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Doctoral employment outside universities has been increasing, as universities cannot employ all doctorate holders. Nevertheless, it has been argued that the shift from doctoral programs to the non-academic labour market has been limited. In this qualitative study, more than 800 verbal answers given by doctorate holders to a pair of open-ended questions were content-analysed to explore doctorate holders’ perceptions of the non-academic labour market and the reputational problems they relate to their employment. The study identifies four reputational problems which doctorate holders relate to their employment: the oversupply problem, the overeducation problem, the consistency problem and the communication problem. By identifying potential reputational problems on the doctorate holders level, this research contributes novel information in terms of both theory development and practitioner insights.

Cross-national comparisons are a common instrument of epistemic governance in national parliaments. Their prevalence could be seen as a consequence of the emergence of the ‘competition state’ and t...

International organisations’ importance in education policy has been growing in recent years. They have been able to promote their role by providing data and interpreting it through international a...

This paper measures both individual- and contextual effects of generalised trust on Europeans’ attitudes towards immigration. Our data come from round 7 of the European Social Survey (ESS) with whi...

In this theoretical article, the vital role of conflicts in knowledge creation is foregrounded, and the concept of conflict is reimagined using a metaphor of music. Theoretically, knowledge...

Military applications of technologies for enhancing or producing vision play a key role in composing contemporary security, as such technologies are deployed to make security sense of everyday sociality, of battlefields, and of much in between these extremes. In this article, I set out to recompose militarised techno-vision through the public detritus left by its heterogenous development, use, and appropriation. I argue that as an heterogenous and amalgamated object, military techno-vision can be composed by speaking the stories of its leftovers, and that this composition is characterised by and in turn characterises a longstanding dilemma between fact and vision – between the ambiguity that is constitutive of the human practices of visual perception and image-making, and the desire for machines that can produce visual ‘actionable intelligence’ that can underpin security decisions. Discourses, practices, and regimes of visibility are deployed alongside technologies to occlude the ambiguity of technological vision and sustain the imaginary of technologically altered vision as neutral production of military or security facts.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine deliberation in the context of organizational change and introduce an organizational jury as a change facilitator. Design/methodology/approach The research is based on an empirical study of four organizational juries that were organized by a non-profit organization in Finland. The main data of the study consist of a survey that the juries’ participants filled in. The data are triangulated with observations of jury meetings and relevant documents including pre-jury information package, jury presentations and juries’ proposals. In the analysis, the paper adopts deliberative democracy criteria to assess the inclusiveness, authenticity and consequentiality of the deliberative process. Findings The research findings suggest that the juries increased the inclusiveness of decision making and the quality of deliberation about the changes among the employees. The results indicate that juries facilitated the change process by providing a means for information sharing and building a shared understanding among the stakeholders. The main weakness of the juries was their low consequentiality. Originality/value Deliberative jury method provides a participative way to build and preserve socially shared meanings in an organizational change context. However, the studies on the use of deliberative forums in the organizational context are still scarce. Thus, the study provides an important addition to the existing research literature.

In recent higher education research, quality in education export action has been explored from the perspective of traditional education export countries such as the UK and USA. However, less attention is given to novice education export providers that rely on different educational traditions. In this article, we explore quality of education as it is done in one exported Finnish master’s degree programme in teacher education in Indonesia. Our theoretical premise is based on the convention theory that relies on pragmatic sociology. The empirical data consist of 16 semi-structured students’ and staff members’ interviews gathered between the years 2016 and 2017 in Finland and in Indonesia. The results of this study stress the plurality of the quality factors that indicate the expectations by the students and the staff members, but also the priorities of the providers as to what is essential in exported degree-based education. From the perspective of convention theory, these considerations emphasize that the successful implementation of the exported master’s degree programme in teacher education is based on the professional-academic convention (as research-based teacher education) that together with the civic-domestic convention (as societal impact, local traditions and Finnish approach to pedagogy) influenced the content of the educational programme through personal interaction.

The Green League approached the April 2019 election to the Eduskunta, Finland’s unicameral national legislature, with a mixture of high hopes and cautious optimism. Finland had been governed since ...

