital innovation operations, and misaligned technical capabilities. We further propose a four-phase process for innovation intermediation, including the establishment of digital co-creation foundations, catalysing digital innovation projects, orchestrating the co-creation process, and scaling the resulting outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political order following rebel victory in civil wars has seen remarkable variation. While some rebellions transform their victories into durable regimes, others do not. This article develops a typological framework to assess the ability, and inability, of victorious rebellions to capture the state after overthrowing incumbents, with a focus on Africa. We argue that these outcomes - state capture, failed state capture, or mixed - depend on two key dimensions of political and military centralization before victory: (1) the distribution of power between rebel organizations participating in the civil war and (2) the communal structure within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper hopes to enhance understanding about entrenched grievance in a couple of ways: (a) Initially, the paper reviews how entrenched grievance reflects melancholic states of mind in terms of its avoidance of the pain of loss and change. But the main contribution of the paper is likely to be found in (b), that is, via detailed clinical material, the paper illustrates how earnest efforts on the part of the analyst to bring understanding may lead to cognitive entrapments such as the convictions incumbent in the “knowing” analyst. Further, that this knowing analyst may need to become aggrieved, that is, narrow, impatient and concrete towards her patient’s entrenchment, and then to recogize this plight in herself before she can genuinely hear her patient’s grievance about her from a wider view, that is as a complaint from the “lively self”, deserving recognition. The clinical detail demonstrates that such recognition softened the patient’s grievance, allowing both members of the dyad to become more collaborative and open to the pains and growth available from mourning states of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancements in digital technology necessitate a shift from traditional linear buyer-supplier value chains to a network-centric approach facilitated by digital platforms. Despite digital platforms being a dominant model for transformation, limited research has explored the enablers for incumbent pipeline firms to embrace platformization. To address this gap, this study reviews existing literature on digital transformation, identifying nine enablers for digital platformization: changing client behavior, information technology (IT) capabilities development, structural efficiencies, disruptive competitive forces, scope advantages, economic triggers, disruptive third-party technology, creation of autonomous corporate structures, and regulatory compliance. Case studies of platformization in diverse industries are analyzed using the modified total interpretive structural modeling (m-TISM) approach, resulting in a hierarchical model with five levels. This model delineates interrelationships among trigger events, external enablers, internal organizational enablers, process enablers, and outcome drivers. Furthermore, the study highlights that the creation and extraction of value from digital platforms are operationalized through e-business strategies, contributing insights to e-business literature by discussing the implications of these enablers on dimensions such as commerce, collaboration, communication, connection, and computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A change of government or minister constitutes a stress test for the relationship between ministers and bureaucrats. The new political masters may question the loyalty of incumbent bureaucrats and seek to replace them. However, the relationship between political changes and administrative turnover is poorly understood in meritocratic systems. This article analyses how changes of either government or minister affect the turnover of permanent secretaries in Denmark and Norway (1970–2020). Whereas ministers are completely reliant on career bureaucrats in pure meritocratic systems, they are supported by political appointees in hybrid meritocratic systems. The article investigates whether the effect of political changes on administrative turnover is mediated by the presence or absence of political appointees. Changes of government increase the risk of administrative turnover in Norway (hybrid system), but there are no such effects in Denmark (pure system), suggesting that political appointees potentially undermine the permanence of career bureaucrats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature highlights the complexities of the relationship between voting, protest action and service delivery within Southern African democracies. We explore the relationship between these variables for South Africa by generating a new dataset from various sources. Although this relationship has been explored before, the existing evidence is mixed. The results from this study therefore bring a fresh perspective, especially at a time during which the political power of the incumbent African National Congress has been declining. We find that improvements in service delivery are not significantly associated with an increase in votes for the incumbent party, indicating that accountability is not the main motivation for South Africans' voting decisions. However, we find a statistically significant negative correlation between protest action and service delivery, providing evidence of the increasing importance of protest action as a form