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This article discusses anxiety as an analytical and methodological concept in the investigation of post‐authoritarian societies, drawing on three well‐being‐focused anxieties that marked Greece in the 1980s: first, the degradation of the urban environment, especially in Athens; second, the technologisation of everyday life, most notably the popularisation of information technology; and third, the impact of novel, consumption‐focused media, particularly lifestyle magazines. The analysis distinguishes anxiety from fear and argues that fear is commoner in authoritarian regimes than in new democracies, which often experience optimism and cultural pluralism. These conditions foster anxieties related to well‐being. By exploring a juncture at which moderate economic progress coincided with democratisation and closer contact with Western Europe, the article argues that anxiety is a productive tool for examining the emotional impact of mild perceived threats to well‐being in societies characterised by relatively calm life conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do democratization processes affect voter turnout in new democracies? Existing work points to an expected boost in electoral turnout after democratization as newly democratic citizens are euphoric to exert newly democratic freedoms or because they developed new political attitudes and behaviours by mobilizing for democracy. While intuitive and normatively appealing, these explanations have not been theoretically nor empirically scrutinized within the literature. This paper develops and tests novel theoretical expectations on the processes and legacies of democratization that impact voter turnout in new democracies. Using electoral turnout data from 1086 national elections between 1946 and 2015, and turnout survey data of over 1 million respondents between 1982 and 2015, we find that the boost in voter turnout (1) exists only for the first election after transition, (2) its effect depends on the life cycle during which individuals experienced the transition and (3) it is less dependent on transition type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the role and purpose of intelligence agencies in nondemocratic regimes. These regimes establish and use intelligence services to maintain control and defend themselves from internal threats. Intelligence agencies in these regimes often operate with high autonomy and penetration of society, and they are not democratically accountable. They engage in practices such as surveillance, monitoring, abuse, and even killing of citizens. The article also highlights the impact of new technologies on the effectiveness of these intelligence agencies. The reach of these agencies extends beyond their borders, targeting expats and exiles. The article emphasizes the importance of intelligence effectiveness in helping dictatorships endure. [Extracted from the article]

African First Ladies are categorised into two: the less powerful First Ladies, the behind-the-scene actors, making positive contributions to their spouses’ regime and the powerful First Ladies whose arbitrary powers and overarching presence pose real threat to the regime. Extant studies concentrate on the former and pay scant attention to the latter. Drawing on the activities of Patience Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s former First Lady, this paper explores the ways Patience and other powerful African First Ladies contribute to regime change in emerging African democracies. In doing so, the paper explores the anatomy of female power and its intricate interface with the Office of the First Lady, the framework for appropriating and exercising the power of the First Lady. The goal is to provide the theoretical basis for understanding the empirical, that is, the practical ways Patience Jonathan and other powerful First Ladies appropriate power and contribute to regime change in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on electoral clientelism are increasingly focusing on the demand side and explaining how voters react to electoral inducements. However, there is limited research about how candidate attributes and partisanship can determine citizens' reactions to clientelism. This article therefore tests the relative weight that voters place on candidate attributes and partisanship in their reactions to clientelistic targeting in the context of a new democracy. We use evidence from an original conjoint experiment conducted in 2021 in Romania, where electoral clientelism is frequent. Our findings show that citizens react negatively to clientelistic inducements in general, but the effects vary based on the targeting strategy used by politicians. These negative effects are considerably weaker among co-partisans. This observation is especially relevant when testing the effect of partisanship in a political setting where it is low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the support of the Ukrainian PEN scholarship program, and implemented by the International Renaissance Foundation and the New Democracy Fund (Denmark) as part of the Rapid Response Fund. On the basis of real-life stories and the classics of world philosophy and literature, the author examines the different meanings and connotations that accompany the use of the words hope, disappointment, desire, expect, win, believe, and act in Ukraine today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Comparative Politics is the property of Journal of Comparative Politics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Why is voting behaviour tied to ethnicity in many new democracies? A predominant view, offered by the instrumentalist theory, argues that voters use candidates' identity -ethnic or partisan- as a signal of expected performance. However, voters will reward well-performing politicians by being more likely to vote for them and punish bad performance regardless of candidates' identity. To test these assumptions, we