This article explores parallels between the ‘shunning’ and ‘seeking’ of membership of the EU in the context of Brexit and stalled enlargement in south-east Europe, via a focus on the partial, fragmentary and contested governance of citizenship. The case studies place Union citizenship into a wider political and socio-economic context, demonstrating its central importance as an enabler of personal freedom. At the same time, they highlight how the denial or removal of Union citizenship can engender individual strategies to recover lost or denied benefits. From the analysis, parallels emerge between Union citizenship and national citizenship; both offer a promise of equality, but a reality of differentiation and inequality. At the same time, by delving deep into the case studies, it proves possible to illuminate the complex and often ‘messy’ constitutional edifice of the European Union, involving sometimes contradictory processes of Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation affecting citizenship regimes at all levels.

This article addresses the role of immigration regulations as a frame of reference for migrant employment before obtaining permanent residency status. Drawing on interviews with non-EU migrants and service sector employers in the Helsinki area, the article examines how immigration regulations inform migrant employment and contribute to the hierarchisation of labour markets. The analysis focuses on the legal significance of employment for migrants during the immigration process, which is related to the financial requirements for residence permits and manifested in the work permit process in particular. Immigration regulations increase migrants’ dependency on paid employment, consequently decreasing their bargaining power in the labour market. The findings demonstrate the changing dynamics of the supply and demand of labour in the low-paid service sector, where employers prefer to recruit migrants in temporary legal positions over local workers and ‘labour migrants’, resulting in what the author calls the juridical division of labour.

Universities are increasingly engaged in marketization and are also expected to transform into more sustainable institutions and be change-agents pushing forward the movement of sustainable development. This article introduces an analytical framework originated by Hahn et al. (2015) for understanding tensions concerning corporate sustainability to the context of the Finnish university system in order to answer the following questions: What are the tensions relating to Finnish universities&rsquo, social and economic sustainability, and what strategies might universities use to cope with these tensions? Through analyzing interviews with university managers and officials from the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland, we find that Hahn et al.&rsquo, s framework is generally applicable in analyzing tensions of sustainability in universities, and we identify six tensions relating to the sustainability of Finnish universities. The tensions are related to 1) academic leadership and management legitimacy, 2) regional political tensions and university profiling, 3) political power over the university system, 4) changing academic work and profession, 5) academic autonomy and the role of the state, and 6) the future role of the university institution. Moreover, the article discusses issues regarding how to adapt the framework of corporate sustainability to the context of higher education.

Why is it that when debating the economic crisis, actors in the Portuguese parliament invoke more frequently countries affected by the crisis, whereas actors in the Spanish parliament invoke econom...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to test citizens’ attitudes on political involvement in energy policy-making that has generally seen to be dominated by experts and business interests and been relatively closed to citizen involvement. The study asks whether citizens are willing to participate politically more through political consumerism (i.e., consumption choices) or through representative democracy and if citizens are willing to assign decision-making to the experts representing public administration and business, as stealth democracy asserts. Design/methodology/approach Methodologically, the study is based on postal surveys conducted in 2007 and 2016 among a random sample representing Finns who were 18-75 years of age. Findings Political consumerism and stealth democracy were not considered as alternative and detached modes for electoral participation but rather as complementary. However, adherence to stealth democracy was a reaction of people who feel powerlessness in the face of the regime, while the supporters of political consumerism had a higher trust in their ability to influence. Originality/value The study is the first one which empirically compares citizens’ support for these three modes of involvement, and it generates new knowledge for the scholars and decision-makers when planning citizen role in (energy) policy-making.

Purpose This paper aims to understand performance management as a social phenomenon by investigating the challenges of performance dialogue, a phenomenon where participants jointly interpret performance information and discuss it while identifying the actions needed to manage the performance according to this information. Design/methodology/approach The research aim is achieved by conducting an interview study. Empirical data were collected by interviewing 30 public managers in three Finnish municipalities and subjecting it to content analysis using inductive category development. Findings The research provides empirical evidence from challenges in engaging in performance dialogue. It moreover derives a comprehensive conceptual model categorizing factors inhibiting performance dialogue. Practical implications Difficulties in conducting organizational performance dialogues are better explained. The findings support the management of performance dialogue by helping practitioners to identify challenges associated to these dialogues. Originality/value This study contributes to current conversations on performance management by showing that performance dialogues are no miracle cure for problems in performance information use. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that complications in performance information use are intertwined in many ways.

