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The Hare Quota-Largest Remainders (HQLR) formula promoted consensus-building during Tunisia’s constitution-writing process and in the new democratic regime’s first years but it is now an obstacle to democratic consolidation. HQLR discourages the development of a tractable partisan choice set -- one large enough to afford voters meaningfully distinct options but not so large as to be cognitively overwhelming -- and fosters party fragmentation in parliament, obstructing the formation of workable governing coalitions. One result has been coalitions and national unity governments so heterogeneous as to lack common purpose, frustrating and disillusioning citizens and risking nostalgia for the decisiveness of the previous, authoritarian system. Replacing HQLR with either D’Hondt or St.Lague divisors formula would reverse the incentives toward parliamentary fragmentation, foster a more coherent political party landscape, and, if democratic competition is restored following President Kais Said’s auto coup in July 2021, facilitate Tunisia’s democratic consolidation by clarifying partisan accountability in parliament.

Using descriptive and multiple regression analyses of data from the National Sports and Society Survey (N = 3,993), this study examines public opinions about athletes’ right to protest during the national anthem. Results suggest that public opinion is now more supportive of athletes being allowed to protest during the anthem, although considerable opposition persists. Black individuals and those who recognize racial/ethnic discrimination in society are especially likely to support athletes’ right to protest. Heterosexual, Christian, sports fan, and military identities seem to encourage opposition to the right to protest. Indicators of traditionalism and sports nationalism attitudes are also negatively associated with support for athlete protests.

This paper argues that a normative frame of reference is necessary to redefine the notion of value from a more-than-human societal perspective, differentiating between ‘fetish value’ and ‘true value.’ The former is a product of capital, while the latter is capital's prey but also its antidote. The paper emphasizes the importance of a normative frame of reference that considers the economic, ethical, and political dimensions of value production, and calls for a shift in focus from a purely analytical understanding of capitalism as a social and economic system to a more integrated (analytical-normative) approach. This approach would require a more nuanced understanding of how value is created and distributed, and how it impacts different social groups and the environment. The paper argues that this new approach would enable us to imagine alternative economic systems that prioritize social and environmental well-being over profit maximization and shift the focus from merely challenging existing power relations and economic structures to creating alternative forms of value creation and exchange based on normative principles of social justice and ecological sustainability. The paper highlights the importance of perceiving capital as the product of the perversion of commons that are vital for the creation of true value.

Who supports high taxes on the rich? Existing accounts of public attitudes focus on egalitarian values and material interests, but make little mention of the ideas people hold about how the economy works descriptively. Drawing on the distinction between positive- and zero-sum beliefs about the economy, and original survey data from five countries, I show that there are systematic differences in tax progressivity preferences across groups within the public who think differently about the economy. Positive-sum thinking is associated with less progressive preferences. However, despite theoretical attention, there is no evidence of systematic zero-sum thinking among the public. On the other hand, some descriptions focus on conflict between rich and poor, and these do predict support for greater progressivity. Further analysis is required to differentiate alternative causal explanations of the patterns observed, but different modes of descriptive economic thinking are an important feature of the mass politics of progressivity.

Why do populist citizens oppose climate change? Thus far, data constraints limited the ability to test different theoretical mechanisms against each other. We argue that populist attitudes affect climate attitudes through two distinct channels, namely institutional trust and attitudes towards science. The former argument focuses on political institutions as the central actors in implementing climate policy. Individuals who distrust these institutions are more sceptical about climate change. The latter argument claims that populists deny climate change because they distrust the underlying climate science. According to this view, populists would view climate scientists as part of the self-serving elite that betrays the people. Utilising data from the Austrian National Election Study and structural equation modelling, we find strong support for the relationship of populism and climate attitudes via attitudes towards science and institutional trust. Populists systematically hold more negative attitudes towards science and political institutions, and consequently deny climate change.

Title in Portuguese: Racionalidade online: provimento de razões em discussões virtuaisAbstract: The aim of this article is to discuss the idea of rationality in online debates. Taking a deliberative approach, this article analyzes 2,375 comments about LGBT rights across four different platforms: Facebook, Youtube, News Portals, and Votenaweb (which was specifically designed as a platform for discussions about bills proposed in the Brazilian National Congress). Using reason-giving as a dependent variable, the article tests five hypotheses: (H1) the number of posts presenting arguments for their positions is directly related to the platform on which these comments were posted; (H2) the chances that a post will present arguments is greater when the forum is balanced; (H3) the chances that a post will present arguments is greater when reciprocity is more frequent; (H4) the chances that a post will present arguments is smaller when the level of disrespect is greater; and (H5) the chances that a post will present arguments diminish when the comments are written by anonymous participants. The results show the importance of the nature of the platform and the salience of respect in inducing reason-giving.Resumo: Este artigo se propõe a discutir a ideia de racionalidade que está no coração das abordagens deliberacionistas de democracia. Essa discussão embasa a realização de um estudo empírico focado em um banco de dados com 2.375 comentários sobre direitos LGBT em quatro arenas online: Youtube, Facebook, comentários de notícias e Votenaweb. O objetivo é discutir os principais fatores a influenciar no incremento do provimento de razões por postagens nessas arenas. Na análise, testamos cinco hipóteses: (H1) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas depende da plataforma em que se encontram essas postagens; (H2) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas é maior em debates em que há equilíbrio entre as posições defendidas; (H3) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas tende a ser maior quando há mais reciprocidade; (H4) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas é menor se o nível de desrespeito é maior; e (H5) A chance de postagens apresentarem justificativas é menor em mensagens enviadas por anônimos. Os resultados indicam que, entre as variáveis testadas, a "plataforma" e a "presença de respeito" são as mais importantes para induzir o provimento de justificativas.

