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Most scholarly work concludes that leader humor positively affects emotional outcomes for followers. However, two interrelated issues with past research make this view incomplete: (a) studies often conflate the act of expressing humor with the humor's effectiveness, and (b) existing research overlooks follower emotion regulation. In addressing these issues, we generate and test new theory that challenges the theoretical consensus, highlighting why and when leader humor expression has emotional costs for followers. Specifically, we theorize that leader humor quantity, irrespective of its quality, puts pressure on followers to engage in "surface acting" to fake or exaggerate positive emotions. We further propose that these surface acting responses are more likely to occur when followers hold high power distance values, such that followers more willingly comply with expectations to display positive emotions in response to leader humor expression. This increase in surface acting then leads to more emotional exhaustion and less job satisfaction for followers. Results from three studies—incorporating a field experiment, a laboratory experiment, and a multi-wave field study—provide support for these hypotheses. We close with a discussion of how our findings provide a unique counterpoint regarding the effects of leader humor on follower emotional outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rise in racism, racial violence, and hate crimes has catalyzed the implementation of workplace allyship initiatives as a mechanism for creating equity and inclusion in organizations. Yet, these allyship initiatives can evoke leader anxiety because they make power dynamics salient. Extant allyship literature has not considered the implications of leader anxiety for allyship and power dynamics that contribute to inequality in the workplace. Thus, in this paper, I reveal how allyship initiatives may trigger different types of leader anxiety (i.e., preventive, promotive, and mixed preventive–promotive) and motivate different leader allyship actions, which I refer to as "LEAP" behavior. As a conceptual framework, LEAP categorizes four broad allyship actions theorized in prior research: Locating oneself, Engaging in discussions, Asking probing questions, and Providing support. LEAP also acknowledges nuances in leader anxiety that can lead to different types of LEAP behavior (i.e., restricted, responsive, or radical). Lastly, I posit that leaders' LEAP behavior can reinforce power imbalances, challenge power imbalances, or change power structures in the workplace. Ultimately, this paper contributes a more nuanced conceptualization of leader allyship behavior to the allyship literature, and provides a foundation for identifying strategies for increasing equity and inclusion in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a proliferation of research has supported the "business case" for diversity, in which scholars collect empirical data to demonstrate a relationship between the demographics of employees and organizational financial performance. However, the business case is only one way—and, we argue, the wrong way—of valuing the presence of women in business. In this manuscript, we focus on gender lens impact investing to interrogate the epistemic assumptions underlying the business case for diversity, and suggest that these assumptions have the potential to strengthen the very power structures that have historically excluded and marginalized many women. We then present an alternative: an intersectional theory of gender diversity. We argue that intersectionality requires diversity initiatives in organizations to include both the recognition of the interactions of multiple forms of identity and marginalization and as well as the goal of dismantling the structures and practices that contribute to marginalization. This approach can be adapted to a range of organizational and industry contexts, and it will need to be thoughtfully applied in order to be effective in promoting gender equitable workplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disappointment and bitterness, mixed with envy and a desperate hope for a better future, are the night soil in which demagogues are hatched. But despite their populist bluster, demagogues are saboteurs of democracy, driven by an urge to ditch and destroy the checks and balances vital to restraining abuses of power. Unless checked, demagogues are the harbingers of a new, 21st-century form of despotism: a corrupted, phantom democracy in which periodic elections are held but the rich become super-rich and omnipotent—while most of the populace is gripped by feelings of powerlessness when it comes to the big decisions shaping everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a historical account of the abolitionist white supremacy work of Henry N. Frisbie and his defrauding of Black and white proponents of abolition in the name of profit, power and capitalism in the Civil War era. Information is provided on the role of elite capture in the persistence of racial capitalism and egalitarian movements, as well as Frisbie's systems of deception of enslaved Black working class using a fraudulent land company to steal their crops and wages.