Many European nations share a political challenge: the ageing population and recessionary economics lead to dwindling resources for welfare services, while scandals and reports of unacceptable deficits in particular in care services for older people arise. In Finland this situation was responded to with a new Care Act for Older People that was passed in 2013. This article tracks the legislative process of the law and demonstrates how this issue of fundamental values and resources was turned into a question of apolitical governance and expert management, resulting in a dubious, status-quo supporting law. It presents a case of how the subsumption of homo politicus in the neoliberal era in practice can happen, and how depoliticisation can function in a context with which neoliberalism is not often associated: namely the care policy of a traditionally social-democratic Nordic welfare state.

The literature on parliamentary war powers has focused on the veto rights of legislatures. This case study on the Finnish Eduskunta adopts a more comprehensive approach. Based on parliamentary documents and statistics, it reconstructs parliamentary involvement in decision-making on individual crisis management operations, laws on crisis management, and ‘grand strategy’ documents since the mid-1990s. The findings underscore the importance of politicisation, with conflicts over legislation and the Government Security and Defence Policy Reports enabling political parties and the Eduskunta to set parameters for subsequent decisions on individual operations. The politicisation of crisis management facilitated stronger participation rights for the Eduskunta and created ‘ownership’ of troop deployments among members of parliament (MPs). Debates have nonetheless become less intense, with broader cross-party support for participation in crisis management and for European Union (EU)-led operations in particular.

Publisher's version (útgefin grein), The Nordic countries are often perceived as a coherent group representing the Nordic model of welfare states, with a strong emphasis on the public provision of universal welfare and a strong concern with social equality. But today we see a change in the Nordic model as part of a global knowledge economy. The aim of this article is to examine education in the five Nordic countries utilising three dimensions of political change: deregulation, marketisation and privatisation. We also analyse the parallel changes in relation to segregation and differentiation in education. The analysis shows that the themes related to deregulation seem to show fairly similar patterns and structures in all contexts. The emerging differences were discovered mainly in the themes of marketisation and privatisation. Institutional segregation emerges in all Nordic countries to different extents along the lines of these three processes, and we observe a simultaneous social segregation and differentiation with an ambiguous connection to them. Based on these findings, the question of what is left of the “Nordic model” could be raised.

The concept of smart specialization has rapidly acquired a central position in European policy and academic circles. It raises interesting challenges for the regional studies agenda. First, smart specialization is about not only policy formulation, implementation and evaluation but also pooling scattered resources, competencies and powers to serve both shared and individual ambitions. Thus, policy formulation and implementation need to be seen in a new light. Second, when smart specialization is seen as one of the platforms for aligning several actors to boost regional economic development, the need to understand agency in its multiplicity emerges as central. This paper argues that to achieve truly transformative smart specialization strategies, there is a need to investigate in more depth the multi-actor strategy processes and new forms of leadership, as well as to invest time and money in advancing related capabilities across European regions.

Despite more than two decades of research on semi-presidential regimes, we still know very little about the actual coordination between the president and the prime minister. Through an in-depth analysis of Lithuanian semi-presidentialism, this article underscores the importance of institutional design on intra-executive balance of power. Drawing primarily on interviews with top-level civil servants and office-holders, it argues that in the absence of written rules or other strong norms guiding intra-executive coordination, presidents enjoy more discretion in designing their own modes of operation. Coordination depends on the initiative of the president, with ad hoc practices further weakening the position of the prime minister. While Lithuanian semi-presidentialism has functioned smoothly, the personality-centred politics commonly found in Central and East European countries create favourable conditions for presidential activism.