of political accountability in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not all governments survive until the next scheduled election. Some are replaced during their term in office by executives with a different party composition and/or portfolio distribution. Others are able to be 'reborn' as the successor government, undergoing only minimal changes. Such variation has to date received scant attention in studies on government durability. By classifying non-electoral replacements according to the degree of ministerial turnover, this article shows that new cabinets are often similar to their predecessors. It hypothesises that the likelihood of this pattern occurring is greater: when members of the current cabinet face bargaining problems in forming a very different cabinet, as in the case of surplus (unnecessary) parties in oversized coalitions; when the policy distance between the parliamentary median party and the current opposition widens; and when the executive's economic performance discourages opposition parties from forming new coalitions with some incumbent parties. The risk of experiencing different types of replacement is estimated using data on Western European cabinets (1946–2021). Consistent with the hypotheses, the results indicate that governments are able to return to power almost untouched after their termination if they are oversized, if the opposition is far from the legislative median voter, and if inflation grows during a government's tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new Polish military branch, the Territorial Defense Force (TDF), has been described both as a defensive tool against Russian hybrid warfare and as a private paramilitary force of the incumbent Law and Justice Party. This paper examines the strategic, political, and military purposes of the Territorial Defense Force using two theoretical models. One is designed for analyzing units intended to protect against external threats, the second for units targeting internal threats. Comparing these models with the officially declared objectives of the TDF, our results indicate a stronger correlation of the new branch with the second model and reveal distinct political motivations for its creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is gaining tremendous popularity in the enterprise software releases, which has brought the growing challenge for the incumbent used to adopt the on-premise licensing model. In this paper, we focus on the optimal versioning strategy problem of the incumbent when he faces the competition from the entrant who releases the SaaS software. He can choose from providing the upgraded on-premise software, turning to offer the SaaS version of the software, and releasing both the versions. We indicate that releasing both versions won't be the optimal choice in the competitive environment. When the upgrade cost is above a certain value, and the gap of value is below a threshold positively linear correlated with the upgrade cost, the incumbent prefers the SaaS strategy. Otherwise, the on-premise strategy generates the highest profit. A special case is that in the medium switching cost environment, the SaaS strategy can be optimal for all possible values of upgrade cost. Finally, We consider the problem in the presence of network effect and in the uncovered market setting. The results provide effective managerial insights into the strategy selection for the incumbent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the 2022 general elections in Papua New Guinea, covering both electoral quality and election outcomes. Overall, the 2022 elections were very troubled. In parts of the country, serious violence and electoral fraud were major issues. In other parts of the country, polling was less fraught. However, some problems, such as the roll, were serious almost everywhere. In terms of election outcomes, one outcome – only two women won seats – was predictable. However, the election brought puzzling results too: in particular, incumbents were re-elected at the highest rate ever. And the largest party won a larger share of seats than has been the case in any election since 1982. Neither of the latter two results appear to have been a direct product of electoral fraud. Rather, the party outcome stems from a turn-of-the-millennium rule change. High incumbent re-election rates remain a genuine puzzle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A burgeoning literature finds that incumbency effects reflect mostly a personal rather than a partisan advantage. We attribute this to incumbents' mobilization incentives. Incumbents have weaker incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of their copartisans in national races than in local ones, where their local power is at stake. We examine these implications in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina's largest subnational unit, where midterm elections give mayors a strong incentive to help their copartisans running for the local council, but much weaker ones to support those running for a national seat. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find a large positive effect of incumbency in local mayoral and midterm elections. In contrast, local incumbents neither help nor hurt their copartisans running for the presidency or the national legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While economic voting theory assumes that voters respond to economic conditions, critics have argued that most voters lack an adequate understanding of key national economic indicators. In this paper, we investigate the occurrence of a neighbourhood effect, where citizens can observe unemployment levels in their own local communities. Using both official statistics and survey data of three recent election studies in Belgium, we assess whether local unemployment levels are associated with the assessment of the national economy, and incumbent voting. While the results show that the local unemployment level is strongly associated with the assessment of the national economy, results regarding a direct association with supporting incumbent political parties are mixed. We argue that the neighbourhood effect is an important mechanism in economic voting, as citizens react to a neighbourhood effect in their assessment of the state of the national economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines patterns of voter defection from Turkey's incumbent AKP amid major economic and democratic decline. As in other electoral autocracies, defectors constitute a small but politically significant group in Turkey, where the opposition's ability to secure a transition from authoritarianism depends on reducing the incumbent's vote share. Based on survey data gathered in November 2021 and February 2022, we find that while the high level of partizanship among AKP voters hinders defection, persistent economic and democratic decline still reduces incumbent support. We also found that defections are higher outside of the lowest income group. Our findings have important implications for opposition strategies in electoral autocracies. Directing public debate away from identity issues to economic and democratic problems increases the likelihood of defection. In addition, offering voters clear superior alternatives decreases the cost of uncertainty that comes with change and increases the likelihood of defection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comprehensive understanding of the roles and functions of ASEAN's human rights regime by building on widely documented, consistent findings relating to the purpose of the association and the nature of its human rights institutions. In particular, the paper starts by emphasizing that, despite continuing debate over the nature and achievements/failures of the regional grouping, scholarship tends to converge on the two important aspects: ASEAN's normative framework and its long-standing practice of 'quiet diplomacy' are designed to reassure incumbent governments weary of unwanted interference in internal affairs; and regional human rights institutions are primarily ASEAN bodies. These findings are formulated as assumptions guiding the analysis of the association's human rights rhetoric and practice, which centers on the evolution of intergovernmental consensus, the role of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) in advancing this consensus, and an assessment of ASEAN responses to gross violations perpetrated or supported by governing elites. This latter examination details regional responses to the 2014 military coup in Thailand, Philippines' brutal and largely extrajudicial 'war on drugs', the Rohingya genocide, and the 2021 military coup in Myanmar and ensuing violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have paid increasing attention to how questions of multi-level governance have become politicized in the domestic political arena. Issues surrounding democratic government itself have received surprisingly little attention in this debate. In this article, we ask how political parties politicize the principles of liberal democracy within advanced democracies. We expect that challenger parties are most likely to question existing principles. The targets of their criticism, however, should vary according to their ideological origins. Conducting automated quantitative text analysis of Swiss, German and Austrian party press releases between 2006 and 2018 using a multidimensional dictionary of liberal democracy, we confirm that left-libertarian and populist radical right parties are the main challengers of the democratic status quo. The foundation of criticism, however, differs fundamentally. While left-libertarians focus on principles that strengthen individual autonomy in politics, populist radical right parties demand more forms of participation and fewer constraints by liberal elements of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the outcome of the July 2023 election in Spain. Despite the right- and far-right bloc winning a higher share of the votes, the two main incumbent parties on the left (PSOE and Sumar) defeated the odds and returned to government thanks to a post-election agreement with six other parties, including the Catalan pro-independence political formations. We show how coordination in the left bloc was important in shaping the outcome. An increase in mobilisation and strategic voting across districts contributed to preventing the right-wing bloc from achieving an absolute majority of seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research is ambiguous about the status of Australian regional elections, seeing them as conforming to the second-order election model but also as affected by regional politics. We clarify this ambiguity, drawing on aggregate and individual level data to explore the variable impact of national and regional incumbents on regional elections. Although national incumbents seem to affect Australian regional elections, under some circumstances regional incumbent parties are able to electorally outperform their national incumbent counterparts. We suggest that Australia's uncoordinated national and regional election cycles and federal distribution of policy responsibilities both help to focus voter attention on the performance of regional incumbents. The way that regional incumbents manage key policy issues, including Covid-19 in recent years, appears to matter for