In a general equilibrium framework, we show that banks may "buy" political influence at a discount: They offer disproportionately small campaign contributions compared to the influence they exert, thus generating abnormal returns. We distinguish between the direct effect of contributions which, as a cost, reduce bank returns, and the indirect effect of contributions which boost returns via inducing bank-favoring policies. Therefore, abnormal returns may or may not increase with the amount of contributions, depending on which effect dominates: Stricter capital requirements decrease contributions and abnormal returns. When politicians attach more weight to households' welfare, contributions increase and abnormal returns decrease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Performing back squats with elastic bands has been widely used in resistance training. Although research demonstrated greater training effects obtained from adding elastic bands to the back squat, little is known regarding the optimal elastic resistance and how it affects neuromuscular performance. This study aimed to compare the force, velocity, power, and muscle activity during back squats with different contributions of elastic resistance. Methods: Thirteen basketball players performed 3 repetitions of the back squat at 85% of 1-repetition maximum across 4 conditions: (1) total load from free weight and (2) 20%, (3) 30%, and (4) 40% of the total load from elastic band and the remaining load from free weight. The eccentric and concentric phases of the back squat were divided into upper, middle, and bottom phases. Results: In the eccentric phase, mean velocity progressively increased with increasing elastic resistance, and muscle activity of the vastus medialis and rectus femoris significantly increased with the largest elastic resistance in the upper phase (P ≤.036). In the concentric phase, mean power (P ≤.021) and rate of force development (P ≤.002) significantly increased with increasing elastic resistance. Furthermore, muscle activity of the vastus lateralis and vastus medialis significantly improved with the largest elastic resistance in the upper phases (P ≤.021). Conclusion: Velocity, power, rate of force development, and selective muscle activity increased as the elastic resistance increased in different phases during the back-squat exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February of 2022, professional women's basketball player Brittney Griner was detained in Russia on drug possession charges. Her detainment was a trending Twitter topic demonstrating the cultural, political, and social state of the United States, specifically pertaining to race, gender, nationality, and LGBTQ matters. The purpose of this study was to analyze what Brittney Griner's release from Russia tells us about social power relations and contemporary social political matters on the axis of race, gender, and sexual orientation. We organized the data to determine three distinct, yet interconnected themes: (a) Woke Politics at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Queerness; (b) Preferential Treatment at the Expense of Whiteness Informed Patriotism; and (c) Intersectionality as Political Pandering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Powerful leaders need to be challenged and pushed to consider uncontemplated perspectives. Research has indicated that employees in lower-power positions are best poised to challenge leaders, because these individuals better understand others' perspectives and have a different lens on day-to-day organizational issues compared to powerful leaders. While several well-known leaders rely on a lower-power employee (i.e., right-hand partner) to amplify their efforts, it is unclear how one becomes a right-hand partner or what this entails. Relying on qualitative data from 74 individuals (61 chiefs of staff and 13 leaders), we develop a process of heedful challenging: the process of presenting alternative perspectives to someone in an individualized manner. In this process, the lower-power employee utilizes their knowledge of the leader and their understanding of how organizational issues are impacting employees to thoughtfully challenge the leader by presenting differing perspectives and illuminating the implications of their behavior. We articulate how one becomes a right-hand partner through this process, present the defining characteristics and drawbacks of being a right-hand partner, and describe instances when this process goes awry. This work contributes to theory about unequal-power relationships and provides insight into how lower-power employees can broaden leader's perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research enriches the field's perspective on value and argues that to seriously address inequality during the next 50 years, consumer research must explore processual aspects of value hierarchy and consider its relationship to inequality. Doing so recognizes the duality of structures as embodying outcomes and agency, as well as the need to view value not only as what it is but also as what it does. To begin to address limitations in the literature, we use empirical evidence from an investigation of the cancer care market from 1970 to 2021 to understand how value hierarchy shapes and manifests as inequality. This is conceptualized as: distribution of multilevel resources, consolidation of consumer power, stratification of consumer agency, and (de)credentialization of worthiness. Building on each of these, we discuss a research agenda for future JCR inquiries and introduce "value hierarchy as inequality" as a big-tent issue for consumer research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many professionals want to both achieve professional success and contribute to society. Yet, in some professional contexts, these aims are in tension because serving elite clients is considered the pinnacle of professional success, but professionals themselves may view serving this clientele as antithetical to making a societal contribution. Drawing on interviews with 84 architects and designers who self-identify as people seeking to contribute to society—that is, who hold a prosocial identity—we develop theory about how professionals navigate tensions between their prosocial and professional identities and with what consequences for their work with clients. We identified four strategies that professionals used to ease these tensions, all of which gave the prosocially oriented professionals a sense of identity integration. However, these strategies differently shaped professionals' approach to power