The purpose of this study was to address whether the attitudinal distance between the Finnish energy elite (decision-makers and experts) and the citizenry has changed with regarding the energy policy from 2007 to 2016, and whether their attitudinal differences were more concerned with the substance of the energy policy than the process of policy-making. The year 2007 represents a period of rapid and stable economic growth, while the year 2016 represents the immediate time after a prolonged recession that resulted from both international economic crises and domestic political decisions. Theoretically this study was based on the theory of stealth democracy, and the methodology used was postal surveys and expert interviews. The attitudinal distance between the elite and the citizenry decreased regarding the substance and the process of the energy policy. The citizenry supported stealth democracy more than the elite; people prioritized the experts and businessmen more than elected officials as energy policy-makers, while the elite prioritized the elected officials more than experts and businessmen. Our findings showed a decreasing appreciation for classical democracy within the energy elite. Citizens' attitudes on stealth democracy were not clearly related to their level of conventional political involvement and civic efficacy.

Despite increased scholarly attention, there is still limited knowledge on how empathy works in democratic deliberation. This article examines the role of empathy in citizen deliberation with the help of a deliberative experiment on immigration. First, a random sample of citizens was surveyed regarding their opinions on immigration. Based on their opinions, they were then divided into a permissive or a non-permissive enclave, and randomly assigned into like-minded or mixed-opinion groups for deliberation. After deliberation, they were surveyed anew. The study analyzes: (a) empathy differences between permissive and non-permissive participants; (b) changes in outgroup empathy toward immigrants as a result of deliberation; and (c) differences in prosocial behavior (i.e., donating to charity). The results show that the permissive respondents had more empathy, especially toward immigrants, than the non-permissive respondents. Among participants, outgroup empathy increased during deliberation. Regarding prosocial behavior, the permissive participants donated more often to charity at the end of the experiment.

Contains fulltext : 218776pub.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) In 2017, at a time when the EU was experiencing a triple crisis, the European Commission published a White Paper containing five scenarios outlining potential ways out of it. In his State of the Union address Commission President Juncker added a sixth. Although the Commission refers to fundamental values it neglects gender equality and reduces equality to the harmonization of the quantity of fish in fish fingers and EU‐wide access to vaccination against measles. Despite the neglect of gender equality, the scenarios are not gender neutral. A feminist institutionalist analysis unpacks the potential direct and indirect positive and negative gendered consequences of each scenario and illuminates how the choice of scenario makes a difference as to their gendered impacts and as to the access for feminist actors to bring gender issues to the table. 06 september 2019 17 p.

Purpose This paper aims to analyse performance measurement ambiguities in hybrid universities. In accounting research, performance measurement of universities has been discussed in detail, and there is some research on impacts of hybridity in institutional systems. However, there is a particular need in accounting research for more sophisticated theorizations of the ambiguities associated with measuring performance in hybrid organizations. Moreover, there is a dearth of accounting-related interdisciplinary studies conceptualizing the hybridity of universities with important implications for measuring and reporting performance. This paper fills this research gap by providing more elaborate basis for conceptualizing performance measurement ambiguities through the lenses of hybrid universities. Design/methodology/approach The authors critically scrutinize the promise of performance measurement in hybrid universities and explore why it may result in new policy problems. Questions asked are as follows: How can we better understand those institutional mechanisms through which the promise of performance measurement may ultimately result in new forms of ambiguities and unexpected outcomes, and what are the specific characteristics of hybridity that make those mechanisms possible in universities? Findings The authors propose a conceptual model for studying universities in hybrid performance settings. The model provides a new inter-disciplinary approach for conceptualizing performance measurement ambiguities in universities when they are influenced by hybridity, hybrid arrangements and hybrid governance. Originality/value This paper provides more elaborate basis for understanding hybridity of universities, not only through reforms for combining business, government and collegial professional logics (e.g. corporatization, marketization) or through new hybrid mixes of professions but also as a more comprehensive, inter-disciplinary understanding of institutional structures, logics and practices at modern universities.

Due to the national importance of metropolitan areas, central governments seek to make them as attractive and competitive as possible. In many cases, this is done through state control over metropolitan areas and their governance arrangements. This article examines the relationship between state control and metropolitan governance capacity based on a comparative case study of four metropolitan areas: Auckland, Dublin, Montreal and Oslo. These areas represent different models of metropolitan governance, as well as different forms of state control. We studied state control by focusing on political and administrative decentralization: how independently can the metropolitan government make decisions and perform its tasks? The conclusion is that the different dimensions of decentralization are connected to capacity, but not straightforwardly. This study indicates that state involvement through different forms of control can increase metropolitan governance capacity, but only if it is combined with mandate and supportive policy actions.

