International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique

Publisher:
Sage Publications, Inc.
Publication date:
2021-09-06
ISBN:
0192-5121

Issue Number

Latest documents

  • Comparative European legislative research in the age of large-scale computational text analysis: A review article

    Advances in data accessibility and analytical methods opened new frontiers for comparative studies of European legislative activities. However, these advances still need to be fully harnessed by legislative scholars for multiple reasons. We provide an overview of extant research agendas to identify these reasons and explore the opportunities for tapping the potential of big data and quantitative text analysis. We present significant data collection efforts, such as ParlSpeech, the Comparative Agendas Project and CLARIN, and highlight their respective value for, primarily, large-N comparative research focusing on European Union member states and the European Union itself. Our review highlights the most consequential gaps in the literature and shortcomings of available data and analysis. These include the lack of extensive historical and geographical coverage, missing harmonisation and cross-linking between separate efforts, no unified speech and document (bill, law) databases, and the unavailability of good-quality full-text variables.

  • Improving referendums with deliberative democracy: A systematic literature review

    This article systematically reviews the literature on combining referendums and deliberative processes. With referendums being criticized for various reasons, including their deliberative deficit, and amid the deliberative turn in democracy, various hybrid combinations of referendums and deliberative processes have been practised or suggested. We bring together the hitherto scattered literature that focuses on assumed and observed strengthening effects of deliberation in light of ascribed referendum deficits. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses method, we reviewed and thematically analysed 55 publications. We show that, despite their different focal points, a clear overlap exists between perceived shortcomings of referendums and the added value of deliberation. Expectations of hybridization run high, with empirical evidence emerging that shows promising positive effects. Nevertheless, non-positive effects are both anticipated and observed, and these underscore the importance of ensuring appropriate connections between aggregative and deliberative processes and of systemic embedding.

  • The deepest foundation of our democratic crisis

    The deepest foundation of our democratic crisis is our increasing human interdependence. That interdependence creates increasing needs for ‘free-use goods’: goods that, once produced, anyone can use without paying (other names: “public goods,” “non-excludable goods”). Such goods produce the classic “free-rider” problems to which the most efficient solution in societies of strangers is usually government provision through taxes or regulation, both of which depend on a combination of voluntarism (based on duty and solidarity) and legitimate coercion. More interdependence creates more free-rider problems, which require more government intervention/coercion. Our eighteenth-century democratic mechanisms were not designed to legitimate the amount of state coercion we now need. To bolster legitimacy, we need to embrace the logic of free-use goods and replace one-way with recursive representation, the principle of distinction with more descriptive representation, corruption with clean institutions, and legislative-centric democracy with a full representative system approach, all drawing on our collective intelligence.

  • Behind the technocratic challenge: Old and new alternatives to party government in Italy

    The growing presence of technocrats in contemporary governments has emerged as a relevant phenomenon worldwide. Italy, once known as a paradigmatic case of party government and now identified as the promised land of technocracy, constitutes a crucial case to test the major short-term (critical junctures) and long-term (complexity of policy-making; party decline) factors identified to explain this phenomenon. Our analysis is based on two innovative tools: a new dataset updated to the current back-to-politics Meloni Italian government, including all the cases of the ‘technocratic decade’ (2010s); and a new typology combining partisanship and expertise, which allows us to overcome dichotomous categorizations equating technocrats and non-partisans. This more accurate and updated picture of minister profiles in Italy unveils unexpected dynamics and allows us to reassess both previous findings on the Italian case and the explanatory power of the tested theories on the growing diffusion of technocrats in contemporary governments.

  • Does municipal amalgamation affect trust in local politicians? The case of Norway

    When municipalities merge, they grow and, at the same time, experience a comprehensive reform process, both of which may affect political trust. We explore whether and how the large-scale municipal amalgamation reforms in Norway in the 2010s affected citizens’ trust in local and national elected officials and assemblies. We examine the effects of both changes in size and reform processes using survey data on trust in local and national political officials and assemblies before, and at the time, of the merger. In contrast to studies conducted in Denmark, we do not find evidence that the Norwegian Local Government Reform had significant negative effects on political trust. We argue that this difference between Denmark and Norway can be explained by differences in how the two reform processes were implemented.

