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The article focuses on the evolving role of parliaments in political systems, emphasizing their core functions of election, legislation, oversight and communication. Topics discussed include the impact of recent changes and challenges on legislative operations; the complexity and variation of legislative processes across different systems; and the broader context of democratisation, de-democratisation and de-institutionalisation.

A functional legislature is very vital for democratisation. During the time of democratic consolidation, parliament changes from its primary roles of oversight, representation and legislation into 'important public arenas of partisan dispute, of encounters with social topics, of negotiations and of important decision-making'. Populist leaders in parliamentary systems like Turkey recently either led to sui generis presidential systems or transformed them into illiberal democracies by expanding the executive branch's power to amend the constitution, which contradicts the favourable conditions of the third wave of democratisation at the turn of the twenty-first century. By streamlining legislative processes, the Turkish Constitution of 1982 envisaged an empowered executive that would subordinate the parliament. The three constitutional modifications passed after 2007 resulted in de-democratisation, de-parliamentarisation and eventually, a regime change from democratic consolidation to autocracy. The parliamentary debates on these constitutional amendments, which included popular presidential election, judicial reform and the so-called 'Turkish style' presidential governance system, failed to reach a consensus and were marked by an adversarial rather than deliberative approach. Have constitutional reforms made in the name of re-democratisation resulted in de-democratisation, with the legislature entirely crippled, the judiciary reliant and the executive exercising sole authority? This study aims to analyse the impact of three consequential constitutional amendments on democratic backsliding in Turkey, with special reference to the decline of parliament. Parliamentary minutes on the relevant constitutional amendments, procedural changes disabling the parliament from performing its legislative and oversight functions and the actual outcomes of these amendments in terms of executive-legislative relations will be discussed. In conclusion, potentials for strengthening parliament, checks and balances, and re-democratisation will be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the practice of the Hungarian Constitutional Court regarding the restrictions of fundamental rights during the state of danger between 2020 and 2023. The state of danger – which is a type of special legal order in Hungary – was first introduced in March 2020 due to Covid-19. The rules of the Fundamental Law related to the special legal order reserve the Government the opportunity of broader restrictions on certain fundamental rights than in a normal legal order. It was the first period when the Constitutional Court could have established its practice and defined its own role in a special legal order, since the democratic transition in Hungary. The need for the interpretation of the constitutional rules on special legal order never applied before has posed a significant challenge to the Constitutional Court. The paper first examines the development of the constitutional rules on special legal order situations since the democratic transition, then reviews the most important parts of the Constitutional Court's practice on the cases related to the restrictions of fundamental rights in special legal order with a focus on the elements of the test used for checking the constitutionality of the challenged items of legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of constitutional courts (CCs) of post-communist Europe typically entailed the belief in CCs' transformative potential for the consolidation of democracy. Recently, this belief has been questioned, albeit the knowledge of why at least some CCs in the region failed to prevent the rise of non-democratic regimes remains limited. This article addresses this gap via the cases of Hungary and Slovakia, which have taken a different trajectory post-2010: the Slovak CC (SCC) remains an independent institution, while the Hungarian CC (HCC) has been packed by the executive. By combining contextual case law analysis of judgments referring to democracy and semi-structured interviews, the article shows that, during critical moments, the HCC did not perceive itself as responsible for Hungarian democracy, which resulted in its self-marginalisation. The SCC was largely spared from similarly critical moments, which, however, facilitated particular self-perceptions of its responsibility (or lack thereof). These findings offer empirical support for institutionalist scholarship that emphasizes the impact of ideas in calibrating the self-perceptions of political institutions and their positioning in the political system. Constitutional courts remain inseparable from the political regimes they are located in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the changing ideological landscape of post-Mao China through the prism of the science fiction work, The Three Courts, published in the late 1970s. This work and its comic adaptations are not landmark works of literary history and popular culture but rather a utopian fable addressing the profound issues of the reform. We demonstrate how the comic version received a temporary ideological license to support the popular liberty movement, which reflects the cooperation of officials and civil society in the face of the socialist faith crisis and how such collaboration broke down in 1979. By analyzing the two revisions made to this work, we argue that the comic can be seen as a site of liberty that contains radical political content, but its visual output has not been censored. Thus, before the new myth of post-socialism took shape, this text reveals the unfulfilled expectations of democratized reforms by pro-democratic knowledge elites and cultural bureaucrats standing among the ruins of Mao-era China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zanzibar, a self-governing state of Tanzania, may look like a tranquil tropical archipelago. But in the 60 years since a revolution overthrew a sultanate with origins in Oman, its politics have been turbulent. Revolutionary doctrines of socialism and one-party rule led to repression that lasted for years. Far from bringing stability, the introduction of multiparty politics in the 1990s has led to cycles of electoral violence and failed reconciliation talks. The legacies of the 1964 revolution continue to define the deeply polarized political landscape, even as demographic shifts and foreign investment transform the islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the transformation of welfare states carries far-reaching implications for property relations, there is an astonishing amnesia regarding property in research concerning the welfare state. To date, the French sociologist Robert Castel is the only thinker to have illuminated the connection between property and social rights: he understands transfer payments and public infrastructures as social property and describes them as rehabilitation of the previously propertyless. Starting out from Castel's concept of social property, the article discusses its strengths and weaknesses and elaborates conceptually on what it would mean to think of social rights consistently as social property. The authors argue that it is a worthwhile endeavour to think further with and go beyond Castel's concept