This study evaluates whether 853 municipalities of Minas Gerais have developed one specific strategy of electronic government. We searched for municipalities that have websites for the executive branch, relating this information to a number of secondary data. These data include variables on the Municipal Human Development Index (HDI-M), municipal budgetary revenues, year of founding of municipalities, the mayor’s party affiliation, and a public policy initiative related to the creation of municipal executive branch websites. This analysis was performed to develop descriptive statistics among the variables collected. In addition to exploring descriptive analysis, we attempted to determine statistical models that explain the existence of websites for municipal executives. This allowed us to determine whether municipalities that were established earlier than others, have the highest HDI-M, and have larger budgets are also more likely to have websites. The results indicate that older municipalities, as well as those with higher HDI-M and elevated budgetary revenues, are more likely to have websites. A mayor’s party affiliation indicates that municipalities administered by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT, the center-left-wing party) are more likely to have websites than municipalities governed by the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, or PSDB, the center-right-wing party). Furthermore, municipalities that use the state government program Integra Minas (Connect Minas) are less likely to have their own websites, which is an indication that these locations are using policy resources to communicate electronically with the population. Thus, newly founded municipalities with low HDI-M, with low budgetary revenue, and administered by center-right-wing parties may benefit from public policies that encourage greater transparency in the communication of municipal executives with their population.

This article proposes a conception of monetary sovereignty that recognizes the reality of today’s global credit money system. Monetary sovereignty is typically used in a Westphalian sense to denote the ability of states to issue and regulate their own currency. This article rejects the Westphalian conception. Instead, it proposes a conception of effective monetary sovereignty that focuses attention on what states are actually able to do in the era of financial globalization. The conception fits the hybridity of the modern credit money system by acknowledging the crucial role not only of central bank money but also of money issued by regulated banks and unregulated shadow banks. These institutions often operate ‘offshore’, outside of a state’s legal jurisdiction, which makes monetary governance more difficult. Monetary sovereignty consists in the ability of states to effectively govern these different segments of the monetary system and thereby achieve their economic policy objectives.

Corporations increasingly engage in innovative ‘tax planning strategies’ by shifting profits between jurisdictions. In response, states try to curtail such profit shifting activities while at the same time attempting to retain and attract multinational corporations. We aim to open up this dichotomy between states and corporations and argue that a wealth defence industry of professional service firms plays a crucial role as facilitators. We investigate the subsidiary structure of 27,000 MNCs and show that clients of the Big Four accountancy firms show systematically higher levels of aggressive tax planning strategies than clients of smaller accountancy firms. We specify this effect for three distinct strategies and also uncover marked differences across countries. As such we provide empirical evidence for the systematic involvement of auditors as facilitators in corporate wealth defence.

A variety of social movements across the world and the political spectrum are now taking advantage of peer production mechanisms such as collaboration, co-production, and self-organisation. This essay investigates the consequences of peer production for social protest, looking at how peer production reshuffles and remediates social change activism today. It explores the convergences and tensions between peer networks and contemporary social movements ranging from informal coalitions and amorphous grouping to traditional social movement organisations. First, it traces the historical trajectory of peer production as it has come to permeate the progressive social movements of the last three decades, linking distinct approaches to organizing to technological innovation. Second, it reflects on the so-called social affordances (and constraints) of digital infrastructure and their role in fostering specific modes of creativity and convergence apt to support protest actors. Third, it explores three types of consequences of peer production for social movements, namely cultural production and norm change, collective identity, and the commons. The chapter then examines three tensions that might emerge in the process of embedding peer production mechanisms and values in instances of collective action, namely: individual vs. collective engagements, peer networks vs. social movement organizations, and self-organized vs. commercial infrastructure.

Using a natural experiment, we find that in provinces where Turkey’s Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) just won the election in 2004, women, including those who are weakly religious or non-religious, now veil far more than in provinces in which AKP just lost, the more so the poorer they are. This effect, as we predict, does not occur for praying regularly which is more costly and harder to observe practice. We argue that veiling is higher in AKP provinces not only because of a generic aim to conform to the stricter mores fostered by the victorious party. We find that those who veil, particularly those in AKP provinces who are not pious, are more politically active than those who do not veil. This may be an indication that veiling could partly be a strategic response to policies, which favour those who are or appear pious. Our study suggests that observable religious practices may have their independent dynamics driven by the pursuit of instrumental goals. Our results also suggest that parties with a religious ideology have an advantage over their secular counterparts in solving the clientelistic information problem, for they can rely on religious symbols for screening and signalling.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed most countries to an unexpected crisis, with unclear consequences for citizens’ trust in others and in public authorities. This study shed lights on how social and political trust changed during the pandemic. We conducted a longitudinal survey in the US of about 1000 respondents at three points in time during the pandemic. We elicited respondents’ trust towards other people and towards different institutional authorities, along with attribution of responsibility for the current situation. Results show that institutional trust fell, while interpersonal trust slightly increased, especially during the peak of the first pandemic wave. This dynamic was mainly driven by Republicans, whose institutional trust decreased, especially when exposed to COVID-19, along with growth in social trust. Considering that Republicans attributed, at the time, more responsibilities to their political leader, we argue that institutional trust was crowded out by social trust. Disappointed voters felt unprotected by institutions and looked for support elsewhere in society. Consistent with this, though, in the reverse direction, experimental results from the third wave show that Republicans increased institutional trust. However, social trust fell when primed with positive information about the pandemic. Overall, these findings suggest that societal shocks may induce people to exchange formal with informal institutions as a coping strategy, with social and political trust moving in opposite directions.