Lived citizenship has emerged as a key concept in citizenship studies over the last two decades. A growing number of authors have applied ideas of lived citizenship as a generative approach to reco...

The Finnish financial autonomy reform pushed university leaders and academics to a juncture where they must navigate through increasing competition dynamics. Enabling the two types of organisationa...

The European Parliament (EP) offers channels for policy input through committees, intragroups, and the commissioning of reports and studies. Civil society equality organizations (CSOs) promoting diversity, gender equality and sexual rights are among the actors using such channels. Today they experience severe cut-backs and direct attacks by populist and radical-right parties who increasingly gained electoral support in several member states. The trajectory on the supranational level is less clear. This article examines the question of whether the increase in populist and right-wing parties in the EP changed how supranational CSOs promoting (gender) equality used venues for making their voice heard in EP policy-making in the 2014–2019 legislature. We investigate the challenges to the relationships between the EP, its committees and political groups, and equality CSOs. Analysing documents and interviews with MEPs and CSOs, our findings show that in the changing political environment, CSOs have moved towards more informal channels of participation, thereby avoiding polarization and conflict and maintaining an effective presence on the political stage.

In this paper, we propose that there is a politics of encounters centered on the body at play in seeking asylum and refuge, and that it is critical to study how it unfolds from the point of view of both governing and agency. Building on existing work that looks at the role of embodiment in the political struggles of refugees, and leaning on Helmuth Plessner’s original thinking about social embodiment, we develop a theoretical understanding of this political dynamic, illustrating how it can help us make sense of power relations and forms of governance and (latent) resistance involved in it.

This article examines Jürgen Habermas’ concept of communicative power and describes how it transforms into political power in actual decision-making. For this purpose, the article develops the use of Habermas’ typology of validity claims in communicative action as a framework for analysis. This means analyzing how public performances invoking these validity claims affect actors’ authority, which is then capitalized in policymaking. The article thus integrates Habermas’ procedural view on deliberative politics with the more culturally oriented view on political performances. It also contributes to the discussion about the “mediatization of politics” by introducing a communicative perspective to complement the more common institutional and systems perspectives. This theoretical and analytical approach is illustrated by examples drawn from evidence in 16 semi-structured interviews conducted with participants in the policy networks involved in the 2015 Finnish labor market negotiations.

Top-level politicians and political journalists have been key actors in public discussion necessary for a democratic political system and transparent political decision-making. This article presents an empirical social network analysis showing the connections between Finnish top-level politicians and political journalists on Twitter and the construction of mediated political and media elites in this specific context. The article argues that there is a need to take seriously the Twitter as a medium and the new ways of networking provided by the digital, hybrid media environment in particular. The results of our empirical study suggest that it may even be relevant to talk about mediated elites, which have emerged under the new social condition created by the digitalization of media, culture, and society.

In our current context, researching how young children encounter and inhabit the nation among diverse people is ever-more important. In societies free of conflict, the nation operates beneath the surface, therefore, it is difficult to study. By bringing together the perspectives of ‘everyday nationalism’ and ‘cultural pedagogy’, I develop the concept of ‘pedagogy of nation’ to focus on and account for various didactic means through which young children learn to inhabit the nation and to further explore everyday nationalism.

Refugees often find themselves in challenging positions regarding their familial relations while seeking asylum. Whereas transnational human rights agreements and institutions identify fami...

This article examines the perceptions of early-career, fixed-term researchers in Finnish universities towards changing careers. It maps out the reasons this group has considered the change and where they see themselves in five years. As a theoretical framework, a synthesisation of variables related to career change, created by Ryan, Healy, and Sullivan [2012. “Oh, Won’t You Stay? Predictors of Faculty Intent to Leave a Public University.” Higher Education 63: 421–437.], was used. The results show that the most common reasons for early-career researchers to change careers are job-security related stress, job-related dissatisfaction, and salary. Over half of the respondents would like to work at a university in five years; however, half of the respondents would also be happy to work in industry. Further examination of the responses highlighted the polarisation of those academics who were optimistic about their future employment opportunities in academia and those with highly pessimistic outlooks. The results of the study bear crucial importance when addressing the current discussion and issues related to the career paths of early-career researchers in Europe. peerReviewed