of social property. This allows not only to think about public alternatives to private property and to theorise the dismantling of social rights as expropriation, but also to think further on the democratisation of social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates digital and non-digital traces reused beyond the context of creation. A central idea of this article is that no (reused) dataset is perfect. Therefore, data quality assessment becomes essential to determine if a given dataset is "good enough" to be used to fulfill the users' goals. Biases, a possible source of discrimination, have become a relevant data challenge. Consequently, it is appropriate to analyze whether quality assessment indicators provide information on potential biases in the dataset. We use examples representing two opposing sides regarding data access to reflect on the relationship between quality and bias. First, the European Union open data portal fosters the democratization of data and expects users to manipulate the databases directly to perform their analyses. Second, online behavioral advertising systems offer individualized promotional services but do not share the datasets supporting their design. Quality assessment is socially constructed, as there is not a universal definition but a set of quality dimensions, which might change for each professional context. From the users' perspective, trust/credibility stands out as a relevant quality dimension in the two analyzed cases. Results show that quality indicators (whatever they are) provide limited information on potential biases. We suggest that data literacy is most needed among both open data users and clients of behavioral advertising systems. Notably, users must (be able to) understand the limitations of datasets for an optimal and bias-free interpretation of results and decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central Asian states have recently implemented significant constitutional reforms. In the case of the authoritarian republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the nature of the constitutional amendments, introduced in 2022 and 2023, respectively, is hard to accurately assess. On the one hand, they are a step towards democratization and strengthened guarantees of human rights and freedoms; on the other, they reinforce the current undemocratic government mechanisms. This article discusses the most recent constitutional reforms in both countries, distinguishing three main areas of change: ideology, social issues, and governance mechanisms. It is argued that these reforms generally fall within the paradigm of authoritarian constitutionalism and are an adjustment of the countries' constitutions to the current needs of their undemocratic presidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how the Federal National Council (FNC), the parliament of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), transformed from a consultative body to a legislative institution through gradual and incremental changes. It argues that the increasing number of parliamentary questions led to legal, procedural, and behavioral changes in the FNC, influenced by external (government support and public pressure) and internal (rationality, competence, incrementalism, and system development) factors. The success of this transformation is attributed to its gradual nature. Anticipating continued momentum, the study outlines future prospects shaped by the UAE government's commitment to FNC empowerment, heightened public expectations, and the influx of educated and experienced individuals into parliamentary roles. This ongoing institutional change reflects a responsive adaptation to evolving governance demands in the UAE. The study contributes to the theory of institutions and the understanding of legislative oversight in newly liberalized political systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a discussion on the current challenges of critical thinking on communication in Latin America and seeks to outline a research agenda towards 2030, based on the recognition of the historical achievements of the so-called Latin American School of Communication. This prospective exercise takes as its starting point the conclusions of the first meeting of Latin American specialists and experts in communication, which was held in Costa Rica in September 1973, at the initiative of CIESPAL, and shows that the legacy of this foundational meeting is still valid, 50 years later, in the work of the regional networks of researchers. The new faces of cultural dependence, the consequences of the platforming of labor, the role of technology in the articulation of the public speech and the role of critical studies on Public Opinion and Political Communication in the democratization of Latin American societies are some of the challenges to be faced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does introducing de jure political equality affect legislative representation and the identity of elected politicians? This article exploits differences in enfranchisement rates across electoral districts to present evidence on the consequences of one of the most sizable franchise extensions in European history, the 1912 Italian reform, which trebled the electorate and left electoral rules and district boundaries unchanged. Enfranchisement increased the vote share of left-wing social reformers but had no impact on their parliamentary representation, on the parliamentary representation of the aristocracy and traditional elites, or on political competition. I document and analyze elite's efforts to minimize the political impact of enfranchisement: social reformers were systematically defeated in districts that saw a surge in political violence as well as in districts where conservative candidates had signed a secret pact (the Gentiloni pact) with the Catholic Electoral Union. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of democratization and elite persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between modernization and religion is contested, with the literature differing in how and in what ways religion helps or hinders countries' social, economic, and political development. This paper draws upon the history of Christianity in South Korea to critically explore the links between religion and modernization. It makes two arguments. First, discussions of the link between religion and modernization frequently employ static definitions of religion, but Christianity is characterized by oscillations between worldly (institutionalizing) and unworldly (countercultural) impulses that theoretically make very different contributions to social, economic, and political development. Second, in the case of South Korea, it is shown that both impulses have made vital contributions to the country's modernization at different times. This suggests that the dynamic tug-of-war between the institutional and countercultural facets of Korean Christianity, although problematic for individual believers and religious leaders, helped it become an important contributor to the country's success story. However, this paper concludes on a cautionary note by warning that extreme instances of these impulses have caused cleavages between Christianity and the Korean state and society and could undermine its future contributions. This suggests that diversity and toleration—a hallmark of Korean Christianity—will continue to be the best pathway forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic transitions, franchise extensions, and civil war settlements can often be seen as power-sharing agreements in which opposing factions try to use institutional structures to 'lock in' the terms of a settlement. But