Election management bodies (EMBs) can be classified according to different criteria; their composition is one of them. Most EMB typologies pertain to composition and recruitment at the top, and not at the level of sub-ordinate commissions and polling stations. wahlbeboachtung.org has undertaken preliminary research to compare EMB models in Europe on the basis of OSCE/ODIHR reports. This research illustrates that Austria shares a common model – political parties nominating poll workers – predominantly with countries in its eastern neighbourhood, but also indicates the need to conduct further research into EMB compositions and the correlations between various levels, not the least in the context of ongoing electoral reform debates in Europe.

We test the hypothesis that protest participation decisions in an adult population of potential climate protesters are interdependent. Subjects (n=1,510) from the four largest German cities were recruited two weeks before protest date. We measured participation (ex post) and beliefs about the other subjects' participation (ex ante) in an online survey, used a randomized informational intervention to induce exogenous variance in beliefs, and estimated the causal effect of a change in belief on the probability of participation using a control function approach. Participation decisions are found to be strategic substitutes: a one percentage-point increase of belief causes a .67 percentage-point decrease in the probability of participation in the average subject., Comment: 21 pages, 6 pages appendix, 4 figures

Ordinary citizens are considered bulwarks against democratic backsliding. Yet, citizens’ commitment to democracy below the surface is sometimes fragile and crises exacerbate existing anxieties and discontent. We propose “democratic persuasion” as a theory-driven, actionable intervention to foster the resilience of citizens’ commitment to liberal democracy. "Democratic persuasion" requires that political elites actively make the case for democracy and discuss democracy’s inherent trade-offs while engaging existing doubts and misperceptions. During the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought these trade-offs to the fore, we invited citizens on facebook to attend one of sixteen Zoom town halls to discuss pandemic politics with a German member of parliament. Each MP conducted two town halls and we randomly assigned, when they employed “democratic persuasion”. The field-experiment demonstrates substantial effects on some, but not all, indicators of democratic commitment, showcasing the academic and practical value of this emerging line of research on strengthening the societal foundations of liberal democracies.

This literature review contributes to the work of understanding the differences between targeted violence and domestic terrorism by exploring research on radicalization and mobilization processes within the literature on targeted violence. This review relied on DHS’s 2019 language regarding the definition of targeted violence, and consequently focused on incidents that lacked an ideological motivation and occurred in “communities, schools, places of worship, and other public gatherings.” Though our data collection returned 169 distinct articles seemingly on the radicalization or mobilization of those involved in terrorism and targeted violence, we did not find a robust discussion of processes of radicalization or mobilization of those who commit acts of targeted violence. We did, however, identify five “theories of radicalization” in the targeted violence literature which we review in the article. We then articulate recommendations for research that would improve understanding of how domestic terrorism and targeted violence are related. This work is especially critical because the literatures on these topics are not, at present, in conversation with one another, and bringing them together has the potential to meaningfully advance the understanding of both phenomena.

The dominant narrative among scholars and political pundits characterizes American partisanship as overwhelmingly negative, portraying citizens as more repelled by the opposing party than attached to their own party. To assess the valence of partisan identity, we use various measures collected from several new and existing nationally representative surveys and behavioural outcomes obtained from two experiments. Our findings consistently depart from the negative partisanship narrative. For the majority of Americans, partisanship is either equally positive and negative or more positive than negative. Only partisan leaners stand out as negative partisans. We pair these observational findings with experimental data that differentiate between positive group behaviour and negative group behaviour in the partisan context. We find that the behavioural manifestations of party identity similarly include both positive and negative biases in balance, reinforcing our conclusion that descriptions of partisanship as primarily negative are exaggerated.

The literature on welfare chauvinism shows that ethnocentrism reduces support for outgroup redistribution. To limit bias, scholarship suggests framing policies universally or addressing beneficiary deservingness. However, policies to support disadvantaged groups and ensure equity cannot always be framed in universal terms. Moreover, dominant groups often hold minoritized groups to a deservingness double standard. Thus, we ask: what are effective ways of mollifying ethnocentric bias in policy evaluation? We argue that principles of distributive justice -- normative justifications for who should get what and why -- can reduce ethnocentric bias. We test through three experiments in Slovakia and with the Roma as the outgroup. Frames using the distributive principle of reciprocity reduce ethnocentric bias amongst majorities; conversely, frames centered around the principle of need garner minority support. Given salient anti-Roma prejudice, we consider our findings a floor. For less stigmatized outgroups, reciprocity frames may bolster support for redistributive policies even further.

One of todays most controversial and consequential questions is whether the rapid, worldwide uptake of digital media is causally related to a decline in democracy. We conducted a systematic review of causal and correlational evidence (N=498 articles) on the link between digital media and different political variables, such as trust, polarization or news consumption. We further focused on the subset of articles that employed causal inference methods. Across methods, the articles report associations between digital media use and most political variables. Some associations, such as increases in political participation and information consumption, are likely to be beneficial for democracy and were often observed in the Global South and emerging democracies. Other consistently reported associations, such as declining political trust, advantages for populists, and growing polarization, are likely to be detrimental to democracy and were more pronounced in established democracies. We conclude that while the impact of digital media on democracy depends on the specific political variable and the political system in question, several variables show clear directions of associations. We believe that the evidence calls for further research efforts and vigilance by governments and civil societies to better understand and actively design the intimate interplay of digital media and democracy.

In this essay, Chloé Germaine Buckley and Benjamin Bowman discuss the School Strike for Climate movement. Rather than consider the strikes as a protest movement for a large-scale shift in climate policy, they suggest viewing them as a form of global cultural exchange. They highlight the role of three themes to make this case: 1. the role of young people’s positionalities in building relationships and global solidarities;2. young people’s repertoires beyond attempting to shift climate policy into wider civic activity such as intergenerational care or mental health support;3. the functioning of the strikes as a polyphonic ‘text’ that invites dialogue, incorporating a multitude of voices in a variety of forms. In their essay, Buckley and Bowman interpret the efforts of young people not only as a protest against the world as it is today, but as a process that envisions the world as it could be, with all the struggles that come with bringing this view into being. The authors draw on a range of materials produced by young people, from informal protest signs to songs.