conduct a nationally representative survey in Kenya asking voters about their spending preference for the country's main anti-poverty programme, which is managed by MPs in collaboration with citizens. We find that voters, regardless of ethnicity or party, have an erroneous view of how their MP spent the anti-poverty funds. Then in an experiment, we share with voters the spending made by the MPs and audit results probing for corruption. Once voters are aware that their MP's spending does not match their spending priorities, their approval and likelihood of voting for the MP decreases if primed to view the politician as partisan. Voters also electorally punish MPs for corruption whether copartisan or non-copartisan. In contrast to instrumentalist expectations, if voters are primed to view their MP in ethnic terms, they are more likely to vote for their coethnic overlooking bad performance and corruption. The availability of alternative parties in local elections may explain why voters attach partisanship to performance evaluation. Still, in our case study, as in other new democracies, politicians continue mobilising support along ethnic lines, perhaps explaining why voters prioritise group loyalties if primed to think about ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the third decade of the 21st century, digitization and artificial intelligence, global events, challenges from authoritarian states, and difficulties of particular democracies to function properly confront democracy with a new series of challenges and opportunities that will force it to reinvent itself. The last decades have produced an accelerating flow of ideas for new forms of democracy. We survey a long period in the quest for such new forms and point to next inventions for such forms. We suggest to experiment with new ways for democracy to extend the choice of democratic processes that can be implemented in real-life situations, with the beneficial side-effect that democracy might remain the only sustainable structure for self-governing societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, former Soviet republics became sovereign states and faced a challenge of building new political systems. While some of the countries have become authoritarian, democratic political systems were successfully built in a number of post-Soviet countries. In this study the focus is on these new democracies and their armed forces, as such states face questions related to the armed forces' monopoly over the means of violence, their subservience to civilian politicians, the core values around which soldiers coalesce, and their legitimacy in the eyes of publics. How then does a military create a tradition in a new democracy? The term "military tradition" is used to refer to public events (ceremonies and performances), symbols (flags and adornments), and narratives (stories and lore) produced and reproduced in and around the armed forces. Accordingly, the article turns to the study of public events in order to further the study of military traditions in new democracies. As empirical focus, the authors propose to look at a key state-centered, national public event, the military parade through an exploratory case study of Estonia, a relatively young democracy of 30 years. The results of the study show that the form and practices of Estonia's military parade simultaneously signal its subservience to elected officials, its role as defender of a democratic polity and its fate, its closeness and openness to society, and they reflect the wider societal developments centered on individualization, digitization, and marketization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Candidate debates are increasingly organized during elections in democracies and electoral autocracies. How do debates impact partisan divisions and preferences in these contexts? One theoretical perspective suggests that debates should amplify these preferences and divisions, while another implies debates should attenuate them. This paper evaluates these expectations by studying presidential debates organized during Malawi's May 2019 elections. With an experiment and national panel survey, the paper provides evidence consistent with attenuation: debate watchers were substantially more likely to vote across partisan lines (cross-party voting), became more favorable toward out-partisan candidates, and became less favorable toward co-partisans. Suggestive evidence on causal mechanisms shows that these effects were driven by policy persuasion and debates' impact on perceptions of the candidates' policies and qualities. Results advance debates about information processing, campaign effects, and voting behavior in new democracies and electoral autocracies, and have implications for electoral institutions' impact on partisan divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latin American societies show lower levels of political trust when compared to other regions of the world. The lack of trust in institutions can led to ineffective management of public affairs, social crises, lack of transparency, economic problems and even difficulties in countering pandemics. The objective of this work is to build an index (LADI) that provides a measure of the level of perceived distrust in the institutions of the different Latin American countries and its variations over the period from 2008 to 2018. The data used for this analysis are of a subjective nature and come from the series of surveys provided by Latinobarómetro. To develop the analysis, we have used a quantitative approach of a partially non-compensatory aggregative type, known as Adjusted Mazziotta and Pareto Index. The results show a generalized increase of distrust in the years 2017 and 2018 for several Latin American countries. On the other hand, in countries where the rule of law is more consolidated, a best perception of the functioning of democracy emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Frónesis is the property of Universidad del