the commitment power inherent in institutions varies. When the institutional environment is weak and credibility is low, it is difficult for a powerful elite to tie its hands and give up power. This article studies a window-of-opportunity model in which an enfranchised elite faces a periodic threat. Institutional weakness is parameterized in terms of the elite's marginal return to trying to undermine a power-sharing agreement. The analysis shows that (i) bargaining breaks down if the overall institutional environment is too weak and why it does; (ii) equilibrium agreements share more power with the opposition when the institutional environment is weak; (iii) there is a non-monotonic relation between power sharing and how often the opposition poses a threat; and (iv) power sharing is path dependent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of a shift in focus from political praxis to trauma work in the context of a failed democratisation movement. It investigates the various phenomena which emerge when intellectuals, under the traumatic impact of violence and atrocities, place trauma narration at the core of their interventions. Drawing on document analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with twenty nine exiled Syrian intellectuals in Paris and Berlin who had participated in the revolutionary movement of 2011, the paper suggests that an inversion of the normative power structures pertaining to how intellectuals relate to their publics occurs when they adopt, under conditions of extreme violence and trauma, what we call a radically embedded positionality vis-à-vis 'the people'. This results in the dismantling of previous figurations of the 'militant intellectual' along with praxis-focused notions of the 'responsibility of intellectuals', ultimately undermining their ideational influence upon domestic publics and weakening their political impact and critical role within a revolutionary movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bhutan has attracted international attention by pioneering the Gross National Happiness index, gaining a reputation for promoting holistic societal well-being instead of the more typical focus on economic growth. Yet a decade and a half since becoming a democracy, Bhutan is experiencing growing pains. A dearth of job opportunities has prompted more young people to emigrate. And minority rights are still not secure, particularly those of Nepali-speakers, after many were declared noncitizens in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, the pendulum of regime change across the world has swung dramatically from democratization to autocratization. There has been much contention and debate about the extent, variation, and causes surrounding these processes. This special issue turns the spotlight away from regime change and political elites towards societal agents, particularly societal agents who mobilize and resist against autocratization unfolding within democratic and authoritarian regimes. In this introductory article, we review and critique the literature on autocratization studies, and introduce our concept of "agents of resistance." We argue that agents of resistance can develop and engage in repertoires against autocratization under any regime type. Specifically, the contributions in this special issue highlight seemingly mundane repertoires of resistance, and how they can grow through cumulative interactions among societal agents, and between societal agents and the state. Scholars should recognize the full spectrum of resistance and both their liberal and illiberal elements to better assess the impact on global trends of democratization or autocratization. Finally, this article discusses some methodological trends with regards to the existing literature, and introduces the contributions that compose this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2016 and 2019, South Korean conservatives organized a movement called the T'aegŭkki Rallies to oppose the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye and to protest against President Moon Jae-in's administration. This movement is puzzling for its timing, demographic composition, and rhetorical choices. Through in-depth interviews with rally participants and non-participants, I illustrate that a collective identity, shaped by authoritarian socialization, strengthened with positive memories about an authoritarian past, combined to mobilize rally participants. Curiously, rally participants saw themselves as defenders of liberal democracy, protecting South Korea against progressive forces seeking to turn the country into a communist state. However, my interviews revealed that they were, in fact, trying to protect the authoritarian past. In this manner, South Korea's authoritarian legacy entrenches ideological polarization and hampers common understandings of democratic citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent can apolitical civic engagement cultivate resistance against authoritarian rule? Building upon the "community pantries" phenomenon which sprung up between April and May 2021 across the Philippines, I test whether this jolt of civic engagement – decentralized, donation-driven and volunteer-managed food pantry sites – impacted the May 2022 presidential election. I find that areas with more community pantries relative to population were more likely to vote for Robredo, the candidate that most closely represented the democratic opposition. These findings suggest that civic engagement, even that which is not explicitly political or partisan in nature, can be an effective form of democratic resistance in autocratizing settings. This article seeks to contribute to the literature on civic engagement and democratization, strategies of autocratic backlash, and social movement repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reward-based crowdfunding has enabled an unprecedented number of consumers to provision capital for commercial and artistic ventures. Each year, consumers use digital platforms to transfer billions of dollars to entrepreneurs and artists to help them develop a wide range of market innovations. Notably, these consumers obtain no financial benefits, no formal guarantee that their money will be used aptly, and no reimbursement options. Under such materially unfavorable conditions, why do consumers transfer their money to these producers? The present research answers this question by introducing the concept of a "market-fostering gift system": a social contract that entices consumers to fund the creation and enhancement of market offerings by mobilizing the logic and practices of gift-giving. This conceptualization includes the core stakeholders, processes, outcomes, and shortcomings of reward-based crowdfunding, providing theoretical structure to this consequential articulation of platform capitalism. In addition, this conceptualization advances theory about how gift and market economies intersect. Whereas previous research emphasizes the tensions that characterize their interface, this article brings to the fore the complementary, scalable relationship between gift-giving and market exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does landholding inequality undermine democratization? Recent contributions have challenged the argument that landholding elites oppose suffrage extension if geographically fixed assets are unequally distributed. We advance research on this long-standing question by exploiting exogenous variance to reinvestigate the relationship. Using multiple instruments, we find that landholding inequality decreases support for suffrage extension. By focusing on traditional patterns of social control, we explore an empirically