relations with the client, depending on the client's status and the types of knowledge and skills each professional viewed as central to their work. Professionals with marginalized social identities, such as women and ethnic/racial minorities, were more likely than others to embrace working with low-status clients and to use broader definitions of the knowledge and skills required for their work. Our findings contribute to scholarship on professional identity construction and prosocial work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common problem faced by contemporary retailers is consumers' tendency to avoid purchases that postpone or prevent cash flow for retailers, thus negatively affecting retailers' sales and profits. Little is known about the factors that drive consumers to avoid purchases or about marketing tactics that may reduce the tendency, especially from a cultural perspective. The authors attempt to fill this gap by exploring the role of an important cultural variable, namely, power distance belief (PDB), on consumers' tendency to avoid purchases. PDB is the extent to which people accept and endorse inequalities in society. A series of 14 studies (including 6 studies in the Web Appendix) using a variety of operationalizations of the key variables suggest that consumers high (vs. low) in PDB are less likely to avoid purchases (Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c) because they generally perceive greater constraints on their behavior (Study 2). These constraints are aversive, triggering the desire to overcome them and to have more as a compensatory mechanism, thereby reducing the tendency to avoid purchases. Accordingly, low (but not high) PDB consumers' tendency to forgo purchases is significantly decreased when they perceive greater constraints on their choices and decisions (Study 3) and when they experience a high social density (Study 4). However, high (but not low) PDB consumers' tendency to avoid purchases significantly increases when individuals perceive that constraints facilitate hierarchy (Study 5) or that constraints lead to positive outcomes (Study 6). Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses caste discrimination in Indian universities, specifically focusing on the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). The podcasts explore the underrepresentation of marginalized castes in PhD admissions at these institutions and the institutionalized discrimination that marginalized students face. The article highlights how caste inequalities are perpetuated through concepts like meritocracy and cultural capital. It emphasizes the need to address caste inequalities in management education and suggests incorporating caste into management courses. The podcasts provide firsthand evidence of caste inequalities and can be used as a resource for initiating discussions on caste in the classroom. [Extracted from the article]

Organizations dominate our lives, yet how well do we really understand them, and their differences? To get past the one-size-fits-all notion of organization design, this article presents four forms of organizations—the personal enterprise, the programmed machine, the professional assembly, and the project pioneer—each with its own way of managing and crafting strategy. Many organizations come remarkably close to one of these forms, while others can be understood as hybrids of them. Nevertheless, since organizations are made up of people, every one of us different, every single organization structure must be customized through a process of design doing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building from recent criticisms that mainstream political corporate social responsibility has failed to effectively address the potential expansion of corporate influence in society, we advance a new conceptualization of corporate social responsibility inspired by U.S. federalist political theory. As federalism has served as a prevailing U.S. theory for arranging governmental political power for the advancement of the public interest, we derive from federalist principles descriptive, normative, and instrumental theoretical foundations for arranging corporate power and directing corporate social action in the pursuit of similar goals. What we call "federated corporate social responsibility" (FCSR) revives an older institutional approach to corporate responsibility, paying particular attention to the division of moral labor in society and how different corporate responsibility prescriptions stand to affect the social ecosystem of power. Federalist institutional strategies deploying separations of power and constitutions are used to develop a concept of corporate "constitutional devices," which have promise to constrain the corporation as it fulfills its social responsibilities, even outside the ambit of a strong state and in light of barriers to constant, effective stakeholder accountability. We conclude by outlining FCSR managerial strategies, which sometimes endorse corporate social inaction in the interest of a desirable distribution of authority across society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In defining this situation, Garcia provides one answer to Beauvoir's original provocation: "to be a woman is to be in a situation where submission appears as one's destiny" (42). Garcia thus clarifies the nature of the situation - again, the political, social, and economic conditions coalescing such that submission appears to women as inevitable - in which women experience their bodies as both their own and not their own, by which Garcia means always already viewed and judged by men. Following Beauvoir in adopting a phenomenological method - proceeding from women's lived experiences, not from abstract theories about humanity - Garcia demonstrates not only that women can I consent i to (if not "choose") submission but that this submission is I rational. i Why is it rational for women to submit to men?. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the transnational commemoration of the Second World War through the Chinese Expeditionary Force (CEF) Fever campaign. The campaign focuses on repatriating the remains of Chinese soldiers who died in the China-Burma-India Theatre. These fallen soldiers have been glorified as national forefathers of the Chinese community in commemorative events. The campaign involves cooperation between Chinese Voluntary Associations (CVAs) in Myanmar and memory activists in China, while revealing conflicts over ownership of the remains and patriarchal leadership in remembrance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the gendered perspective of Chinese transnationalism and the involvement of CVAs in transnational remembrance. The concept of performative filiality is introduced to analyse the gender dynamics in the memorial network, emphasising the practices that demonstrate filial piety towards the war dead. This research highlights the complexities of transnational commemoration, power dynamics within CVAs, and the gendered dimensions of Chinese transnationalism in war remembrance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reveals the role of key European institutions and their importance for the formation and implementation of programs aimed at ensuring gender equality and protecting women's rights. It is noted that achieving gender equality is an important element in the realization of the Council of Europe's mission, which is to protect human rights, support democracy and ensure the rule of law. The institutions of the European Union, in turn, use a multifaceted approach to ensuring women's rights, which includes legislative initiatives, strategic planning, project funding, monitoring and political influence. The importance of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in the adoption of a number of documents to support gender equality, including the Action Plan for the Promotion of Gender Equality, is investigated. A thorough analysis of the conventional aspects of the system of ensuring and protecting women's rights in the European context was conducted. Thus, the role of the Council of Europe was strengthened with the adoption of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950, the Council of Europe Strategy for Gender Equality 2014-2017, the Council of Europe Strategy for Gender Equality 2018-2023, and the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention) of 2011. The author summarizes the importance of strengthening the work of national institutions responsible for protecting women's rights, as well as promoting educational campaigns and raising awareness in this area, since differences in legal culture, resource capacities and political will can negatively affect the effectiveness of the adaptation of national legislation to the European regulatory framework. The article provides a critical analysis of the achievements and challenges faced by European institutions in ensuring women's rights. The author offers a number of recommendations to improve the effectiveness of existing mechanisms in the field of women's rights, including improving legislation, strengthening monitoring and ensuring proper implementation of international obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of government in efficiently managing societal functions and addressing market failures. Topics include the scope of government intervention in public goods and services, the challenges of achieving cooperation in the face of collective-action problems, and the influence of political authority and Keynesian economics on the growth of government.

This paper examines the rise and decline of Sibila de Fortià through the lens of material and economic considerations. The text highlights the intricate interplay between materiality and royal dignity in the life of Queen Sibila. It portrays how her ascent and authority were closely tied to her economic resources and possessions, including symbolic items like the crown and seals. Material culture played a critical role in shaping and projecting the queen's image, especially when her legitimacy was questioned. The paper provides a chronological examination, emphasising the economic and material dimensions of her progression, charting her journey from the king's paramour to her tenure as a queen and finally addressing the challenges encountered during her widowhood. This article is part of a research cluster in this issue on the economic power of medieval queens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of a research cluster in this issue on the economic power of medieval queens. This paper explores the only known surviving detailed economic register of a queen of Portugal's expenses up to the early sixteenth century. Covering the early years of Maria of Castile and Aragon's queenship (1501–1508), the document gives extraordinary insight into the queen's household and the management of her finances. The study conducted over the book allows us to become acquainted with some of Queen Maria's ladies, officials, and servants, detect expenditure patterns, and get a glimpse of daily life at court, along with how the queen constructs her image, exercises her patronage and consolidates her authority. It is also possible to better understand how connected Portugal and Castile were, both economically and culturally, even before the Dual Monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory piece for the research cluster 'The Economic Power of European Queens: Sources, Resources and Expenditure both delineates the content of the cluster and places it in the context of wider research. The article highlights common themes among the four articles in the cluster and common issues with the survival of sources which document the economic activity of royal women. It also highlights the importance of new research which is beginning to illuminate the financial element of queenship and helping us to understand this vital, yet understudied, part of the queen's office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding queenly expenditure is a key part of studying queenship, not least because it provides insight into how queens carried out their roles and responsibilities. But examining such expenditure also serves a purpose in relation to research on the material foundations of queenship. This article examines one aspect of that expenditure, namely the gifts and rewards given by Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth of York, two fifteenth-century English queens consort. Gifts and rewards serve as signal examples of how these queens used their economic resources and provide an additional entry into how to view these queens in economic and social/cultural terms. It shows that relating the queens' gifts and rewards to and demonstrating the implications of their practices on both their economic and social roles is a fruitful method of extending our understanding of the economic resources available to the queens and how they used them. This article is part of a research cluster in this issue on the economic power of medieval queens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tudor Chamber Books (1485–1521) are a useful, underexplored source for