Religion is frequently a key component of national identity. This is notably true in Poland, where national identity is strongly tied to traditional Catholic values. In the present study, we examine the relationship between religious commitment (indicated by self-identification as religious and frequency of practice) and two kinds of national identity in Poland: national collective narcissism, an exaggerated belief in an in-group’s greatness that is insufficiently recognized by others; and national ingroup satisfaction, a belief in the value of the national ingroup. We predicted that although both forms of national identity would be linked to religious commitment, Polish collective narcissism would have an especially strong relationship with religiosity, given that populist rhetoric in Poland relies on grievance-oriented nationalist appeals that emphasize threats to Poland’s traditional Catholic character. In cross-sectional and dynamic analyses using data from a six-wave panel study of Polish adults, we find support for these predictions, though we do not find clear evidence that within-person changes in collective narcissism and ingroup satisfaction are linked with within-person changes in religiosity.

While the benefits of using humor in teaching have been documented in the literature, this article undertakes qualitative research to examine its associated risks. This is not to discourage the use of humor as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of politics. Rather, through analysis of data from three focus groups of 2nd and 3rd year Politics and/or International Relations (Pol & IR) students, this article advances a student-centric understanding of the pitfalls to be avoided by Pol & IR lecturers seeking to harness the benefits of humor in their content delivery.

Political economists have theorized the structural power of financial actors as a function of their capacity to (threaten) exit. This paper presents evidence to make the argument that the dependence of non-financial firms on outside financing have declined, and thus the exit options of wealth owners and their financial intermediaries. Presenting an alternative theory, this paper argues that financial-sector power is increasingly based not on financing and exit but on control. The argument is developed through an analysis of asset manager capitalism as a historically distinct corporate governance regime. Whereas the control-based dominance of finance capital during the early 20th century was characterized by credit-debt relationships between banks and corporations, today asset managers’ equity holdings dominate; and whereas the shareholder capitalism of the late 20th century was characterized by impatient investors wielding the threat of exit, the power of asset managers in corporate governance is based on their large and illiquid, yet fully diversified shareholdings. Recent evidence suggests that the structural power wielded by asset managers determines corporate governance outcomes on environmental and social issues, influences product market competition, and shifts the macroeconomic policy preferences of the financial sector.

The Russian renewable energy industry has not yet succeeded in breaking through into the domestic market despite its potential, particularly in remote Arctic settlements. This article examines broad issues that influence national policy-makers and provides an analysis of the type of objectives that are emphasized in Russian energy policies. It can be assumed that the priorities behind these objectives have a more stable status than more concrete plans to boost the use of renewables, since they often fail to materialize. In order to discover these priorities, I analyze several relevant policy-making documents with the help of public justification analysis, a method developed to examine public claims made in favor of a certain cause, and the commonly known values that the claim-makers refer to in order to convince others. This paper reveals that Russian energy policy documents tend to emphasize concrete, technical tasks over more abstract, holistic goals. In addition, industrial needs dominate all policies, even those related to socio-economic or environmental issues. I conclude that the tendencies listed above may prevent fundamental structural change in the Russian energy industry, despite the potential of renewable energy, especially in the Arctic regions.

Scholarly explanations of the survival of left parties and the upsurge in mainstream politics discontent often refer to voters' intergenerational mobility resulting from the post-industrial transition. As the occupational structure evolves, voters across generations are exposed to heterogenous life chances, and the social elevator progressively alters class voting patterns. Yet empirical evidence for the electoral implications of social ascent and decline as well as their reasons is mixed at best – likely because most empirical studies seek for homogenous average mobility effects. To address this limitation, we analyse the diverse consequences of mobility across social groups in a quasi-descriptive fashion by applying a cutting-edge ANOVA-based OLS model. Contrarily to prior studies, this approach allows us to identify class-specific mobility effects on voting (ceteris paribus), consistently with theory. Our analyses draw on individual-level detailed information on both intergenerational social mobility and political behaviour from the European Social Survey (rounds 1-9) across 19 Western European countries. Although scholarly accounts on the consequences of social mobility averagely find little to no support in our analyses, we do observe some significant and substantial class-specific effects of both social ascent and descent on voting choice.

‘Strategic communication is something we are very bad at’, tells us a tweet from the Geneva Peace Week. One of the examples of strategic communication is public engagement content on Twitter. Empirical studies, however, never looked at public engagement content about peace on Twitter. In turn, I use grounded theory approaches to explore and map peace communication among seven research organizations and events in the West. My data set comprises a total of 9,874 tweets in English. Thematic coding with Atlas.ti results in 4,274 codes that are grouped into 63 distinct themes. I find sustainable peace as the main type of peace in data. Yet, the themes that presumably contribute to it – health, accountability, trust, and transparency, among others – are marginal. While gender is among the dominant themes, it emerges disconnected, with a lack of meaningful integration of it in other topics such as health or participation. A pattern emerges of the level of view that is mainly positioned on the global, with the local, community, family left at the margins.

While recent trends in the study of radial party voting have tended to focus on egalitarian attitudes and individual personality traits in their endeavor to explain radical party choice, the present study pits individual identity traits in the spotlight of ballot box behavior, using data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey. We analyze the link between exclusive and inclusive identity (identifying with a more restricted ‘in-group’ versus identifying with a larger community) and the propensity to vote for radical right and radical left parties, using differences in individual identification with respondents’ home nation and as European citizens. The results show that exclusive individual identity is a good predictor of radical right party choice, even in the presence of redistributive and egalitarian values usually associated with left-wing voting. The results also speak to the literature on welfare chauvinism. While the presence of strong egalitarian and redistributive attitudes does indeed normally predict radical left party preference in line with previous findings, this relationship is complicated by the presence of exclusive individual identity, which moderates the former’s effect and can induce egalitarian voters to prefer radical right parties. In conclusion, the paper explores the interaction of identity and social class.