neglected mechanism linking landholding inequality and democratization. Taking advantage of four direct democratic votes between 1866 and 1877 in Switzerland, we demonstrate that landholding inequality also influences the political preferences of ordinary citizens who do not control these resources. This paper shows that high levels of landholding inequality provide local elites with the incentive and the means to align the local population's voting behaviour with their political goals. Supplementary analyses using qualitative and quantitative data further substantiate this social control mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once depicted as a flagship case for the soft power—based foreign policy of young democracies, Turkey's conduct of foreign affairs following its authoritarian backsliding has been increasingly associated with hard power. Using the case of Turkey's Africa policy under the AKP, this article challenges this reading and its underlying conceptual assumptions. To overcome the spurious democracy—soft power vs. autocracy—hard power dichotomy, it argues for adopting a process-oriented approach to analysing the foreign policies of (autocratising) states by focusing on, firstly, the foreign policy situations in which they mobilize power resources to a particular end; and, secondly, the extent to which they attempt to gain control over societal power resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Homer's Odyssey, King Odysseus asked his men to tie him to the mast of his ship with the hope that he would not jump into the sea after listening to the Sirens. The Odyssey's hero made a pact to bind himself in the future. He knew that the temptation would be impossible to resist without restraints. Similarly, the creators and advocates of international investment agreements believe that providing rights to foreign investors through international treaties will chill State policies that would harm the interests of investors in the future. The "rope" to tie the State is the threat of facing multimillion-dollar claims brought by investors to international arbitration tribunals. But this widely accepted model assumes that the State, like Odysseus, is a single, static unit that can be tied to the mast. Analyzing twenty-five years of international investment dispute data, this Article's findings challenge the conventional wisdom that the "ropes" are effective in chilling energy government policies. The Article analyzes two variables: 1) the time elapsed between the initial filing of an arbitral claim and the final award and 2) changes in the administration of particular countries during the pendency of the arbitration proceedings. My objective is to identify how often the government that was in power at the time of the enacted regulation is the same actor that has to compensate the investor. The Article concludes that the chilling effects assumption does not apply evenly across all sectors and actors. Paradoxically, those countries with more democratic transitions tend to drag out the arbitration proceedings for a longer period, and investors there face more challenges in recovering compensation. In contrast, in those countries where the same party or officer remained in power for more than a decade, the government dropped out of the system by denouncing the treaties, tended to settle earlier in the process, or otherwise avoided dragging out the compensation stage. Rather than tying the hands of the State, the investment arbitration system tends to generate disparate incentives depending on who is likely to be left with the bill. Ultimately, the State, as a subject of international responsibility, has to pay, but the government actors' self-interests predominate. Those government actors do not necessarily contemplate the country's long-term interests, but rather the short-term benefits of policies affecting foreign investments. Rather than being the ropes that tie countries to the mast, we see that international arbitration proceedings result in individual government actors abandoning the ship and leaving someone else to pay the bill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shifting ideological centre of gravity from what has been termed "democratic cosmopolitanism" to "religious nationalism" in Indonesia and its impacts on diverse areas of policymaking has been a subject of scholarly debate. This article investigates how these ideological developments affect gender policy reforms in post-Reformasi Indonesia. To do so, it develops a framework to examine ideological contestation by centring the role of Pancasila and gender politics in its analysis. By employing this framework, the article examines three attempts at gender policy reform: the 2008 Pornography Law, and two most recent bills on the elimination of sexual violence (RUU Penghapusan Kekerasan Seksual) and family resilience (RUU Ketahanan Keluarga). It is argued that the battle over the interpretation of Pancasila has ideologically shaped gender policy reforms through which political actors contest their ideal gender order and relations. This article concludes by reflecting on broader issues around gender, democracy, and ideology in post-Reformasi Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary scholarship on populism, albeit involving divergent approaches and polarised diagnoses of populism's political impacts, commonly attributes the recent populist surge to the peril of neo-liberal encroachment. However, such a neo-liberal–populist proposition encounters discrepant experiences when applied in non-Western contexts, including in East Asia. To recalibrate the conceptual framework, this article employs Gramsci-inspired scholarship on hegemony and populism – the notion of "the integral state" and non-reductionist class politics in particular – and utilises Taiwan as a case to expound upon the entanglement of democratisation, neo-liberalisation, and various forms of populist politics. Situating the post-2000 surge of multiple popular movements in Taiwan's hegemonic restructuring since the 1980s, this article identifies a course of bifurcated development between "liberal populism of the bourgeois hegemony" and the "neo-liberal populism of the multitude" that embodies various ways in which neo-liberalism intersects with populist politics. Highlighting the constant boundary-redrawing of the integral state and its associated class politics along the hegemonic restructuring processes, Taiwan's case exemplifies a critical approach to rethinking the over-determined relations between populism and neo-liberalism for other East Asian states and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reinterprets the Recep Peker cabinet's 1946 decisions to devalue the lira and deregulate foreign trade, which are often described as US-encouraged and liberalizing. The authors argue that alignment with the US did not dictate policy. They begin with World War II and show that, by 1944, Turkey had already been drawn into an Anglo-American international order. The authors then suggest that devaluation should be understood as a response: as a Europe-oriented policy with specific, short-term goals. They conclude that 1946 was less a radical liberalizing pivot than an attempt to address the difficult legacy of wartime neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Asian democracies, long seen as the success stories of the Third Wave, have curiously co-existed with illiberal partisan competition. We argue that such patterns are symptoms of long-standing democratic stagnation, rather than democratic regress. We trace the entrenchment of illiberal competition to nationalist polarization in the early phase of democratization—a common phenomenon in