A key factor of semi-presidential regimes is power-sharing mechanisms between president and government. Influenced by Shugart and Carey’s seminal work on premier-presidential regimes, this article addresses intra-executive dynamics in light of recent scholarship on the risks and consequences associated with conflict and cooperation between the president and the cabinet. Through an in-depth comparison of three premier-presidential systems with broadly similar constitutional designs, Finland, Lithuania and Romania, it forces us to reconsider how coordination mechanisms and political context shape presidential influence. Absent of a working constitutional division of labour and established modes of intra-executive coordination, presidents are more likely to use alternative channels of influence – such as the strategy of ‘going public’ or direct contacts with political parties, the legislature or civil society stakeholders – and to intervene in questions falling under the competence of the government. Lack of institutionalized coordination also benefits the presidents as they hold the initiative regarding cooperation between the two executives.

The need for greater efficiency, productivity and quality in the higher education sector has triggered increased governmental interest towards different mechanisms of accountability, especially evaluation and performance measurement. This interest has developed over a relatively long period of time, but it has now reached its culmination point in many ways. For instance, advances in citation tracking, performance data collection and databases and the professionalisation of evaluative practices and methods have opened new avenues for verifying accountability. This chapter offers definitions for the key concepts used throughout the book, as follows: accountability, evaluation, and performance measurement and management. Each section is followed by a short contextualisation of the concept in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The chapter ends with a short discussion about the policy convergence between Nordic countries and the reasons for it.

This paper investigates the accountability mechanisms introduced in the universities in the Nordic countries by building on a typology of accountability types. By utilising survey data, it analyses how academics experience the changes in accountability mechanisms and how they perceive the impact of these changes on their performance. The analysis shows that especially political/bureaucratic and managerial accountability demands have been strengthened. This development has fostered debates on how to measure academic performance. Some academics, more in Denmark than in the other countries, have experienced the development as a sign of mistrust.

In national policymaking speakers commonly refer to models and policies adopted elsewhere as a means to justify a bill. However, empirical analysis of parliamentary talk in eight national parliaments (Argentina, Canada, Chile, Finland, Mexico, Russia, Spain and the USA) reported in this article showed an interesting relationship between two types of justifications: of the eight countries compared, the ones that rank lowest in references to the international community as means to justify or criticize domestic legislation rank highest in the frequency with which national self-image is evoked. Yet these two types of justification exist in the same debates, because the occurrence of both of these discourses correlates with debate length. The variation is due to differences between political cultures: in countries like Argentina and the USA, where national self-image is employed most frequently, speakers have at their disposal stories that bolster beliefs about the country’s uniqueness. In contrast, in the parliaments of Canada and Finland, where references to national self-image are most infrequent, references to the country’s history are rare, and talk about national self-image is entwined with international references.

In our present research we address the question of whether it is valid to apply the Quality Assurance and Evaluation (QAE) umbrella concept, which was formulated to explain new phenomena in European educational governance, to similar developments in Brazilian basic education. This led us to reflect on the possible pitfalls and potential strengths of using umbrella concepts as analytical tools. This article presents this exploration and its operationalisation. We confronted in-built assumptions in QAE with the contested, consensual and creative use of the notion of quality in Brazilian basic education, and looked for relationships. Our analysis shows that the Brazilian developments reiterate the relationships concerning global interconnectivity, and challenges those pertaining to conformity. We argue that the main risks of using umbrella concepts seem to concern the re-production of understandings, which frequently leads to the disregarding of deviation.

The aim of this article is to explore the ways in which gender equality is used in gender and politics research. We contend that the political and theoretical relevance of studying the multiple meanings of gender equality is enhanced by current crises. We discern four strategies used in gender and politics research: (1) escaping equality; (2) fixing equality; (3) deconstructing equality; or (4) delegating equality to political theory. This article is motivated by the belief that what is needed is not only more reflection on these choices, but also a productive dialogue between the different strategies.