(English): The performance of polls in the 2019 Argentine elections reached its lowest point since democratic restoration in 1983. Their errors were much greater than those observed in recent years in mature democracies, where there is talk about a crisis of this type of surveys. In the primaries, Argentine pollsters widely underestimated the advantage of the Everyone's Front opposition alliance over the governing Together for Change. But after adjusting their methods, in the general election they overestimated that advantage by similar margins. We analyze both failures in an international comparative perspective. Vote intention data for president was used to calculate error indicators and compare them with current international averages and those of past decades, and with errors in several electoral cycles in the US and the UK. We examine ongoing changes in the survey industry, falling response rates, and causes of error identified by new academic studies and work commissioned by professional associations in the field of public opinion research. This literature shows that pre-election polls are no more inaccurate today than in the past and underlines the importance of "non-sampling" errors, particularly those produced by non-response bias, when the probability of participating in a poll is lower for certain groups, such as people with little interest in politics or low social or institutional trust. These types of errors and their causes are now better understood and procedures can be designed to improve the accuracy of estimations. We also discuss the impact of inaccurate polls on political strategies and the media narrative of elections, as well as the difficulty for pollsters, journalists and political actors to acknowledge and communicate the levels of uncertainty associated with electoral predictions. Our analysis highlights basic limitations of the polling industry and public opinion research in Argentina, such as the lack of a professional association and the incipient development of electoral behavior studies. Pollsters were surprised when voters punished the government because of the economic crisis, even though it was the most likely scenario according to a not very large but significant set of empirical studies on economic voting in Argentina and Latin America. The substantial errors in 2019 have implications for the reliability of issue polling, which may show a distorted picture of opinions in Argentine society.

In this paper we examine three forms of regret in relation to the UK’s hugely significant referendum on EU membership that was held in June 2016. They are: (i) whether ‘leave’ voters at the referendum subsequently regretted their choice (in the light of the result), (ii) whether non-voters regretted their decisions to abstain (essentially supporting ‘remain’) and (iii) whether individuals were more likely to indicate that it is everyone’s duty to vote following the referendum. We find evidence in favor of all three types of regret. In particular, leave voters and non-voters were significantly more likely to indicate that they would vote to remain given a chance to do so again; moreover, the probability of an individual stating that it was everyone’s duty to vote in a general election increased significantly in 2017 (compared to 2015). The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of the referendum’s outcome.

This article discusses the debate and empirical bases of the environmental argument against Latinx immigration to the United State (US) since the 1980s decade. The environmental argument against immigration states that the level of immigration (undocumented and legal) has a statistical impact on the CO2 emissions, quality of air, and pollution. The argument also declares that immigrants exceed the emissions if they remained in their country of origin since the 1980s decade, and that immigration rapidly consumes environmental resources such as water, air, land, and increases biodiversity loss. This argument has neo-Malthusian, social Darwinism, and racist biases. This paper presents the core debates around the primary premises, the evolution inside the environmental movement in the US. This paper argues that the environmental argument against Latinx immigration lacks generalizable studies, objective data, and scientific validity. The environmental argument evolution has not present enough academic to support to its main claim that connects immigration with environmental degradation. Instead, we argue that immigration it is not the only cause of population growth, the environmental argument denies the strong evidence and studies that linkage environmental degradation with industrialization levels, emissions, economic development, and consumption levels of the US citizens.

Does democratization process lead to positive environmental public policies in the Colombian case? By focusing on variations in authoritarianism and democratic rule during the 1990s, this paper tests the hypothesis that an increase in democratic rule produces changes to environmental protection along two levels, legal framework and institutional accountability. The dependent variables are democratization and authoritarianism. The independent variable is the level of environmental protection in the public policy outcome. The qualitative analysis is focused on the factors and causal mechanism that allows to evaluate the hypothesis. The findings are that the periods of authoritarian rule and democratic rule are highly influenced by two factors. The first is domestic (postcolonial institutions, regime’s organizational strength, elites’ cleavages, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, and the strength of environmental movement) and second international (western linkage and international organizations’ influence). The Colombian case in the 1990s allows for an identification of these different characteristics of authoritarian and democratic regimes and the causal mechanisms that promote or avoid environmental protection.

Since the financial crisis there has been a massive shift from actively managed funds to passive funds that merely replicate financial indexes. Instead of active investors influencing states through their investment decisions, in this new economic reality the locus of agency is shifting from investors towards index providers as they decide which companies and countries are included into key benchmark indexes. We argue that the major index providers (MSCI, S&P Dow Jones and FTSE Russell) exercise growing private authority as they steer capital via their indexes. Index providers have become crucial intermediaries in the relationship between states and investors. Through producing widely used indexes, index providers essentially provide a crucial infrastructure that enables the creation and trading of increasingly passively allocated financial claims. Through the infrastructural power they derive from this gatekeeper position, index providers are able to ‘standardise’ the issuers of capital claims and the countries in which these issuers reside through determining the criteria that corporations and states, especially emerging markets, have to fulfil to qualify for index membership – and consequently asset allocation. This chapter therefore investigates the relationship between states and index providers and the latter’s influence on issues of domestic financial regulation, investor access and international capital flows.

Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek are two philosophers who are known to be quite provocative in voicing renewal in the face of world politics. Both simultaneously want to restore the position of political subjects who are considered dead at the intersection of philosophy and politics. The book entitled “Subjektivitas dalam Filsafat Politik Alain Badiou dan Slavoj Zizek”, this book simply discusses Badiou and Zizek's understanding of political subjects that are considered to have misguided capitalism. The book by R. Setiawan consists of three chapters written theoretically. The first chapter contains the background of Alain Badiou and Badiouian's theoretical framework. The second chapter discusses the background of Slavoj Zizek and Zizekian's theoretical framework. Finally, the third chapter discusses the future of the Badiousian and Zizekian subjects regarding the reincarnation of political subjects, St. Paul's militancy and radicalism, and the confrontation of Levinasian and Derridean ethics. The purpose of writing this book review, apart from being an assignment for the Philosophy of Science course, also aims to provide a reference on how Badiou and Zizek understand the theory of critical political subjects.

This chapter explores the effects of the trust problem on jihadi internet discussion forums. The scarcity of non-verbal cues in digital communication facilitates deceptive mimicry, which undermines the interpersonal trust required for sensitive transactions. Open-source data from Arabic-language jihadi forums between 2006 and 2011 indicate that distrust there was high and direct recruitment rare. General trust also declined over time as policing of the forums increased. As of 2014, forums are still in use, but primarily for low-stake activities such as propaganda-sharing and ideological debate, not recruiting or operational coordination. Confidence in the authenticity of propaganda remained relatively high, due to vetting institutions and hard-to-fake video formats. A modicum of interpersonal trust also remained, thanks to reputation systems and a few relatively reliable signs of trustworthiness involving time expenditure. The trust problem is an Achilles heel for high-risk activists online, including pro-democracy activists in authoritarian settings.

Are offline political relations and endorsements established or maintained with online interactions?We examine the external validity of data on political behavior exhibited online and compare it to offline behavior. We overlay two data sets on political support among members of the Swiss parliament to estimate the explanatory power of online endorsements on offline cosponsorship signatures among members, using a gHypEG network regression model.Whereas offline support behavior is driven by a broad range of factors, such as network and homophily effects, online endorsement is less diverse.Our findings show that online endorsement is predominantly driven by partisanship, calling into question the use of online political behavior data to study real-world politics.

The Hong Kong Online Public Opinion Data Mining Project (http://www.webopinion.hk/) aims to collect and study online public opinion in Hong Kong. Funded by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Project No. 11600717), this project started in January 2018 and is currently housed in the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong. The project team is led by the principal investigator Dr. Fei Shen and comprised of scholars and researchers with specializations in communication, computer science, and other social science domains. Utilizing a big data approach, the current project uses a series of computational communication methods to extract and analyze the dynamics of public opinion on the internet in Hong Kong.

Usual studies of the underpinnings of partisan attachments only consider positive party identifications and the Big Five framework. However, negative party identification is an important understudied side of party identification that affects democratic dissatisfaction and political conflict. This article studies how narcissistic admiration and rivalry as well as need for closure affect negative party identification and partisanship types, such as being a negative, open, or closed partisan. I argue that different types of partisan attachments fulfill different psychological needs and the kind of attachments individuals show can thus be traced back to their personality features. Based on a novel online quota survey from Germany conducted in February and May 2021 (N= 1,454), I find narcissistic rivalry and need for closure to be central traits for different types of partisanship. Furthermore, negative partisans against a radical-right party show a different profile from partisans with other system parties.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the traditional “booth, ballot, and pen” model of voting, based on a specific location and physical presence, may not be feasible during a health crisis. This situation has highlighted the need to assess whether existing national electoral legislation includes enough instruments to ensure citizens’ safety during voting procedures, even under the conditions of a global pandemic. Such instruments, often grouped under the umbrella of voter facilitation or convenience voting, range from voting in advance and various forms of absentee voting (postal, online, and proxy voting) to assisted voting and voting at home and in hospitals and other healthcare institutions. While most democracies have implemented at least some form of voter facilitation, substantial cross-country differences still exist. In the push to develop pandemic-sustainable elections in different institutional and political contexts, variation in voter facilitation makes it possible to learn from country-specific experiences. As accessibility and inclusiveness are critical components of elections for ensuring political legitimacy and accountability, particularly in times of crisis, these lessons are of utmost importance.In this study, we focus on Finland, where the Parliament decided in March 2021 to postpone for two months the municipal elections that were originally scheduled to be held on April 18. Although the decision was mostly justified by the sudden and dramatic daily increase in new COVID-19 infections, the inability to guarantee those in quarantine the opportunity to vote was included among the likely risks. The failure to organize health-safe voting procedures to accommodate the original schedule emphasizes a certain paradox in the Finnish electoral legislation: caution in introducing new facilitation instruments has led to lower levels of preparedness and flexibility in crisis situations. Although a forerunner in implementing extensive advance voting opportunities, Finland has only recently introduced postal voting, which is restricted to voters living abroad. Hence, we ask: what can be learned from this form of convenience voting if expanded to all voters to enhance the sustainability of elections in future crises like pandemics? Our analyses are based on a survey conducted among non-resident voters (n = 2,100) after the 2019 parliamentary elections in which postal voting from abroad was allowed for the first time. Our results show that whereas trust in the integrity of postal voting is quite high, various efforts needed from individual voters substantially increase the costs of postal voting. Postal operations also raise concerns. Furthermore, voters felt that requiring two witnesses made postal voting cumbersome, an issue that needs to be resolved, particularly if applying postal voting in the context of a pandemic. The Finnish case constitutes a concrete example of a situation in which voter facilitation targeted to a particular segment of society may become a testbed for electoral engineering (see Norris 2004) that will improve voting opportunities for everyone.