their electoral support, making Australian regional elections more than second-order events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Re-election of all incumbent Presidents, most of them from the Socialist Party (PS) or the Republicans (LR), was the main feature of the French regional elections of 20 and 27 June 2021. As a result, regional government remained controlled by the two parties that have dominated French politics since the early 1980s, even though both lost the 2017 presidential and legislative elections to newcomer Emmanuel Macron. The second-order elections model captures part of these dynamics, but the candidate-centered politics model provides a more appropriate framework to understand the general pattern of these regional elections. In a context of increasing split-ticket voting between regional and departmental elections, which were held at the same time, an era of divided government seems to have emerged since 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, evidence on the relationship between democratization and reductions in military spending has accumulated. This association has proven to be robust to a wide variety of specifications and samples. Nevertheless, there remain two important gaps in our understanding of this relationship. Firstly, while most studies argue that democratic political institutions constrain the incumbents' power to allocate resources to the military, there is still disagreement about which institution. Second, empirical evidence on causality is very scarce. Endogeneity remains a difficult problem to grapple with. To address these issues, I specify a clear set of channels of interaction linking democratic political institutions to military spending. Following previous work, I also argue that political accountability constrains allocations to the military. However, I distinguish three types of accountability: horizontal, vertical and diagonal. I find that diagonal accountability is the strongest mechanism. Furthermore, I use a country's accumulated experience with political accountability as an instrumental variable to tackle the endogeneity between political accountability and military spending. I find evidence suggesting that political accountability causes military spending as a share of GDP to fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of COVID-19 sparked debates about whether incumbents should focus on saving lives or the economy. Politicians' decisions in this dilemma could determine whether they remain in office. "Saving the economy" is predicted to affect re-election chances positively in economic voting theory. However, a public health crisis can shift the electorate's preferences in favor of expanding healthcare support at the cost of the economy. We examine whether there is a trade-off between "saving lives" and "saving the economy" for the incumbent in receiving higher political support. Based on two experiments conducted in Russia, we measure if individuals are more likely to support, vote for, and extend the power of the incumbent based on their policies. Although both experimental factors encouraged support, the economy-driven policy had a larger effect on voting than the healthcare-driven one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the tourism industry in regional contexts has attracted significant interest from tourism geographers, in which the evolutionary economic geography (EEG) approach has been of interest over the last decade. Recent research on EEG has emphasised the role of institutions and particularly legitimacy in new path development, claiming that legitimacy is crucial for the development of emerging industries. Against this backdrop, this paper explores the role of legitimation and delegitimation in the development of the sharing economy in Innlandet, a tourism region in Norway. The article poses two research questions. How is the legitimacy of Airbnb expressed by key tourism stakeholders in a tourism region in Norway? Moreover, how can the shifting roles of legitimation and delegitimation among key stakeholders in the tourism industry inform the literature on new path development? These issues are explored in qualitative interviews with respondents from four key tourism stakeholder groups: consumers, Airbnb hosts, incumbent firms, and regional industry and policy actors. The findings reveal legitimacy issues mainly related to regulatory and normative ambiguities, described by biased regulations that result in economic leakages to other regions and countries and concerns about decreasing local value creation in the region. These findings indicate that the sharing economy lacks legitimacy among the stakeholders. The article concerns the role of legitimation and delegitimation in new path development processes, arguing that delegitimation prevents transformative changes and path development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an increasing body of scholarship analyzing the conditions under which incumbent presidents can launch successful attempts to evade existing term limits. It has generally been found that if presidents use multi-strategy approaches, the probability of their success is high. Failure of term limit evasion, on the other hand, is typically ascribed to opposition by judges or to popular disapproval. The case of Indonesia, presented in this article, challenges some of these assumptions. We show that President Widodo's attempts to achieve a revision of term limit regulations or to delay the next elections failed despite a determined multi-strategy approach, and they did so primarily because of sustained elite opposition, including from his own party. Judges played no role, and popular rejection was relevant only insofar as it aligned with elite attitudes. Widodo's failed term evasion attempts, then, highlight two contradictory trends in Indonesia's contemporary democracy: they demonstrated both the erosion of democratic culture that made the initiative possible and the continued resilience of democracy that ultimately thwarted the plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenges in the Practice of Progressive Foreign Policy The second important question that Jackson's article raises is: Where is progressive foreign policy in practice? During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Democratic candidates such as Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren articulated visions for an "emerging left-wing foreign policy."