The paper addresses the question whether national decision-making has become increasingly interdependent in recent decades, and what role “world models” play in any such trend. These questions are scrutinised by utilising the “Historic Hansard” corpus, which contains all records of the UK Parliament from 1803 to 2005, complemented by other corpora. The results show that references to other countries were most frequent in parliamentary debates very early in the 19th century. However, allusions to other countries have evolved from referencing case examples to referencing policies that are constructed and branded as models. The idea of transferable models caught on particularly strongly from the 1950s onward. The other corpora used for the study confirmed that these changes reflect a global trend. Hence, the post-war era has witnessed a worldwide spread of the idea of model as a precondition for a global proliferation of named models.

In this article, we analyse local resident activism as a rising form of participation which, in part, challenges the familiar understanding of political representation. We acknowledge that today also non-institutional agents, such as civic movements, increasingly claim and perform themselves as representatives of varying constituencies. Here mandate and accountability depend on how people judge the performance of the claimed representative on an ongoing basis, as though in a non-stop election campaign. The material has been gathered in Finland between 2014 and 2015.

The metaphor of ‘empire’ has been applied not infrequently to the European Union—most notably by Jan Zielonka (2006)—and there is indeed a growing, though not necessarily very well interconnected, body of scholarly literature on the topic (see Behr and Stivachtis 2016; and e.g. Waever 1997; Gravier 2009; Marks 2012). The extent to which the EU has been, or can be interpreted as an ‘empire’ clearly depends on what is meant by the word. It is often used in a negative sense to indicate the ‘imperialist’ ambitions and policies of the ‘Brussels bureaucracy’, allegedly to subjugate its member states, or how the bureaucracy or the leading member states dominate the continent and some other parts of the world, particularly the former European colonies. On the other hand, there are people who see ‘empire’ as a more positive concept, implying the diversity of the constituent units, with multiple loyalties and overlapping authorities. An example of this is Zielonka (2006), who defines the EU as a neo-medieval polity, or Robert Cooper (2002), who sees it as a postmodern one. Those who embrace ‘imperialism’ also stress the civilisational aspect of developed and enlightened imperial communities, though more often this mission is seen in a critical light. Even the EU Commission President, Manuel Barroso, once noted that ‘sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire’ (Mahony 2007). However, he distanced himself from the negative aspects of the concept by adding ‘what we have is the first non-imperial empire’. Given these loaded meanings, it might be difficult to refer to ‘empire’ as a purely analytical concept. Nevertheless, ‘empire’ can be seen as a vast territorial unit larger than a nation-state, consisting of a centre and peripheries but often without definitive outer borders, or even more nominally as a territorial unit ruled by an emperor. If the EU is an empire in the former sense, it is definitively an empire without an emperor.

In the early 2000s, Simon Hix and his colleagues declared the European Parliament (EP) constitutes a good laboratory to test theories and hypotheses about legislative or party behaviour. However, scholars mainly focused on roll-call votes analysis, allowing them to investigate voting behaviour, coalition formation as well as activities in committees. The author argues that work in parliament should not be investigated without considering constituency work. Surprisingly, despite the institutionalisation of district work, only a few studies have focused on micro-level linkages between members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and citizens. The results show that MEPs are in contact with citizens having matters to do with the European Union (EU) but not directly with their constituents. In the district, MEPs are more experts of the EU than members of the community. By investigating day-to-day contacts between citizens and their MEPs, this paper offers a new perspective on the debate about the democratic deficit of EP and EU institutions.

This article uses strategy metaphors consisting of a plan, a home and a game to study government programme formation in Finland. The strategy approach both contradicts and complements the traditional political science approach to government formation. The government programme has been strategic in the sense of separating the formulation and implementation parts of the strategy. The most important function of the metaphor of plan is to hold coalition parties together. The adopted austerity policy provides a meagre contribution to the expansion of services and the increase in government spending. Consequently, the home metaphor in the government programme appears in the distant future and in combating external threats. The game metaphor is apparent in the goal of making contracts with social partners. The vocabulary change from politics to strategy alters the government programme's position in terms of catering to the needs of civil servants, citizens and stakeholders. The strategy perspective might be instrumental in shifting open democratic debates to closed and secretive policy formations.