Conceptions of privacy differ by culture. In the Internet age, digital tools continuously challenge the way users, technologists, and governments define, value, and protect privacy. National and supranational entities attempt to regulate privacy and protect data managed online. The European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect on 25 May 2018. The research presented here draws on two years of media reporting on GDPR from French, German, UK, and US sources. We use the unsupervised machine learning method of topic modelling to compare the thematic structure of the news articles across time and geographic regions. Our work emphasises the relevance of regional differences regarding valuations of privacy and potential obstacles to the implementation of unilateral data protection regulation such as GDPR. We find that the topics and trends over time in GDPR media coverage of the four countries reflect the differences found across their traditional privacy cultures., Comment: Under Review

The article discusses fascism's place on the political spectrum. At present, there is no consensus among political scientists and economists on that issue, as it has been extraordinarily politicized and distorted during ideological struggles among various currents of socialism. From the very beginning, fascism was depicted by Marxists as belonging to the Right, while Fascists themselves wanted to build a society that transcends the Left-Right paradigm. However, few voices in academia have noted that practical implementation of the fascists’ ideas, inherited from the works of revolutionary and national syndicalists, exhibited predominantly leftist characteristics.The ambiguity of placing fascism in its proper place on the political spectrum can be confidently resolved by applying three primary factors that govern political spectrum polarization: attitude to private property, scope of individual freedom, and degree of wealth redistribution. The article argues that fascism is a particular current of non-Marxian socialism that utilized collectivization of consciousness and wealth redistribution as the main paths toward socialism rather than outright expropriation of private property or means of production. Simultaneously, it is acknowledged that private property rights were inhibited by the fascist state, even though de jure they were permitted.The fascist ideal of the “alternate way” had a logical inconsistency that produced an unstable equilibrium between labor and capital as well as between the man and the state. The politico-economic structure predictably collapsed to the left in the course of building a new society. Therefore, fascism could be correctly called the Right of the Left.

This chapter argues that the benefits of data sharing will accrue more quickly, and will be more significant and more enduring, if researchers make their data “meaningfully accessible.” Data are meaningfully accessible when they can be interpreted and analyzed by scholars far beyond those who generated them. Making data meaningfully accessible requires that scholars take the appropriate steps to prepare their data for sharing, and avail themselves of the increasingly sophisticated infrastructure for publishing and preserving research data. The better other researchers can understand shared data and the more researchers who can access them, the more those data will be re-used for secondary analysis, producing knowledge. Likewise, the richer an understanding an instructor and her students can gain of the shared data being used to teach and learn a particular research method, the more useful those data are for that pedagogical purpose. And the more a scholar who is evaluating the work of another can learn about the evidence that underpins its claims and conclusions, the better their ability to identify problems and biases in data generation and analysis, and the better informed and thus stronger an endorsement of the work they can offer.

The impact of international economic integration on social protection is conditional on the monetary regime. This key insight of both Polanyi and Ruggie has been neglected in the Polanyi-inspired debate on the social consequences of European integration. Focusing on the European Court of Justice and the European Commission as the supranational enforcers of the legal logic of integration, the literature has paid insufficient attention to the role of the European Central Bank (ECB) as the supranational enforcer of the economic logic of integration since monetary union. While Polanyi conceptualized central banking as an institution of non-market coordination that evolved to protect the domestic economy from gold standard pressures, the ECB has acted as an enforcer of disembedding “euro standard” pressures vis-`a-vis national labor market and welfare state institutions. Performing a mixed-methods analysis of public speeches, parliamentary hearings, central bank publications, and interviews with senior decision-makers, we provide the first comprehensive study of the ECB’s advocacy of structural reforms during the period 1999–2019. Despite lacking the mandate or the authority to override national legislation, the ECB, strategically pursuing its organizational and systemic interests, pushed for structural reforms via discursive advocacy and conditionality. Our results show that Europe’s prospects for Polanyian non-market coordination are determined by Frankfurt as much as by Luxembourg and Brussels.

This study examines how people with disabilities and chronic health conditions—members of a large and diverse group often overlooked by Canadian public policy—are making sense of the Canadian federal government’s response to COVID-19. Using original national online survey data collected in June 2020 (N= 1,027), we investigate how members of this group view the government’s overall response. Although survey results show broad support for the federal government’s pandemic response, findings also indicate fractures based on disability type and specific health condition, political partisanship, region, and experiences with COVID-19. Among these, identification with the Liberal party and receipt of CERB stand out as associated with more positive views. Further examination of qualitative responses shows that these views are also linked to differing perspectives surrounding government benefits and spending, partisan divisions, and other social and cultural cleavages. La présente étude porte sur la façon dont les personnes atteintes de handicap ou de maladie chronique — appartenant à un vaste groupe diversifié, souvent ignoré des politiques publiques canadiennes — interprètent la réaction du gouvernement fédéral canadien à la COVID‑19. À l’aide de données nationales exclusives tirées d’un sondage en ligne effectué en juin 2020 (N= 1 027), nous analysons le point de vue des membres de ce groupe quant à la réaction globale du gouvernement. Bien que les résultats du sondage témoignent d’un large appui à la réaction du gouvernement fédéral à la pandémie, nos observations révèlent également des failles selon la nature du handicap et les particularités liées à l’état de santé, l’allégeance politique, la région et les expériences en ce qui a trait à la COVID‑19. Entre autres éléments, l’allégeance au Parti libéral et le statut de bénéficiaire de la PCU se signalent comme étant associés à des points de vue plus positifs. Un examen plus approfondi des réactions qualitatives montre que ces points de vue sont également liés à des perspectives divergentes entourant les prestations et les dépenses gouvernementales, les divisions partisanes et autres clivages sociaux et culturels.