examining queenship. In addition to the two queen consorts, Elizabeth of York and her daughter in law, Catherine of Aragon, there is interesting coverage of Margaret and Mary Tudor who became respectively Queen of Scots and Queen of France, as well as the early years of Mary I. This article demonstrates how financial records can shed new light on pivotal moments in a royal woman's life, including childhood, betrothals and weddings, widowhood, joys such as coronation ceremonies and stresses of childbirth and infant (or even maternal) loss. It demonstrates the utility of the Chamber Books themselves and of wider financial sources in charting the lives of royal women and understanding more deeply the rhythms and responsibilities of queenship. This article is part of a research cluster in this issue on the economic power of medieval queens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's sports illustrate the challenges to achieving fairness and equity in society, the obstacles presented by systemic inequities, and how these lead to long-term inequitable outcomes. The intertwined paths of sports and public administration evidence the transformative role they both play in shaping society and changing power dynamics to benefit all citizens. The authors propose a theoretical model that supports these intertwined paths toward social equity that have been demonstrated through women in sports and public administration. Together they can shatter glass ceilings/glass walls and break down patriarchal heteronormative hegemonic practices that hold back both sports and public administration from full inclusivity and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a submerged aspect of James C Scott's work on 'hidden transcripts'. Whereas Scott focused predominantly on the hidden transcripts of the powerless, here we propose a research agenda based upon studying hidden transcripts of the powerful. First, we define our terms. Second, we map existing literature, observing that although plenty of research exists into the public transcripts of dominant and subordinate groups, and that Scott initiated a productive research agenda into the hidden transcripts of powerless groups, research into hidden transcripts of powerful actors is lacking. We identify an assumption within this literature that because existing social institutions are already structured in such a way as to reflect and advance the interests of dominant groups, there is no need for separate spaces to foster the consciousness, cohesivness, and mobilisation of the powerful. Third, we ask how social scientists might study the hidden transcripts of the powerful, and what methodological challenges and opportunities such a research programme might present, identifying in particular the promising avenue of studying what we have chosen to call 'transcripts hidden in plain sight'. Fourth, and finally, we question the epistemological status of these hidden transcripts, focusing on whether they can be used by social researchers as a reliable indicator of the 'true' consciousness of the social group that expresses them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 'strong mayor' local government systems, the institutional rules often allow for the formation of divided government. When the local government is divided, i.e. mayor is not supported by the majority in the council, the dominance of the mayor in horizontal power relations may be undermined. This paper studies local budgetary resolutions and annual discharge resolutions in Poland, where the electoral system affects the formation of divided government. The analyses presents that: the budget is adopted later and the discharge resolution is more often not adopted in the first vote in municipalities with divided government than in those with unified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Turkey and Tunisia have attracted significant attention regarding their democratization and religious politics. While Turkey was considered a successful case of blending Islam and democracy in the decade of 2000s, it plunged into autocratization in the following decade. Tunisia became the only Arab spring country to go through democratic transition between 2011 and 2015 but 6 years later, an elected president grabbed power over the democratic institutions. Inspired by the elite theories of democratization and combining the comparative method with a within-case analysis, this article evaluates the regime trajectories of the two countries, emphasizing the points of convergence and divergence. First, it argues that the emergence of a power symmetry between the elites representing the religious-secular cleavage constituted a critical juncture in each case, paving the way for democratic reforms. Second, it argues that the power symmetry was of an adversarial nature in Turkey and a consensual nature in Tunisia, which affected the elite choices to deal with the masses in different ways. The article concludes with a discussion of how the elite-mass interactions ultimately eroded the power symmetries and reversed the democratic processes in Turkey and Tunisia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who maintains authority over Iran's foreign policy has long been the subject of debate. Ambiguous constitutional provisions, conflicting foreign policy patterns of different administrations, and their impact on multiple global and regional security concerns have intensified such discussion. Existing studies suggest Iran's foreign policy is either made through institutional consensus or competition; or, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has been gradually monopolizing decision-making. This article seeks to identify ways in which the power hierarchy during the Rouhani presidency can be explained. It uses high-level diplomatic meetings as observable evidence in a novel analytical framework to identify the scope of competition and hierarchies in foreign policy decision-making processes. The statistical analysis of high-level diplomatic meetings estimates the changing degree of influence Khamenei holds over foreign policy making and confirms coordination amongst power centres that were often assumed to compete. As the article's empirical results reveal, observable foreign policy agendas of Iranian key decision makers did not noticeably diverge, and their diplomatic activities were clearly coordinated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the end of the Second World War in 1945, the phantom of the Cold War loomed over the international relations of countries and created tensions, both foreign and domestic. In the case of Iran, the so-called Azerbaijan Crisis (1946) brought Iran-US relations into a new phase which changed power equations. Iran's strategic importance as part of the 'Northern Circle' of countries was known to both the United States and the Soviet Union; therefore, they struggled to gain a firmer foothold in Iran by any means. There were four main political discourses of power in Iran from September 1943 to August 1955: Royalist, Marxist, Islamist, and Nationalist. This article examines how they clashed and interacted and how these tensions were reflected in a literary work of the time: Karim Roshaniyan's roman feuilleton I Was a Soviet Spy in Iran, published serially in Tehran-e Mosavvar weekly from May 1949 to May 1950. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of elite coalitions, violence and social orders in the development process has recently resurfaced in economic literature. In this article, we mobilize some of the literature on elite coalition, elite circulation and institutional change and provide a framework for understanding institutional change as the result of major misalignment between rent-seeking and rank-keeping. We also analyse how lock-in systems implemented by the elite in place provoke political instability. This framework is then applied to Thailand, which has experienced political instability in the past decades. The rapid empowerment of an ascending elite provoked a major misalignment between its growing economic power and the legitimacy of the established political order, i.e. a major contradiction between a rent-seeking and a rank-keeping conception of the legitimacy of elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia's relations with the EU have worsened over the past decade, and energy-related issues have been part of this regress. The attention has been mostly turned to natural gas and Gazprom, while Rosatom, another state-controlled energy giant, has been largely overlooked, although it may be the next vehicle fostering Russia's foreign policy goals. To find out whether this is the case, Hungary and Finland were chosen as case studies to determine whether Rosatom serves as leverage for Russian political influence. The research utilized the authors' analytical model to find manifestations of strategic behavior, pointing at political leveraging of the deals in point. The findings revealed that Russia could use Rosatom's nuclear deals as vehicles for its foreign policy goals. The outcome is, however, case-specific, depending on the leeway given by the host country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mini publics have become cornerstones of the European Union's Future of Europe (FoE) initiative. However, weaknesses in their designs bring their political influence into question. Often-unsystematic in design, they fail to strengthen participants' understandings of the issues under evaluation and induce silo-thinking and the formation of pseudo-preferences. These come at a cost to informed and deliberatively deduced recommendations which speak to underlying functional/operational technicalities which fundamentally determine the form and delivery of policy interests. Guided by the adage that form follows function, this paper argues that mini publics pertaining to the FoE must primarily encourage participants to think about the ways policies are made in the EU before they formulate policy recommendations. To do this, they must consider the EU's overall form (or prospective forms). Utilising data from focus group analysis, the paper demonstrates that scenario (vignette) models are conducive to strengthening participants' understandings of both existing and alternative EU forms, and their functional consequences for EU policies, thus enabling them to formulate concrete and potentially deliverable policy recommendations. Subsequently, the paper encourages organisers of relevant mini-publics to employ the European Commission's 'Five Scenarios for the FoE' as entry-points to strengthen the deliberative quality and democratic outputs of such exercises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid rise of China as a major economic power, characterized by its expanding global trade and financial connections, has significantly heightened geopolitical tensions, particularly with the US. The primary objective of this study is to examine the ramifications of such geopolitical risks (GPR) on trading patterns within Latin America, employing a gravity model. The selection of Latin America stems from its ongoing transformation in power dynamics, with China emerging as the second largest partner, posing substantial competition to the US, which has historically been the region's primary trading partner. This region has also emerged as an attractive investment and trade destination with abundant natural resources and a growing middle class. By focusing on seven of the largest economies in Latin America – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela – from 2000 to 2020, our study yields valuable insights into the influence of GPR on trade dynamics. The findings underscore the overall detrimental impact of GPR on trade, with a disproportionately adverse effect on imports. This study represents a significant contribution by bridging existing gaps in the literature, particularly within the underexplored context of Latin America, while providing crucial guidance for policy formulation and informing future research endeavours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship investigating autocrats' motivations to adopt gender equality reforms has proliferated. Yet, many questions remain unanswered: Who supports these gender reforms? Do citizens support gender quota policies? What is the role of political elites? Under what conditions do women's increased presence in politics lead to positive outcomes for women? Answering these questions is crucial for both practical and empirical reasons. On the one hand, the number of 'partly free' and 'not free' countries is increasing, making up the majority of world countries (79%). On the other hand, women's access to political power has exponentially grown over the past two decades. Women in autocracies are participating in politics more than ever before. This special issue presents cutting-edge research on gender and authoritarian politics relying on diverse methodological approaches and geographical foci. The introduction of this SI identifies the remaining knowledge gaps and provides future directions for more scholarship on the intersection of gender and authoritarian politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]