[21] As Warren explained, "The United States can no longer maintain the comfortable assumption that its domestic and foreign policies are separate. Many important, complex foreign policy issues, such as discussions about the nature of future confrontation with China, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and US (re)entry into a nuclear agreement with Iran, have the potential to become "wedge" issues for the Democratic Party. [Extracted from the article]

The relationship between the policy ambitions of political incumbents and the organisation of the state administration to achieve them is complex and fluid, and cross-sectional studies provide useful but limited insights into how this relationship is evolving. There is evidence that the challenge of managing and coordinating the modern state's stock of public policies is under considerable pressure, however, arising from the accumulation of increasingly diverse policy responsibilities. In the Westminster/Whitehall administrative tradition, the primary actor for managing these endeavours is the ministerial 'department', which acts as the central organisational entity for formulating and coordinating public policy measures, and accounting for their implementation. In this paper, drawing on a data-set spanning a century of Irish public administration () and other sources, the changing profile of ministerial departments between 1922 and 2022 are examined in longitudinal perspective to illuminate the incidence and content of policy portfolio accumulation, and the political and administrative responses to these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on judicial recruitment in post-communist countries and highlights gaps between law and practice which are due to intervening informal dynamics. The case study on Georgia is suitable to explore the power of informality in increasingly formalized systems of decision-making and also in the ones that allocate considerable powers to judges. The article draws inspiration from and contributes to the limited but growing scholarship on informality in judicial governance. It relies on extensive empirical research to discern informal criteria and methods for selecting judges which embody the interests and preferences of the judicial elite and turn elaborate formal rules and procedures into the convenient façade that covers up informal dealings. It signals that recruitment mechanisms, even if structured to eliminate independence-threatening dynamics, can emerge as means of perpetuating the mentality of conformity and help prevent the consolidation of counter-elites willing and able to challenge the dominance of the incumbent leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I seek to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on voter behaviour in the 2020 general elections in Ghana using survey data compiled in Greater Accra between July and August 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic became a major campaign issue in last year's election prompting varied responses and support from both the government and the main opposition parties. Though a majority of the electorate were satisfied (83.5%) and grateful (82%) for the relief items they received, only 3 out of every 10 of the respondents think the intervention had an effect on the way they voted. Using the rally-effect theory, the paper finds that the political leadership and incumbent government were able to rally support for their campaign as a result of the social intervention policies implemented in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, yet were unable to sustain and translate that support into electoral victory in the Greater Accra Region, a major swing region with the highest number of Covid-19 cases and one of the only two regions that witnessed a lockdown during the height of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We consider a static entry game played between an incumbent and a collection of potential entrants. Entry decisions are made with incomplete information and beliefs are conditioned, at least partially, on a market characteristic that is unobserved by the econometrician. We describe conditions under which, even though the unobserved market characteristic cannot be identified, a subset of parameters of the model can still be identified, including all the strategic-interaction effects. We also characterize testable implications for strategic behavior by the incumbent when this player is able to shift the unobserved market characteristic to deter entry. We present results under Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) and under the weaker behavioral model of iterated elimination of nonrationalizable strategies. Our empirical example analyzes geographic entry decisions in the Mexican internet service provider (ISP) industry. This industry has an incumbent, América Móvil (AMX), which established a widespread geographic presence as a monopolist following the privatization of Telmex in 1990. Our results show significant strategic interaction effects between AMX and its competitors, as well as evidence of strategic behavior by AMX to deter entry and maximize its market share. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic defection and pro-government militias are two recurring features of ethnic conflicts. There is a strong connection between these two elements, with incumbents using militias to absorb defectors from rebel constituencies into their ranks. However, relatively little work has been carried out on this link. Most works exploring ethnic defection have treated these defector militias, as the article refers to them, as the result of ethnic defection. This research offers an alternative hypothesis: Rather than tools for administrating and controlling defection, governments in ethnic civil wars often view militias as a tool for enhancing and facilitating ethnic defection. The socio-political functions of militias may triumph over military ones in governments' consideration to form and sustain such defector militias. The article employs two case studies to support this hypothesis, these of the ethnic conflicts in northern Iraq and southern Sudan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the application of the African Union's norm and sanctions regime on the prohibition of unconstitutional changes of government from 2001 to 2022. It identifies three forms of unconstitutional changes of government: coup d'états and other violent changes of democratically elected government; refusal of an incumbent government to relinquish power after losing an election and constitutional manipulations to win an election or extend the tenure of an incumbent government. The discussions reveal that apart from cases of coup d'états and other violent overthrows of government, the AU has not been consistent with its application of the sanction regime. The article attempts an explanation of why this is so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to advance perspectives on powerful incumbent firms in (new) regional industrial path development. Drawing on recent insights from transition studies, it is argued that this actor group - hitherto often portrayed in a rather one-sided manner - plays a crucial role in shaping the pace and direction of regional path development through agency oriented towards both change and maintenance. Building on systemic perspectives at the intersection of evolutionary economic geography and innovation studies, a particular emphasis is placed on incumbent firms' interventions to reconfigure or stabilize their surrounding regional innovation system to support their intentions. To this end, this article examines how incumbents exert their influence through various forms of power as means by which they promote or hinder regional industrial change. Empirically, the role of incumbent firms in three traditional automotive regions in Austria is investigated. It is shown how they leverage their power to propel the industry's digitalization and suppress its decarbonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the euro crisis, the sustainability of Spain's debt burden was called into question. By 2019, however, Spain had successfully navigated its own crisis and reduced its debt burden. What role did Spain's emerging fiscal federal system play in this recovery? We analyze the performance of Spain's fiscal federalist framework and how it affected the country's budgetary balance, with a special emphasis on its coordination and on political relationships within the autonomous regions. Contrary to what advocates of the benefits of fiscal coordination argue, we find that coordination does not prevent the erosion of fiscal discipline in regions. Our results show that politics, rather than fiscal rules and frameworks, play an important role and have led to differing fiscal performance. In regions where incumbents were re-elected, coordination is employed to ensure more positive budgetary balances. Conversely, in regions with changing incumbents, coordination serves as an indicator of future fiscal problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian Constitution obligates the Governors to act with the aid and advise of their Council of Ministers except in those matters where discretionary powers have been explicitly conferred upon them. Despite the absence of an explicit power to order a state government to face a floor test before the House, Governors have been using their discretion to make such directions. While defining the ambit of this discretion, several Inter-State Council reports and judicial pronouncements have assented to this practice. This paper argues against this trend and asserts that the process of summoning the assembly for a "floor test" must be driven by the choice of elected legislators rather than the Governors' subjective satisfaction. Towards this end, this paper proposes a four-level formula, with certain rights for the opposition parties, which must be followed by the Governors when the confidence of the House in the incumbent government is questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Recession undoubtedly reduced the electoral prospects of incumbent parties, coherently with the expectations of the economic vote theory. Yet, the exceptionality of the period may have displaced other elements of that theory, such as, for instance, the moderating impact that globalization is supposed to have on the retrospective mechanism. By using an original dataset comparing 168 elections in 38 democratic countries in the period 2000–2015, we detail how the crisis modified and even reversed that conditional effect. Furthermore, we