The world around central banks has shifted. Europe is confronting an unprecedented combination of environmental, economic, and social challenges. Reducing carbon emissions to zero fast enough to avoid catastrophic global warming is difficult; doing so while also reducing economic inequality so as to avert social disintegration and democratic backsliding is very difficult. Addressing this twin challenge will require the state – and the European Union – to deploy all economic policy instruments already at its disposal, and to develop new ones and coordinate their use in new ways. The paper proceeds in three steps. The first section discusses three distinct challenges – legal, political, and ideational – for the debate on the future of central banking. The remainder of the paper will tackle the two main ideational challenges, namely, institutional amnesia (forgetting past realities of central banking) and strategic ignorance (ignoring present realities of central banking). To overcome institutional amnesia, the second section briefly reviews the history of central banking, showing that the price stability is only one of several goals that central banking has, historically, been associated with. To overcome strategic ignorance, the third section reviews three mandate-remote, or ‘extracurricular’ areas of recent ECB activity.

It is often argued that diversity depletes the social capital of trust and cooperation. We argue there is no compelling theoretical reason for supposing that trust and cooperation will move together in response to diversity; and we provide new causal evidence that they do not. While diversity undermines trust, we find that people in more diverse societies are, surprisingly, better able to cooperate in both new aggregate and individual level observational data and in laboratory experiments. These results caution against the suggestion that diversity creates trade-offs for society: e.g. between innovativeness and solidarity or between freedom of movement and welfare state generosity.

In order to identify factors that may help explain when individual claimsmaking converges around a common set of messages on different forums across a complex media system, we examine individual discourse during the two-week period in which the "Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act" was debated, passed, and signed into law by Governor Rick Scott. Specifically, we assess the extent to which two factors identified in the literature as relevant to individual expression – elite frames and movement mobilization – seem to influence claimsmaking in three mediated forums - Twitter, Letters to the Editor and op-eds that appear in mainstream news outlets, and emails sent to Rick Scott about the legislation. We find that movement mobilization, in particular, seems to have influenced individual claimsmaking across the forums. Additionally, we find that there is more coalescence in claimsmaking around the gun control movement than the gun rights movement, and that movement coordination may help explain these differences.

The growing interest in banal expressions of nationalism in everyday life has left the capacity of national identities to cause irregular attitudinal and behavioural reactions to changing circumstances undertheorized. To fill this gap, this article asks when, how, and why national identities have strong impact on public attitudes about events. The article introduces a theoretical framework, which integrates elements from humanistic philosophy, sociology of nationalism, political psychology, and sociology of emotions. National identity protects against existential threats but is precarious because the nation is a phantasmal object of identification whose 'existence' depends on contested narratives. Therefore, events that seem to threaten or promise to alter the perceived core elements of the nation (i.e., 'nation-disrupting events') evoke strong emotions, which motivate attitudinal shifts. Which affective reaction individuals experience depends on the meaning they attribute (spontaneously or in response to elite cues) to events vis-à-vis competing idealizations of the nation.

Why are COVID-19 conspiracy theories so prevalent? Particularly, why would some citizens ignore scientific evidence and common logic but, instead, be convinced that COVID-19 was a military experiment or spread by 5G signals? Why would they believe that Bill Gates had anything to do with it? In this contribution, we argue that populism is at the centre of these beliefs, as the complex nature of the COVID-19 pandemic makes it an ideal playground for populists' opposition to scientific and political elites. We use Structural Equation Models and panel survey data (n = 823) from the Austrian Corona Panel Project to test this argument. We demonstrate a negative correlation of populist attitudes with both trust in political and scientific institutions, which, in return, negatively relate to COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs. This results in an overall positive relationship of populist attitudes and conspiracy beliefs that is independent of political ideology. These findings have important implications for elite communication regarding virus mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties is the property of Routledge 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 series of recent crises (EURO, refugees, backsliding, Brexit) challenge the self-portrayal of the European Union (EU) as a community of shared values. Against this backdrop, we analyse European Values Study data from 1990 till 2020 to assess the level and change in publics’ acceptance of the EU’s officially propagated values: personal freedom, individual autonomy, social solidarity, ethnic tolerance, civic honesty, gender equality and liberal democracy. We find that EU publics support these values strongly and increasingly over time. The EU-member publics are also remarkably distinct culturally from Eastern European non-EU-nations, especially concerning individual freedoms and gender equality. Simultaneously, however, member nations internalize EU-values at different speeds–alongside traditional religious fault lines that continue to differentiate Europe–in the following order from fastest to slowest: (1) Protestant, (2) Catholic, (3) Ex-communist and (4) Orthodox countries. In conclusion, the EU writ large evolves into a distinct value-sharing community at different speeds.

Satellite campaigns have been discussed as core parts of parties online campaigns. However, study is needed to understand the specifics of what satellite campaigns are, where they fit and how they are used as part of parties’ social media election campaigns. This article comparatively examines Facebook pages across the 2017 general election; Momentum, Labour Party page and Labour leader page information and participation content is comparatively investigated to understand what sets satellite campaigning apart. Findings show that Labour had generated a Facebook approach termed ‘Janus-faced campaigning’. Labour was using leader, party and satellite pages with diverse approaches to speak to different audiences, thus presenting different faces of the same party to the public. The party engaged in two core forms of approach. The 'traditional Facebook campaign' via the leader and party page, saw the party using core policy messages, open inclusive rhetoric and a focus on information over participation to campaign to the mass public. This approach was supported by what is termed the 'new methods Facebook campaign'. Here, satellite page Momentum focused equally on participation and information, using novel, partisan and divisive content, large amounts of leadership personalisation and humour, to activate a younger more partisan audience and get them campaigning online and offline. The group treated their online audience as a reservoir of potential offline campaign activism, breaking down the barriers between ‘official’ and ‘virtual members’. This multifaceted approach allowed Labour to engage in different strands of organic communications, campaigning to (and through) different audiences in the most effective manner.