Zulia (Fronesis) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The 2004 EU enlargement and related Europeanisation processes supported the development of stagnated interest group systems in many ways, including with respect to the professionalisation of mainly voluntary-based organisations in Central and Eastern Europe. In the pre-membership period and initial years after joining the EU, national interest groups from Central and Eastern Europe chiefly relied on EU-level interest groups for important information, knowledge, and know-how concerning EU policymaking, whereas 20 years of membership has today established them as equal partners and co-decision-makers. The article elaborates on the Europeanisation of interest groups in the Central and Eastern Europe region from the start of the process of accession to the EU, with three case studies in focus: Lithuania, Poland, and Slovenia. The main research question is: In which different ways has the Europeanisation process influenced interest groups in the region? To address it, the article builds on Johansson and Jacobsson's (2016) typology of the Europeanisation of interest groups. Six exploratory factors were examined in this regard: (a) contacts with EU policymakers and institutions, (b) interest in EU policymaking, (c) funding received from EU projects and programmes, (d) networking with EU umbrella organisations, (e) participation in open consultations, and (f) the relationship of the group with members. To study the effects of Europeanisation processes in selected countries, web survey data gathered from national interest groups as part of the Comparative Interest Groups Survey project were used. Our results show that interest groups from Central and Eastern Europe have become "European" in a range of ways. Regulatory and discursive Europeanisation is most typical for Polish interest groups, identity Europeanisation for Lithuanian interest groups, and financial and participatory Europeanisation for Lithuanian and Polish interest groups, while organisational Europeanisation has the strongest effect on interest groups in Slovenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a recent boom in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in many developing countries, there is limited research on how social media is being used in political campaigns in emerging democracies. In these contexts, the introduction of electoral gender quotas often forms part of the constitutional reform. This paper investigates the gendered use of social media among political candidates during the 2019 parliamentary election campaign in Tunisia, which recently adopted an ambitious gender quota system. We have mapped the use of Facebook among a random sample of 400 men and women candidates and carried out interviews with 19 men and women candidates who ran in these elections. The results demonstrate how patriarchal structures interact with political-institutional features – the electoral gender quota system, the electoral system (a closed-list proportional-representation system), and the fragmented party system – in shaping the gendered use of social media among political candidates in Tunisia. We show that men are more likely to use Facebook for campaign purposes since they are more often placed at the top of the candidate lists. Hence, rather than having an equalizing effect, the study suggests that social media become a new tool for already privileged candidates in Tunisia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet offered an opportunity to explore unknown aspects of daily life before and during the dictatorship. This essay focuses on one particular exhibition (How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design), which featured a complete reconstruction of the Cybersyn operation room. Based on participant observation, the essay argues that the interaction between visitors and the re-creation in such a particular moment is an invitation to reflect on how technology, socialism, and democracy sought to reinforce each other during the Cold War. The Cybersyn project, one of the most globally recognizable pieces of technology designed in the Global South, still resonates five decades after its implementation (and further destruction by the military), prompting new questions in an era of artificial intelligence and new threats to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We propose a new estimator of the Democracy Effect that overcomes selection effects. • It weighs the behavior of each type of voter by its prevalence in the whole population. • We derive the distribution of this new weights-based estimator of the democracy effect. • Applications to two experiments find a significant effect in one but not the other. Dal Bó et al. (2010) show experimentally that the effect of a policy may be greater when it is democratically selected than when it is exogenously imposed. In this paper we propose a new and simpler estimation strategy that does not require information on the vote of subjects in the exogenous treatment. The new estimation strategy is based on calculating the average behavior under democracy by weighting the behavior of each type of voter by its prevalence in the whole population (and not conditional on the vote outcome). We derive the distribution of this new weights-based estimator of the democracy effect and show it eliminates selection effects under certain conditions. We apply the new estimation strategy to the data in Dal Bó et al. (2010) and to the data from a new experiment for which we cannot use the previous estimation strategy as we do not have information on how subjects would have voted in the exogenous treatment. We find a significant democracy effect in the former but not on the latter application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the performance of the Supreme Court as democratic guardrail during five prior periods of democratic crisis in the United States. It finds that most such periods witnessed efforts by the