Third Wave democracies where nation-building and democratization pressures coincided. Party polarization can take many forms, but when it centers on mutually exclusive nationalist visions from the outset, it redefines the end of democratic competition as state capture and justifies whatever means necessary, even those that violate democratic norms, to achieve it. Through a comparative analysis of Taiwan and South Korea, we show that when democratization tends to institutionalize, rather than alleviate, pre-existing nationalist conflicts, it can seed endemic barriers to the habituation of democratic norms, imposing a ceiling on democratic progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do violent elections affect the willingness of citizens to defend democratic institutions? We argue that in the wake of violent elections, support for democratic constraints on the executive will diverge amongst ruling and opposition party supporters. To protect their position, ruling party supporters become more likely to endorse weakening constraints on executive power, even if it violates democratic principles. Opposition supporters, on the other hand, become more likely to reject democratic transgressions that de facto render them more vulnerable to political abuse. We examine these expectations using a vignette experiment embedded in a nationally representative 2019 post-election survey of 2400 Nigerians. Our findings suggest that incumbent supporters are overall more likely to endorse weaker constraints on the executive, but these attitudes are not reinforced by information about election violence. Opposition supporters, in contrast, become less likely to accept transgressions when informed about election violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on the connection between democratization and political violence typically views democracy through a liberal prism prioritizing elections and elite dynamics and qualifies violence through the lens of civil war or organized armed conflict, which leaves the political salience and effects of alternative modes of violent contentious mobilization underexamined. This study analyzes the connection between the weaponization of Egypt's post-revolutionary democratizing roadmap and politically transformative street battles that divided and reconfigured social and political alliances through bloodshed, grievance and betrayal. Weaponization describes a process in which Egypt's transitional democratizing roadmap championed free and fair elections while revolutionary activists were systematically repressed and stigmatized. The resultant polarization from street battles, particularly between the Muslim Brotherhood and their opponents, significantly contributed to support for the Tamarrod (rebellion) campaign, leading to mass mobilization and the ousting of President Mohamed Morsi of the Brotherhood. This ushered in an authoritarian restoration structured through heightened political polarization and repression. The analysis largely draws from the accounts of informal political actors, not least in order to address the underrepresentation of such experiences within orthodox democratization scholarship. The Battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street and the Ittehadiyya presidential palace clashes are developed as two exemplar empirical cases (re)directing Egypt's transitional trajectory, which enrich wider debates on democratization, authoritarian entrenchment, political violence and the fluidity of transitional politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy and democratising or autocratising trends are topics that have attracted interest in both academia and public opinion. The main quantitative tools for monitoring democracy have been democracy indices, which have scored and ranked democracies based on their attributes. However, since the emergence of the first indices in the 1970s, the reality of democracy in the world has changed, both in the international context in which democracies develop, as well as in the advances in their study and the growing importance of democracy theories. Political and social changes have led democracies to face new challenges and they are now being confronted with strategies that were not even considered five decades ago. This article reviews the functioning of eleven of these indices on the basis of these characteristics: geographical and temporal coverage, variables, scoring system, data collection methods, transparency, availability, validity and reliability. Special attention is paid to the limitations of the indices on measuring democracy today, mainly the predominance of institutional and procedural variables, and little importance given to local realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the changing trends in Jewish Genealogy over the past 40 years, the author has interviewed more than one hundred genealogists around the world. All of them are connected to the two most important genealogy organisations, JewishGen and JRI-Poland. They range from hobbyists researching their own families to professionals researching specific prewar Polish shtetls and those serving the entire genealogical community. Based on their responses to 26 questions, the author has identified two important features of contemporary Jewish genealogy: its democratisation and institutionalisation. The democratisation of genealogical research has contributed to a great expansion of the field. The focus of interest is no longer limited to only rabbinical families but is also concerned with the common man. Thus, genealogists today speak not only on behalf of sheyne yidn and otherwise distinguished families but also on behalf of the millions of murdered „ordinary" Jews who once lived in Poland. The institutionalisation of genealogy refers to the degree to which genealogical research organisations like JewishGen or JRI-Poland now provide some of the same functions provided years ago by the landsmanshaft institutions. Today, descendants of a particular shtetl often discover and connect to each other through genealogical researchers and these genealogical organisations. How these Jewish genealogical practices can be/are used to strengthen the landsmanshaft-like function will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the 2021 military coup in Myanmar and its violent aftermath as a starting point for analysing the dominant lens through which western observers commonly narrate the country's politics as a struggle for democracy. It shows how focusing on questions of the political system is insufficient for explaining political processes and conflict dynamics, and how it risks sanitizing the country's past and presence of nationalism, ethnic conflict and genocide. A postcolonial reading suggests that finding solutions to conflict and authoritarianism in Myanmar demands questioning the role of the modern nation-state itself. This analysis contributes to recent research which has found that Conflict and Peace Studies develops theories from some conflicts over others, reflecting how western interests shape academic choices in a field that aims to inform policy and practice worldwide. This article contributes to this debate on knowledge production by arguing that this selectivity bias is not simply a function of general western interest (or lack thereof). It is also linked to the frames that govern our interest in and understanding of countries and regions worldwide. Studying 'forgotten conflicts' in the global South not only necessitates a turn to specialist literature, but also demands moving beyond Eurocentric frames of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With over one million people arriving in Europe as refugees, the UN