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This chapter assesses the impact of lockdowns on mobility rates. It notes the variation in mobility rates during lockdowns and the importance of understanding why citizens in different countries respond differently. The results suggest that the severity of lockdowns and the capacity to enforce the rules significantly reduce mobility rates. Interestingly, however, trust in government also significantly influences the impact of restrictions on mobility rates. Finally, the influence of COVID-19 risk perception on compliance does not appear to be very relevant. The research highlights the importance of political factors in shaping compliance during crises and provides insights for policy makers.

This concluding chapter offers recommendations for the future of emergency policymaking. The contributions gathered in this edited volume found that the policies implemented during the pandemic heavily depended on what had been done before. We argue that more attention should be paid to the principle of proportionality, especially in countries with low levels of institutional trust. Also, investing in legal preparedness is crucial to face situations where the emergency could lead to both ineffective policies and unnecessary curtailment of individual rights. Finally, in many countries, we have observed severe restrictions on data access that reduce the quality of evidence we can provide. We advocate the principle of evidence-based information restriction to promote access to information on a reasonable basis.

While modern technologies—for example, in the form of airplanes facilitating international travel—enabled the coronavirus virus to spread rapidly, they were also the foreground in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably in the rapid development of novel vaccines, as well as smartphone apps used to locate, track and alert individuals to the spread of SARS-CoV-2. This chapter investigates what happened, how, and what is likely to emerge from what we characterise as a timid turn to COVID-apps in Europe during the initial outbreak of the pandemic. Our central argument is that COVID-app reliance re-turned to and extended a long-standing emphasis on digital technologies, as quick fixes to complex socio-ecological problems, a tendency known more widely as ‘technosolutionism’. Our analysis expands the growing literature on COVID-19 era technosolutionism in two ways. First, we explain how smartphone apps showed anxious citizens and consumers the rapid responsiveness of both governments and companies to the emergency in ways that navigated tensions between privacy and surveillance. Second, we elaborate how app-based responses have solidified an increasingly permanently ‘datafied’ emergency management infrastructure that threatens the very solution governments and technology firms sought between desires for privacy and surveillance. Our chapter concludes by pointing to further lessons to explore from this case of technosolutionism in troubled times.

This paper contributes to ongoing scholarly debates on the merits and limitations of computational legal text analysis by reflecting on the results of a research project documenting exceptional COVID-19 management measures in Europe. The variety of exceptional measures adopted in countries characterized by different legal systems and natural languages, as well as the rapid evolution of such measures, pose considerable challenges to manual textual analysis methods traditionally used in the social sciences. To address these challenges, we develop a supervised classifier to support the manual coding of exceptional policies by a multinational team of human coders. After presenting the results of various natural language processing (NLP) experiments, we show that human-in-the-loop approaches to computational text analysis outperform unsupervised approaches in accurately extracting policy events from legal texts. We draw lessons from our experience to ensure the successful integration of NLP methods into social science research agendas.

The Constitution of the French Fifth Republic offers very little room for citizens to demand a strong accountability of people voted in power. Recently, the Yellow Vests movement has unexpectedly revived the debates on the introduction of a recall mechanism in France, an option already defended by some candidates to the 2017 presidential election. This chapter analyses the French experience of recall mechanisms in four directions. First, it recalls the origins and historical diffusion of the idea of recall, introduced during the French Revolution as imperative mandate. Second, it analyses current constitutional provisions and discusses their compatibility with some forms of recall processes. Third, it examines the various social demands for recall, especially focusing on the one which has emerged out of the Yellow Vests movement. Lastly, the chapter ends with a discussion of the possible design a recall process could take in France.

Since January 2020, European countries have implemented a wide range of restrictions to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet governments have also implemented democratic compensators in order to offset the negative impacts of restrictions. This article aims to account for the variation of their use between Belgium, the Netherlands and France. We analyse three drivers: the strength of counterpowers, the ruling parties’ ideological leanings and political support. Building on an original data set, our results distinguish between embedded and ad hoc compensators. We find that ad hoc compensators are championed mainly by counterpowers, but also by ideology of the ruling coalitions in Belgium and the Netherlands and used strategically to maintain political support in France. Evidence on the link between embedded compensators and counterpowers is more ambiguous., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Building on an original dataset compiling data on exceptional measures taken daily in European regions, the EXCEPTIUS dataset1, this paper focuses on decisions made since the start of the pandemic outbreak in Europe to assess the resilience of democratic governance in times of exceptionalism in Belgium, the Netherlands and France. This case selection offers variation on the resilience of democracy in times of Covid, namely the balance between restrictions and democratic compensators.

A recently published paper in this journal (Choi, 2021) establishes a statistical link between, on the one hand, Islamist terrorist campaigns - including terrorist attacks and online propaganda - and, on the other the growth of the Muslim population. The author explains this result by stating that successful campaigns lead some individuals to convert to Islam. In this commentary, we intend to reply to this article by focusing on the impact of terrorist attacks on religious conversion. We first show that Choi's results suffer from theoretical flaws - a failure to comprehensively unpack the link between violence and conversion - and methodological shortcomings - a focus on all terrorist groups over a period where Islamist attacks were rare. This leads us to replicate Choi's analysis by distinguishing Islamist and non-Islamist terror attacks on a more adequate timeframe. By doing so, we no longer find empirical support for the relationship between terror attacks and the growth of the Muslim population. However, our analyses suggest that such a hypothesis may hold but only in contexts where the level and intensity of political violence are high.

As Covid-19 disrupts political and economic arrangements around the world,International Political Economy (IPE) is uniquely positioned to reflect on the pandemic’s global economic and financial impact. To explore what IPE research can bring to the table, we situate state and market crisis responses within patterns of continuity and change in core structures of the international political economy as well as developments in everyday life. Spanning themes from the role of industrial animal farming and global value chains in spreading the virus to how the pandemic affects foreign aid, the politics of IMF aid disbursements, distributional conflicts within the European Union and surveillance capitalism, we outline research agendas for scholars and students of International Relations and International Political Economy to examine the origins, spread and responses to Covid-19 in years to come.

As Covid-19 disrupts political and economic arrangements around the world,International Political Economy (IPE) is uniquely positioned to reflect on the pandemic’s global economic and financial impact. To explore what IPE research can bring to the table, we situate state and market crisis responses within patterns of continuity and change in core structures of the international political economy as well as developments in everyday life. Spanning themes from the role of industrial animal farming and global value chains in spreading the virus to how the pandemic affects foreign aid, the politics of IMF aid disbursements, distributional conflicts within the European Union and surveillance capitalism, we outline research agendas for scholars and students of International Relations and International Political Economy to examine the origins, spread and responses to Covid-19 in years to come.

The Constitution of the French Fifth Republic offers very little room for citizens to demand a strong accountability of people voted in power. Recently, the Yellow Vests movement has unexpectedly revived the debates on the introduction of a recall mechanism in France, an option already defended by some candidates to the 2017 presidential election. This chapter analyses the French experience of recall mechanisms in four directions. First, it recalls the origins and historical diffusion of the idea of recall, introduced during the French Revolution as imperative mandate. Second, it analyses current constitutional provisions and discusses their compatibility with some forms of recall processes. Third, it examines the various social demands for recall, especially focusing on the one which has emerged out of the Yellow Vests movement. Lastly, the chapter ends with a discussion of the possible design a recall process could take in France.