differentiate our results by separating the impact of economic openness from that of political globalization. In so doing, we improve our understanding of the mechanisms that trigger the conditional effect on the economic vote in normal and exceptional times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK Labour Party changed its incumbent-renomination process six times between 1979 and 2019. Using Labour as an influential case, I propose a two-part theory explaining parties' choice of incumbent-renomination methods: who controls the party, and whether they believe MPs are bound by dictates of the parliamentary leadership or the extra-parliamentary party. Renomination is central to intra-party candidate selection affecting the functioning of parties, legislatures, governments and oppositions. Findings expand our understanding of intra-party organisational dynamics and incumbent-renomination processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to help promote the future growth of behavior analysis, it is incumbent on behavior analysts around the world to develop country-specific standards. National Occupational Standards (NOS) are concise and readable documents that specify the knowledge an individual requires and the standard of performance that must be achieved when carrying out a specific function in the workplace. NOS are used as benchmarks of good practice across professions internationally. The current paper provides an overview of a model with 20 discrete actionable steps across five phases for developing standards: (i) preparation, (ii) development, (iii) review, (iv) validation, and (v) endorsement. A case example is provided for the development of NOS for Applied Behavior Analysts in the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presidents have access to a range of resources unavailable to challengers, and often the most important are derived from control of the state. This allows incumbents to build more inclusive elite coalitions, distribute clientelist resources to their political base and co-opt opposition politicians. Cabinet and government appointments are some of the most visible, direct and identifiable indications of elite accommodation, and African presidents are more likely to build inclusive coalitions to ensure their survival. In Zambia, balanced regional representation – popularly known as "tribal balancing" – has held an important place in the public imagination. But between 2015 and 2021, rather than using incumbent advantage to build an ethnically inclusive alliance, President Lungu used cabinet appointments and senior government positions to shore up his base. This was bolstered by an exclusionary campaign that focused on the opposition leader's ethnicity to push the PF's base to vote against the opposition. This article uses an analysis of cabinet appointments and coverage of the election campaign to illustrate how Lungu sought to build an exclusionary coalition and exacerbate ethnic cleavages. This contributes to debates on when and why elites might use exclusionary strategies, and when they might fail to produce the desired outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Might incumbency entail disadvantages as well as advantages? This article examines the performance of incumbent president Edgar Lungu and the Patriotic Front (PF) in Zambia's Eastern Province in the 2021 election. Eastern Province was a 'swing' region in that neither of the two major national political parties had deep-rooted support, despite Lungu's and the PF's strong performance in 2015-16. Survey data shows that voters punished the incumbent government in 2021 for its poor management of the economy (and, to a lesser extent, corruption). Interviews with provincial politicians and documentary sources reveal the challenges facing the incumbent in maintaining the coalition that had brought it electoral success in 2015-16. The case of Eastern Province illustrates how, in such swing regions, incumbency can be a disadvantage as well as an advantage, as the incumbent president is held responsible for the state of the economy and the opportunities to local elites. In countries where national electoral success requires winning decisively in such swing regions, even incumbent presidents and parties face a significant possibility of electoral defeat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President Edgar Lungu and the Patriotic Front used a range of incumbency advantages to tilt the playing field in their favour in the run-up to Zambia's 2021 elections and, as a result, were more visible offline than the opposition United Party for National Development (UPND) and its flagbearer, Hakainde Hichilema. In this paper, we draw on an original survey of party officials and activists and semi-structured interviews to consider the role of social media in the UPND's victory. We show how the two dominant political parties invested heavily in social media, but how the UPND's online messaging proved more persuasive and spread offline, and how social media facilitated the UPND's political mobilisation and vote protection efforts in the face of a highly uneven playing field. Social media thus played an important role in unseating the incumbent, but not because the election was won online, or because social media provided a uniquely "social" form of communication. Instead, social media helped to facilitate the flow of information across a heavily controlled media ecosystem in which face-to-face communication remained key. In making this argument, we highlight the significant impact of social media on users and non-users alike, even in a context of relatively low internet penetration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]