governing regime to entrench themselves in power, and that the Court has rarely provided an effective check on such democratic abuses. Rather than serving as a reliable democratic guardrail, the Court has regularly exercised what Dixon and Landau call "weak‐form abusive judicial review"; that is, it has declined to check attacks on democracy emerging from other centers of power. On one occasion, the Court has undermined democracy even more directly via "strong‐form abusive judicial review"; that is, the Court itself attacked key democratic guardrails. This historical record provides a helpful baseline for evaluating the Court's performance during the Trump era, when it has taken actions that both protect and undermine democratic health. Conflicting signs indicate that the Court is playing a more democracy‐protective role than most of its predecessors in some respects, but a more democracy‐undermining role in others. As such, it is too soon to say with confidence whether the contemporary Court will be remembered, on balance, for resolving or exacerbating a system‐threatening constitutional crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Africa Spectrum is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

How can democratic values and behavior be induced in new democracies? We designed and tested three original civic education interventions to answer this question, using Tunisia as a case study. Participants were recruited through Facebook and Instagram, where they were randomly assigned to either one of three treatment groups or a placebo. Two treatments were derived from prospect theory, emphasizing the gains of a democratic system or the losses of an autocratic system. A third treatment, derived from self‐efficacy theory, provided practical information regarding participation in the upcoming 2019 elections. Our findings suggest that online civic education has a considerable effect on democratic citizenship, including a significant reduction in authoritarian nostalgia and increasing intended political behavior. We further find differences between the three treatments, with the loss and gain treatments having overall more consistent impact than self‐efficacy, though the latter frame has notable effects on political efficacy and registration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the European Union (EU) is considered unrivaled in its democracy promoting abilities, democracy is being challenged within its borders. Over the last decade, Hungary's ruling party has debilitated or eliminated liberal democratic institutions; similar trends have emerged in Poland and other new democracies in the EU. What explains these surprising cases of democratic backsliding? Researchers have identified the limits of conditionality and the EU's inability to counteract backsliding. However, given the EU's extensive role in democracy building in its member states, it is critical to also consider the EU as an initial source of backsliding. This paper argues that the EU's post-Maastricht policy structure, accession process, and membership requirements have made democratic backsliding more likely in new democracies by simultaneously increasing executive power and limiting states' domestic policy space, which stunts institutional development. This combination of factors creates opportunities for executives to manipulate already weak institutions to increase their power, and democratic backsliding becomes more likely. A comparative analysis that combines typical and control cases provides support for this argument. These findings extend beyond the EU to contribute to emerging research on the limits of international democracy promotion and the related long-term effects that international organizations have on domestic democratic institutional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Doxa Comunicación is the property of Fundacion Universitaria San Pablo - CEU and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sportswashing has emerged full force in the 21st century, highlighting the gap between word and deed in the sports world. Yet, the term suffers from definitional imprecision and is often applied solely to autocratic hosts. This article offers a robust definition of sportswashing and—building from the soft-power approach to analyzing mega-events like the Olympics and World Cup—creates a sportswashing typology. This paper offers four advances in conceptualizing sportswashing: (a) the practice is not just the domain of autocrats, but can emerge in democracies as well; (b) domestic audiences are crucial to understanding the political complexities of sportswashing; (c) sportswashing often sets the stage for military intervention; and (d) new forms of sportswashing are emerging, with authoritarian regimes funding teams and events in democratic states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents" by Balihar Sanghera and Elmira Satybaldieva is a timely and important book that addresses the challenges of rentier capitalism in Central Asian countries, specifically Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The authors argue that rentier capitalism, which is the result of neoliberal policies imposed by Western donors, has led to plutocratic regimes and increased inequality in these countries. The book explores the mechanisms and dynamics of rentier capitalism, including the role of external and internal forces in legitimizing income extraction and suppressing political opposition. It also highlights grassroots movements that have resisted the concentration of wealth and offers insights into the limitations of democracy in countering rentier capitalism. Overall, this book provides a valuable resource for understanding the political and socioeconomic dynamics in the Central Asian region. [Extracted from the article]

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]