Refugee Agency declared 2015 "the year of Europe's refugee crisis." This article explores the meaning-making process surrounding the "refugee crisis" in a Russian context, using discourse theory to analyze representations of refugees, Russia, and the West in opinion pieces and interview articles in three major Russian newspapers. In addition to the humanitarian and security discourses presented in existing studies, I identify a geopolitical discourse that represents refugees as victims of interventionism and democratization processes that the West has promoted in the Middle East and North Africa. More generally, this study adds to the literature on discursive construction of identity and difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the susceptibility of post-conflict democratization processes to civilian forms of ethnic violence. Shifting the focus away from institutions and political elites, which dominate analyses on democracy and ethnic violence, the paper analyzes social relations and struggles among civilians during post-conflict democratization. Through an analysis of anti-Kurdish communal violence in twenty-first-century Turkey, the paper shows that social movements led by minorities demanding recognition make ethnicity a politically salient cleavage. This triggers contention over ethnic boundaries, resulting in civilian forms of ethnic violence. A key finding of this paper is that violence is not merely an outcome of increasing polarization and division but also a strategy employed by dominant populations to reinforce former boundaries and reduce uncertainties surrounding the existing ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of the research lies in the observation that, while Ukraine has established formal democratic institutions since its independence, many democratization issues remain unresolved. These formal structures lack effectiveness and support, with informal, often non-democratic political processes and secret agreements continuing to prevail. The study aims to conclude a theoretical study, conceptualization, and generalization of the problems of the existence of informal institutions, as well as a comprehensive analysis of practical technologies of informal institutionalization in modern Ukraine. The authors used such general scientific methods as analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, abstraction, the ascent from the abstract to the concrete. The authors considered such informal institutions that exist in the political reality of Ukraine, such as lobbying, corruption, populism, non-conventional forms of political participation of citizens, party agreements, clientelism, and political bargaining. The effective technologies for the informal institutionalization of modern Ukraine, including technologies for eliminating authoritarian practices, technologies of party structuring, technologies of political participation and technologies for the formation of democratic political consciousness have been proposed. These technologies are aimed at the political modernization of Ukraine, ensuring the institutional functioning of democracy at the proper level and minimizing the negative effects of informal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some countries escape the political resource curse while others do not? Most scholars argue that avoiding the claimed anti-democratic effects of natural resources, especially oil, largely depends on the quality of pre-existing political institutions and/or the effectiveness of contemporary resource management institutions. Drawing on the most-likely case of Timor-Leste, one of the world's most oil-dependent countries that nevertheless successfully consolidated democracy, we challenge these dominant theories and highlight new important factors to consider. We show that Timor-Leste did not avoid the curse because of good pre-existing political institutions, good natural resource governance institutions, or an otherwise favorable environment for democracy. Instead, we find that the ideological beliefs of major political actors, their strong popular legitimacy, the absence of a hegemonic actor among them, as well as the approaches of external actors, have produced a consolidated democracy despite strong incentives for the development of authoritarianism. These findings highlight the importance of ideology and agency, of the composition of independence movements, and of constructive international engagement, in particular at critical historical junctures. In short, even countries facing serious political and economic challenges can avoid the political resource curse, and both scholars and policymakers should consider a broader approach to the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the most relevant far right parties since the restoration of democracy in Spain, namely, Fuerza Nueva and VOX. These two parties show divergent electoral trajectories. While the former had some ephemeral prominence during the democratic process of transition, the latter emerged in 2018 and, for the time being, seems to have become established in several political arenas. Through an in-depth qualitative examination, this research explores the role of the organizational institutionalization process in the divergent electoral sustainability of both parties. The results show that it is possible to identify a temporal link, as well as certain mechanisms, between the way in which the parties develop organizationally and their electoral sustainability. In other words, a solid organizational institutionalization process has a positive effect on electoral sustainability. Overall, these findings suggest the need to further strengthen the so-called "internalist perspective" in the agenda of the far right, which entails a more systematic view of the characteristics of the parties themselves to explain their performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Other than the Baltic countries, Ukraine has made the most progress in the transition to democracy than any other post-Soviet country. Ukraine's Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, has been an instrumental institution in the democratisation process, and has played an increasingly significant role in furthering the public's desire to align with Europe, sometimes in opposition to Ukrainian presidents who have tried to steer the country towards Russia. Nonetheless, the path to join the European Union has not been a smooth one. On 16 September 2014, the Verkhovna Rada ratified the Association Agreement with the European Union and set out to meet its requirements. However, progress in passing the necessary reform legislation has been slow, in part due to the political dynamics operating in the country and the Parliament; proliferation of parties, repeated shifting party memberships, regional differences and oligarchic influence have all played a role in preventing agreement on reforms. The Russian invasion in February of 2022 has transformed the political dynamics in the country and the Parliament. Long-stalled reform legislation passed in a few months. This article examines the impact of Russian's invasion on the changing political dynamics that spurred Ukraine's Parliament to pursue compliance with EU requirements. It discusses the actions the Ukrainian Parliament has taken to combat corruption, improve the rule of law, and to achieve economic reform that is necessary for EU compliance. Ukraine is trying to accelerate its efforts to join the European Union and to succeed, it must meet the requirements of the EU acquis which is the body of Community rights and obligations that is binding on all the EU member states. It includes the content, principles, and obligations of