  • Blind spots in the study of democratic representation: Masses and elites in old and new democracies

    Preference congruence between masses and elites lies at the heart of the study of democratic representation. In this article, substantiated by a meta-analysis of 154 studies published between 1960 and 2022, we show that the literature on mass–elite congruence has increased exponentially in the past decade. Despite the growing academic interest, the publications mainly focus on Western Europe and leave two critical blind spots. First, at the mass level, little attention has been paid to distinguishing between voters and non-voters and between independents and partisans. Second, at the elite level, presidents have been overlooked, including those studies examining presidential or semi-presidential democracies. In this article, we demonstrate the existence of two blind spots with a meta-analysis, explain their significance for political representation and test the extent to which they affect mass–elite congruence measurement. The article contributes to the comparative study of representation by illustrating how filling in these two blind spots is necessary to ensure a reliable and comprehensive assessment of mass–elite congruence.

  • Drivers of radicalisation? The development and role of the far-right youth organisation ‘Young Alternative’ in Germany

    Today, many far-right parties maintain youth wings, providing opportunities to mobilise members and future party leaders. However, they are often neglected in the study of the far right’s organisation. This article explores the development of the ‘Young Alternative’ and its ambivalent relationship with the ‘Alternative for Germany’. Theoretically, it argues that far-right youth wings can act as important drivers of radicalisation. It also tries to understand conflicts between far-right youth organisations and parties by discussing the interactions between organisational development and radicalisation. Empirically, it opens the ‘black box’ of the German case by drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including semi-structured interviews with high-ranking ‘Young Alternative’ members, (social) media communication and official documents of the ‘Young Alternative’, ‘Alternative for Germany’ and intelligence services. Overall, the article underlines the importance of far-right youth wings as part of the broader party organisation and offers substantial theoretical and empirical research perspectives.

  • Navigating new realities: Explaining programmatic transitions of mainstream and niche parties

    Electoral competition is determined by the issues that parties choose to compete on and the stances they adopt on these issues. However, little research has examined the trade-off between expanding a party’s programmatic stances to secondary issues while maintaining ideological continuity on primary issues. This article seeks to address this gap by examining programmatic transitions among mainstream and niche parties and in which contexts these transitions are more frequent. The study analyses 47 parties in 10 established democracies between 1986 and 2020 using multiple regression techniques. The results show that niche parties are more likely to focus on secondary issues, and when they make such transitions, they tend to be larger. The analysis also reveals that the length of niche competition influences mainstream parties’ programmatic transitions, while niche parties’ transitions are driven by their continuity in programmatic transitions and governmental experience.

  • The angry voter? The role of emotions in voting for the radical left and right at the 2019 Belgian elections

    This study examines the role of negative (anger, fear) and positive emotions in addition to political attitudes (political trust, populist attitudes, external political efficacy) as key determinants of voting behaviour. We rely on the RepResent voter survey conducted in 2019 in Belgium (n = 3236) allowing us to assess the relationship between emotions, political attitudes, and the vote for radical right (VB, PP) and radical left parties (PTB-PVDA). Findings indicate that anger is significantly and positively related to voting for radical left and right parties, while controlling for key political attitudes and issue positions. Fear and positive emotions are not significantly more related to voting for radical parties than for other parties. The results suggest that anger should be more systematically integrated in electoral research. These findings call for further analysis on the causal mechanism linking emotions and voting behaviour, and the (in)direct effects of emotions on voting.

  • Italy’s quiet pivot to the Indo-Pacific: Towards an Italian Indo-Pacific strategy

    Italy is the only ‘Big Four’ European country and ‘Quint’ North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member ostensibly uninterested in the world’s geopolitical and geoeconomic epicentre. However, a number of developments contradict the assumption that Rome overlooks the importance of the Indo-Pacific. By analysing official policies, naval deployments, new partnerships and evolving trajectories, this article reveals that Italy’s strategic engagement with the Indo-Pacific is already significant and unfolding under three broad areas: (a) economy; (b) security; and (c) norms. It then assesses the benefits and risks of this developing foreign policy, and argues that the former outweigh the latter, a condition which is conducive to the establishment of an official Italian Indo-Pacific strategy. As the first scholarly work on the Italian role in the Indo-Pacific, this research makes a novel contribution to the literature on both Italian foreign policy and the Indo-Pacific security landscape, by investigating a complementary approach to that of existing Indo-Pacific strategies.

Featured documents

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