This essay engages in border studies by articulating a "liminal island chain," linking Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as a frontier of democracy in the rise of a new Cold War. Tracing the theoretical evolution from boundary to border and bordering in the recent scholarship, it aims to counter the island chain idea in international relations theory with an indigenous settler colonial perspective on the one hand, and to approach democracy as a political rhetoric deployed in Taiwan's and Hong Kong's anti-China protests since 2014 that constructed a biometric, emotional, and civilizational border against China on the other. By taking the Protect Diaoyutai (Baodiao) Movement of the early 1970s that linked Okinawa with Taiwan and Hong Kong as a critical conjuncture of Cold War bordering, the essay adopts a cultural studies approach to consider the implications of multiple bordering in East Asia as congealed in the social movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan, then and now, to offer an analysis of the unfolding of the new Cold War. By conceptualizing Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as unwieldly liminal island chain as produced by post/colonial geography and shaped by post/Cold War entanglements, the essay hopes to unveil how multiple bordering is at work in East Asia, and to usher in a trans-local imagination of the democracy to come. [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]

The construction of feminist democratic societal projects relies on the production of feminist knowledge and ideas within social movements, as well as academic, professional, and institutional settings. In the context of a rising opposition against democracy and gender, race, and sexuality equality at a global level, the European Union has launched the call Feminisms for a New Age of Democracy with the purpose of supporting knowledge production about opposition to gender equality in Europe and feminist democratic responses. The CCINDLE (Co-creating Inclusive Intersectional Democratic Spaces across Europe) project is one of the funded research projects under this call. CCINDLE's objectives include analyzing not only anti-gender politics and the problems that they create for democracy in Europe but especially feminist movements' and institutional responses to anti-gender and anti-democratic forces. The project aims to co-create feminist knowledge with the actors that are already working to counter the antidemocratic project that anti-gender movements and far right parties are trying to construct, and to envision feminist futures building on theories and practices of intersectional justice, inclusion, and participation in European democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracies in general and political parties in particular have undergone political personalization in recent decades. The power balance between politicians (one or many) and the team (the party as a collegial entity) has changed, and existing party typologies are no longer suited to the analysis of today's democratic politics. Although some new personalized party types have been added, what is missing is a systematic attempt to contrast them with the collegial option. This article proposes a new classification of political parties to fill the lacuna. It includes five ideal types of parties: two personalized-decentralized types, referring to collections of separated autonomous activists or to separated autonomous individual politicians (plural); a collegial type, which is about the centrality of the team and is based mainly on collective authorities and collective decision making; and two personalized-centralized types, referring to the centrality of an individual politician in her capacity as the party leader or that of a specific individual who "owns" the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early post-Cold War period, the global order witnessed a significant shift, with Western liberal democracy emerging as the predominant force. However, this ascent of the United States in pursuit of global dominance gave rise to a Security Dilemma, fostering the emergence of alternative powers in various regions worldwide. Among these, Russia has played a prominent role, notably in the Middle East. This study seeks to examine Russia's historical and contemporary objectives in the Middle East, analyzing its political, economic, and security pursuits. Through the lens of the "Security Dilemma," the article underscores Russia's transformation into a potent regional counterbalance to Western influence in various respects. The article concludes that the sustainability of Russia's gains depends on the fluid Middle East landscape, the continuation of Putin's leadership, and the influence of potential Western sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In countries that have recently transitioned to democracy, what factors most drive citizens to mobilize and participate in early elections? Many comparative studies on democratization and elections stress the vital importance of early elections in new democracies – with voter turnout inexorably linked to a democracy's long-term stability and legitimacy – however, much of this literature focuses on aggregate rather than individual-level behaviour, and very little targets the Middle East/North Africa region. This study closely examines individual voting behaviour in democratizing Tunisia's critical second election in 2014. We argue that amidst great uncertainty, the polarizing issues of national and political identity created systematic disparities in participation – with the most ideologically polarized citizens/social groups more likely to vote. Using original data from a survey conducted in Tunisia right after its November 2014 elections, we find that Tunisians were sharply divided in their support for democracy, the previous regime, and Islamic governance. Specifically, Tunisians who were more ideologically polarized along its secular-Islamist divide and those more satisfied with the new democratic system were more likely to vote – overall suggesting somewhat uneven electoral participation in this