the EU treaty and legislation adopted pursuant to the treaty and the case law of the Court of Justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore the continuities and changes in Turkish political history by examining three predominant, populist right-wing political parties in Turkish multi-party politics: Democrat Party (DP), Motherland Party (ANAP), and Justice and Development Party (AKP). The article utilizes correlative and spatial analyzes to juxtapose these three cases to find out path dependencies and critical junctures in Turkish political history. The commonalities in these cases are the clear linkages of incumbent party support with the nature of party competition, initial mobilization of the masses in the earlier tenures of these political parties, and high spatial correlation in electoral outcomes. However, there are also differences among the DP, ANAP, and AKP governments correlatively and spatially. The article intends to contribute to the existing literature on Turkish politics, especially through the lenses of party politics and democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines why regime survival rates vary across young democracies. The literature offers competing claims regarding the effect of the mode of transition on the duration of post-transitional democracy. This study reconciles these claims by proposing three modes of democratic transitions – military dominance (MD), popular sanction (PS), and consensual power transfer (CPT) – arguing that CPT leads the subsequent democracies to last longer than MD and PS. MD fails to incorporate the military into democratic systems, making it more likely for the ensuing democracies to suffer a coup, whereas PS enables regime insiders to change democratic rules without hindrance or outsiders to gain power through an organized armed conflict. CPT shapes a strong electoral performance by authoritarian successor parties, which provide checks and balances in post-authoritarian politics, thus decreasing the likelihood of collapse. This study verifies these hypotheses using data on nascent democracies between 1945 and 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy aid has been a major foreign policy instrument over the past 30 years. However, it is not clear whether such aid has any meaningful effect on democratic development in recipient countries, as previous studies have yielded somewhat contradictory results. We contribute to the burgeoning literature on the effectiveness of democracy aid by arguing that recipient countries' history of conflict constitutes an important moderator in the relationship between democracy aid and democratic development. Specifically, we develop a theoretical framework which examines the effects of two different types of democracy aid – top-down and bottom-up assistance – on democratic development in post-conflict recipient countries. Analysing data on 147 recipients over a period of 19 years (2002–2020), we find that while neither type has a significant general effect on democracy levels in recipient countries, bottom-up democracy assistance does have a positive and significant effect in post-conflict contexts, which suggests that post-conflict periods pose an opportunity for domestic pro-democracy actors and their international supporters to nudge their countries towards democratic development. These findings have implications for the literatures on democracy aid and conflict as well as policymakers interested in fostering democratic development abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do mutually reinforcing cleavages harm democracy? Evidence from specific cases suggests that autocratization can be related to the predicament of ethnic groups, if ethnicity is politicized and involves resource distribution. However, we know little about whether this is a cause of autocratization more broadly. The article demonstrates that, with increasing inequalities between ethnic groups, a country experiences a decline in its level of democracy and higher propensity to start autocratizing. The analysis thus advances previous contributions, focusing on individual inequalities and power-sharing institutions as explanations of democratization or democratic quality, in two ways. First, isolating autocratization as downturns in democracy levels and the onsets of related timespans (autocratization episodes), and comparing the impact of (economic, political, and social) types of inequalities between ethnic groups. Second, adopting a global sample of (democratic and non-democratic) countries since 1981, with an original data collection integrating expert surveys with survey data. Quantitative evidence confirms most expectations, particularly on economic inequalities between ethnic groups, and – although less precisely – economic, political and social dimensions combined. The findings have important implications for political regime and ethnic studies, showing that preventing the mutual reinforcement of sociocultural and economic cleavages is key to stabilize democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon called legislative inflation is extensively used in public debate across jurisdictions – including new democracies attempting to overcome communist legal heritage. Typically, the phrase refers to the quantitative aspect – growth in the number, volume and frequency of amendments of primary and secondary legislation exceeding the natural demands of the technological progress and growing complexity of business relations. This paper attempts to provide a bird's eye view of legislative inflation in Poland after the 1989 democratic breakthrough. As Poland is an example of successful democratic and market transition of the nineties, substantial redrafting of the legal framework during EU accession and populist right-wing governance, the results seem relevant beyond the domestic context. Documented patterns suggest that the search for driving forces behind the legislative inflation should shift from the parliament towards cabinet ministers and the bureaucratic apparatus under their supervision, the pace of legal text production justifies the search for a theoretical conceptualisation of how the law could govern societies unwilling and unable to familiarise themselves with its flow and to examine the impact of legal text production on society and the economy it seems useful to shift from the data on the text itself towards its actual impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While all European democracies have been subject to the 'stress test' of the global rise of illiberal populism, institutional erosion has occurred mainly in the East. Several qualitative analyses have claimed that the weakness of liberalism explains democratic vulnerability in the region. Seeking inspiration and quantitative data, we turn to the research field of global support for democracy, which has always started from the assumption that it is through cultural change rather than institutional reform that democracy takes root. By melding empirical strategies from this field with insights from democratic theory, we present a new and more exacting measure of cultural liberalism. We extract individual-level data from the European Social Survey to measure the effect of the 'Proportion of Cultural Liberals' (PCL) within national cohorts on levels of (de)democratization between and within East and West Europe 2012–2021. We find that PCL is positively correlated with increasing democracy levels (and resistance to democratic backsliding) across Europe. More significantly, this relationship holds independently for both Eastern and Western Europe, with the PCL effect being stronger in the East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay applies existing research in new institutional economics to early modern European political theory so as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, the essay proposes that understanding early modern European political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries (in a particular sense of that term) can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists' normative prescriptions. Early modern political theorists faced significant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing material resources using impartial criteria. By contrast, many contemporary readers of these writers live in the developed and liberal-democratic West. Contemporary readers are thus liable to normalize their own conditions and to underestimate the political-economic constraints under which early modern political theorists wrote, thereby misreading some of the latter's normative prescriptions. By interpreting early modern political theorists as writers who faced institutional constraints that have significantly receded in today's West, contemporary readers can enrich their understanding of these writers' objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent theories propose that commitment problems drive phenomena such as war and democratization. However, existing work disagrees about a basic question: how does a challenger's coercive strength affect prospects for conflict and/or institutional reform? We establish that the relationship depends on how challenger strength affects the average and maximum probability of winning a conflict in a given period ("threat"). We analyze a formal model with a general distribution of threats, and conceptualize challenger strength as affecting this distribution. If the maximum threat is fixed and stronger challengers pose a higher average threat, then weak challengers will rebel (absent reform) during the rare periods they pose a high threat. However, if stronger challengers pose a greater maximum threat, then they are harder to buy off. Applying these insights advances theoretical and empirical debates about democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of democratic state-building constituted the basis of the peace promotion engagement of the United Nations and other international agencies in Timor-Leste. Yet, this process of internationally assisted socio-political reconstruction has produced mixed results in terms of achieving a liberal democratic transformation. In accounting for these outcomes, the existing scholarship highlights the ways in which the intensifying power struggles between different competing social groups gave rise to a socio-political order where clientelist, neo-patrimonial governance structures and practices co-exist with those of the Western Weberian state. This article draws on social conflict theory to examine the underlying political economy dynamics of these governance outcomes. It concludes that the process of socio-political ordering experienced in Timor-Leste is not a deviation from the liberal democratic blueprint. It rather results from it, reflects the balance of power between competing groups in society, and develops in such a way that serves the interests of particular social forces while marginalising others. Following from this premise, the article emphasises the point that the analysis of the political environment in Timor-Leste should consider the state-society complex rather than focusing on the quality of state institutions misguidedly insulated from societal interest and influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the deepening of socio-economic inequality manifested as dualisation in South Korea and deregulation in Hong Kong. It explains the extreme manifestations of inequality by reference to the nature of economic co-ordination, organised labour power and societal corporatism, and the politics of democratisation. It finds that South Korea's legacy of state-orchestrated co-ordinated market economy favoured the retention of a manufacturing core despite globalisation. However, the neo-liberal inclinations of the state and big business groups led to the marginalisation of less privileged firms and workers. These inclinations reinforced the defensiveness of the small but strong labour organisations, preventing effective societal corporatism. These phenomena are fully understandable only with reference to the country's conservative democratisation that divided the liberal and left political forces. The geo-political legacy also induced identity conflicts that overshadowed socio-economic issues. By contrast, Hong Kong's liberal market economy coupled with the absence of security concern had allowed a radical de-industrialisation in the 1990s and wholesale casualisation in the 2000s. Divided by identity politics, organised labour was unable to challenge the trend. The same conflicts also led pro-China labour organisations to side with business interests in the post-1997 electoral autocracy and prevented the introduction of more fundamental reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that curriculum work can benefit from signifiers of Bildung to promote democracy in public education. The argument is built on the premise that cultural and intellectual traditions that value Bildung presume a link between the inner cultivation of the individual and the development of better societies (Horlacher 2017). I start by presenting Mouffe's (2000) democratic paradox and how pluralism is the defining feature of liberal democracies. Based on how curriculum work is a standard of public education (Hopmann 1999), I state that the curriculum must formalise pluralism in education and convey the democratic paradox in educational terms. With reference to Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, I then argue that such a laborious task can be achieved in the curriculum with the aid of signifiers of Bildung. Signifiers of Bildung are discursively empty and cannot acquire a definite meaning. Because of this, they make it possible to speak of the student and the society of liberal democracies while impeding a too narrow comprehension of what they are and ought to be. Therefore, to implement signifiers of Bildung in the curriculum can help establish both a standard of public education and limits to popular sovereignty. However, their use must undergo careful scrutiny, and teachers must remain free to interpret them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why was the route to democracy in Scandinavia extraordinarily stable? This paper answers this question by studying Scandinavia's eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century peaceful agrarian reforms, which contributed to auspicious state–society relations that made democracy progress relatively smoothly. Based on comparisons with contemporary France and Prussia and process-tracing evidence, the paper shows that Scandinavia achieved relatively extensive and peaceful agrarian reforms because of relatively high levels of meritocratic recruitment to the central administration and state control over local administration, which ensured impartial policymaking and implementation. These findings challenge prevailing theories of democratization, demonstrating that the Scandinavian countries represent an alternative, amicable path to democracy led by civil servants who attempt to transform their country socioeconomically. Thus, strong state-cum-weak society countries likely have better odds of achieving stable democracy than weak state-cum-weak society countries. However, building bureaucratic state administrations alongside autonomous political societies is probably a safer road to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]