critical election and, therefore, the potential for the kind of instability conducive to democratic breakdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Labour Party's support will likely be crucial to any major change of the voting system in the UK. While Labour has supported first past the post for most of its existence, a resolution was passed at the 2022 party conference calling for Labour to include in its manifesto a commitment to change the voting system to proportional representation after the next election. This resulted from an effective campaign by activists to change the party's policy on electoral reform. The position of the trade unions, often perceived to be conservative on constitutional issues, was particularly important. This article focusses on the campaign to change the opinion of the British trade union movement. It outlines the British trade union movement's historic reservations about electoral reform and then analyses the grassroots effort behind this movement, focussing on the organisation of Make Votes Matter, Labour for a New Democracy, and Politics for the Many. The article concludes by offering insights into the potential long‐term consequences of this campaign and its potential impact on the ideological direction of the Labour Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) is facing a democratic deficit, but the debate on how to address it has been caught in a dichotomy that pitches EU democracy as either national or supranational. Considering EU democracy through the nation-state lens, whereby the EU either becomes a nation-state itself or borrows democratic legitimacy from its Member States, obscures the many dilemmas and trade-offs involved in the institutional design and practice of EU democracy. Moving beyond this national-supranational dichotomy thus requires coming to grips with a variety of diverging democratic criteria the EU is facing when pursuing democratisation. The books reviewed in this article have done exactly that. While the books under review approach the challenges of EU democracy from a variety of angles, this review touches upon three major points of discussion: legitimacy, representation and citizenship. It concludes that EU democracy should not be considered as an end-point to be reached, but as a continuous interaction between various and conflicting ideas about the nature of the EU and of democracy. Particularly with a view on the upcoming 2024 European elections, is it thus vital to foster open and public debate on the tensions and dilemmas inherent in (EU) democracy. Bremberg, N. & Norman, L. (Eds.). (2023). Dilemmas of European Democracy: New Perspectives on Democratic Politics in the European Union. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jančić, D. (Ed.) (2023). The Changing Role of Citizens in EU Democratic Governance. London: Hart. Lord, C. Bursens, P. De Bièvre, D. Trondal, J. & Wessel, R. A. (Eds.). (2022). The Politics of Legitimation in the European Union. London: Routledge. Wolfs, W. (2022). European Political Parties and Party Finance Reform: Funding Democracy? London: Palgrave Macmillan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the censorship practices in Weimar Germany, specifically focusing on the Great Police Exhibition of 1926. It discusses the shift in regulatory practices and the role of sexuality in these changes. The exhibition aimed to reform the police force and build trust with the public, showcasing technological advances and presenting a more liberal stance on sexuality. The article also highlights the different sections of the exhibition, including the Forbidden Literature and Art section, the Lewd Literature section, and the public section, which aimed to educate the audience about contemporary erotica. The exhibition faced pushback and criticism but reflected a deep engagement with censorship, regulation, and policing in a changing society. [Extracted from the article]

Internet, social media, and app shutdowns have become frequent, not only in authoritarian states but also in emerging and fragile democracies. As Russian authorities enforced a legal blockage to Instant Messenger Telegram during the past 2 years, many users kept using the app seamlessly thanks to what we call a subversive affordance: a built-in proxy functionality that allows users to seamlessly circumvent the blockage. We claim it is subversive because it allows users to overcome the blockage as the consequence of the app's development, with a significant fraction of users who did not have to take action to bypass the blockage. By conducting an online survey and performing a meta-cluster analysis, we found a group we labeled the undeprived : people that, despite presenting traits frequently associated with digital divides—such as gender, age, and low levels of digital skills—were able to keep using the app. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, the European Union’s (EU) relations with the Southern neighbour countries (SNCs) have been reframed in the light of a new élan of democracy promotion. The underlying logic of this approach was to leverage the building and consolidation of democracy and rule of law through enhanced cooperation in terms of more ‘markets, money and mobility’. A sort of mobility-democracy nexus has been assumed by the European Commission as a crucial dimension of the EU’s external relations with SNCs. Within this strategy, Mobility Partnerships (MPs) with SNCs have been identified as a key policy tool for EU democracy promotion. Via original qualitative analysis of European Commission’s documents, MPs, and other migration and mobility agreements that the EU has negotiated with SNCs since 2011, this paper explores how the mobility-democracy nexus has been defined in the Commission’s talks. We critically discuss the effectiveness of this nexus and demonstrate the inefficacy of MPs as a tool to promote democracy by fostering more mobility and regular migration flows. Looking at the content of MPs with three SNCs (Tunisia, Morocco, and Jordan) allows to trace the transformation of EU external relations with SNCs from a principled approach into selective issue-oriented cooperation based on more specific and sectorial policy choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work is directed to examine what drive marketization and professionalization of campaigning of political parties in the emerging democracy of Indonesia. Focusing on such issue, this work adopts Strömbäck' (2007, 2010) and Strömbäck et al.' (2012) conceptual models of marketization and campaign professionalization of political parties and deploys a case study method. The findings are as follows. Following factors encourage these parties to adopt such practices. They include democratization of politics, establishments of the democratic political, government, media and election systems, declines of Indonesian electorates' partisanship and number of loyal voters, the emergence of rational voting behaviors, ICT development and increasing influence of the media logic in political news productions, domination of the media agenda over the political agenda and numbers of media consumers and the Internet and social media users who strongly engaged in political consumerism and activism. This work offers an analytical model that visualizes the structural factors and conditions, which stimulate political parties in the emerging democracy of Indonesia to take up such practices. We could consider this model as we want to evaluate developments of marketization and professionalization of campaigning of political parties in the emerging democracies, especially those shared similarity with Indonesian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romanian environmental activists have been subjected to violent attacks for protecting their forests from illegal logging. This article traces the drivers of this conflict, revealing complex relationships between corrupted institutions, economic dependence, and cultural beliefs entrenched in Romania's religion and recent history. Examining the drivers of environmental conflict in new democracies and new EU members – like Romania – may help reveal weaknesses and opportunities in EU structures in the context of nature conservation and environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The development of the world's economies, especially in emerging countries, depends significantly on land. Despite being a crucial tool for obtaining loans, the use of land as collateral is relatively low in rural Kenya. This has largely been attributed to lack of formal ownership documents attributable to poor titling, which has subsequently hindered investments and development in these areas. The research gap, therefore, lies in the need to understand and address the reasons behind the low uptake of land as collateral in rural Kenya, despite its potential as a valuable asset and its significant role in rural livelihoods and development. This study set out to establish factors influencing the use of property titles as loan security in a rural setting using Machakos County as a case study. Employing a descriptive research design, the study targeted 724 households in Kivani and 30 financial institution officers. Data was collected using questionnaires and topical discussions, achieving response rates of 96% and 100%, respectively. Findings reveal that 67 percent of respondents have never used land titles as collateral. Several factors were identified: social relations, lending conditions, and loan pricing. Social relations factors included communal land ownership, land succession problems, cultural norms, and sentimental attachment to land. Lending conditions encompassed land valuation processes, borrower creditworthiness requirements, collateral quality, and the need for family consent. Loan pricing factors involve the costs and fees associated with credit financing. The study recommends increasing awareness of individual land ownership, exploring alternative collateral options, establishing insurance markets for collateral assets, and improving loan evaluation processes to better support rural residents. These measures aim to enhance access to financing, thereby promoting rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) play an important role in environmental governance. However, ENGO activity does not always lead to favorable outcomes. This paper highlights the ways in which neoliberal economic reforms and governance deficits constrain ENGO effectiveness through a case study of Georgia -- an emerging democracy that has attracted considerable external funding in the environmental domain. We analyze representative household survey data on environmental attitudes and conduct interviews with ENGO representatives and other key informants to show how many Georgian ENGOs are able to create a fa¸cade of successful activities for the country's donors, while not contributing to meaningful environmental outcomes at the local level. The case study further illustrates the implications of Georgia's business-government nexus, which censors criticism by genuine ENGOs, while leading others to take lucrative contracts for environmental impact evaluations. These findings have important implications for efforts by external actors working to promote environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides causal evidence on how political parties can sway voters at scale in nascent electoral democracies. We collect novel data on expressway construction by the Justice and Development Party in Turkey and use province-by-year variation in construction to show that votes for the Justice and Development Party increased in response to the expressways. The estimates imply that the expressways increased the Justice and Development Party's vote share by 4.8 percentage points—a third of the increase from 2002 to 2011. We provide evidence that the visibility and competence signalled by the expressway expansion, and not increased local economic growth, drove increased vote shares. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review of: Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand: A Survival Guide, Geoffrey Palmer and Gwen Palmer Steeds (2022) Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 400 pp., ISBN 978 1 77692 016 7 (pbk), NZ$40 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most influential arguments suggests that new democracies are more inclined than others to commit to international human rights treaties. This paper examines whether new democracies are more likely to commit not only to the basic, but also to the more demanding and constraining treaties. We argue that despite the strategic utility of costly commitments, new democracies are often unwilling to pay for the increased costs of more demanding and constraining treaties. We test our argument by tackling some of the trickiest inferential challenges. We employ propensity score weighting to address the nonrandom assignment of new democracies and further specify marginal structural models to account for dynamic confounding. Our analyses reveal intriguing findings. While new democracies commit to the broad human rights conventions more quickly, they are more reluctant than established democracies to commit to the more demanding and constraining protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the causal relationship between social and political trust in a low trust society, a setting where this topic has received very little attention. We focus on contemporary Chile, a relatively consolidated new democracy lacking many of the conditions that fosters trust such as high socioeconomic equality, weak social divisions, or universal welfare policies. Our empirical analysis is based on a 4-wave panel survey applied to a representative sample of 2000 Chilean adults interviewed face to face each year between 2016 and 2019. Based on statistical models with varying specifications and assumptions, we find support for the institutionalist view that claims that political trust exercises a positive influence over social trust. However, contrary to recent findings for some European democracies (Sønderskov & Dinesen 2016, Seifert 2018), we also find that social trust positively affects political trust. Our results suggest that the positive relationship between both types of trust travels to different political settings, and that there is no minimum threshold required in levels of trust for this relationship to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate whether a country's youth cohort size and quality of democracy, independently and jointly predict young people's propensity to support democracy as a political system. We use pooled data from World Values Survey Waves 5–7, comprising 81 country-waves with 25,125 observations from 39 established and new democracies, in multilevel binary logistic regression analyses. The paper finds evidence that firstly, against conventional expectations, a large youth cohort exerts a positive influence on young people's support for democracy as a political system. Secondly, the effect of youth cohort size depends on the quality of democracy of countries: young people growing as part of the youth cohorts in established democracies show stronger propensities to support democracy than their peers in new democracies. This has implications for both theory and empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic altered the functioning of societies and people's behavior in many areas of daily life. Studies of political participation during the pandemic do not constitute an extensive body of research, focusing mainly on Western European countries. Under these circumstances, we know very little about political participation in post-communist countries during the pandemic. This special issue aims to understand the dynamics of political participation in post-communist Europe through both qualitative and quantitative analyses. It proposes several innovative concepts and analytical frames that can be used to understand who participated, why, and with what consequences. This topic has often been surrounded by discussions referring to empirical matters much more than around general arguments and theoretical explanatory models. One of the special issue's aims is to enrich the theoretical debate about political participation in new democracies and transition countries during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a real sense, post-third wave democratisation was a transition to democracy after 1991. The character brought down authoritarian regimes such as one-party systems, military regimes, and the personalisation of power. The consequences led to the establishment of democratic governments in different political situations. The article argues that the democratic experience dictates the non-feasibility of elections during the transition process, as there are massive irregularities that marred the conduct of elections in different forms. This article contests the founding (first) elections that were conducted under the supervision of the military leaders. The outcome of the transition elections raised an issue about the quality of future democracy. This includes the socio-economic development that interfaces with the dividends of democracy. Therefore, post-third wave democratisation defines the new African politics. The methodology employed in this study includes qualitative focused on secondary data. The article submits that civilian-military relations are the new paradigm shift in African politics. Given the new approach, the researcher foresees that the politicians will deepen democracy in the two countries. However, military intervention in politics was a result of non-commitment to democratic principles in the past. The tradition became unending, and the countries that organised democracy-based unethical practices could witness military intervention or otherwise civil war that may obstruct the new democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]