This article analyses party positions on European Union (EU) solidarity in Germany in the run-up to the 2021 German federal elections. While previous studies have investigated whether and under which conditions individuals support or reject different types of EU solidarity, little is known about how political parties position themselves on the issue. The study draws on an original expert survey on German party positions, including various items on EU solidarity. First, we demonstrate that the GAL–TAN dimension strongly shapes party positionings on EU solidarity. Second, the support by political parties varies along the long- or short-term institutionalization of types of EU solidarity. Third, the findings have political implications for the current German government coalition, revealing potential problems for a joint political agenda on EU affairs.

In 2018, the Tibet Autonomous Region began resettling pastoralists from high-altitude areas to newly built settlements in distant, lower-altitude farming locations under the “extremely high-altitude ecological resettlement” programme, with a stated dual purpose of environmental protection and improving pastoralist well-being. The programme is said to be based on a principle of “government guidance and voluntary participation.” However, despite its stated “voluntary” nature, the government reports a 100 per cent rate of agreement to participate. After examining the ecological rationales for resettlement and pastoralists’ reluctance to move owing to livelihood concerns and attachment to homeland, the article examines how consent is achieved. Based on official documents and reports as well as semi-structured interviews with officials and pastoralists in Nagchu Municipality, the core target area for the programme, the article identifies a three-step “thought-work” oriented process – beginning with an initial survey, followed by group incentives and warnings and then individual incentives and warnings – which is deployed until pastoralists sign a resettlement agreement. The process illustrates the dialectical relationship between coercion and consent.

While conventional wisdom connects crises and external threats to increasing support for populism, several questions remain unanswered. Following insights of affective intelligence theory (AIT), we posit that anger and fear elicited by pandemic threat relate differently to populist attitudes. While such relations have already been explored in the context of other hazards (such as financial turmoil, terrorism, or immigration), our study allows us to evaluate the emotional bedrocks of populism in the context of a threat that is not apparently connected to the classical political grievances underlying populism. Expanding the literature on psychological underpinnings of populism and on the political consequences of the pandemic, our analyses of original survey data support our contentions that pandemic threat-induced anger is positively related to populist attitudes while fear is negatively linked to populist stances. This holds in particular for anti-elitism and the Manichean outlook inherent in populism. Altogether, we provide new comparative evidence to the puzzle about the emotional bedrocks of populism by illuminating a domain that has not been systematically explored before.

This article discusses the origins, metrics, and methods of UCLA’s Race, Ethnicity, Politics & Society Lab, which trains cadres of undergraduate researchers, many of whom are students of color. The article focuses intently on the connections between the professionalization of undergraduate researchers and the production of greater intellectual, racial, and gender diversity in a university setting. The article also provides a blueprint to steer undergraduate students toward producing peer-reviewed publications for major political science journals. Finally, specific strategies to initiate and sustain a research lab operation with undergraduate researchers in mind are offered.

Previous research shows that violence is an important factor driving ethnic identification and grievances, but most works that explore micro-level effects focus on specific cases and have limited external validity. This article looks at the individual-level consequences of civilian victimization in a large sample across Africa. Combining georeferenced survey data from several rounds of the Afrobarometer, victimization events from the UCDP-GED, and data on collective targeting from the ethnic one-sided violence dataset, it studies the effect of exposure to violence on ethnic identification and self-reported ethnic grievances. Results show that violence increases ethnic identification and ethnic grievances particularly when it is committed by state forces and among individuals who belong to an ethnic group that was collectively targeted in the past.

Although mayors can have important impacts on citizens’ daily lives, local politics remains understudied, especially compared with national and regional politics. This study focuses on Canadian mayors’ digital political gender performance—or self-presentation—on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and the context in which this gendered performance arises. Overall, results confirm that mayors’ gendered performances are on a continuum rather than binary. Results from a visual content analysis of nine Canadian mayors’ social media accounts show that, broadly speaking, women mayors gravitate toward congruent, mixed gendered performances and avoidance strategies, whereas men mayors also display mixed performance of their gender, while more freely exploring congruent and incongruent approaches to gendered stereotypes. Additionally, semistructured interviews with these mayors show that women mayors still work under added constraints because of their gender, which translates into comments on their appearance, attitude, and lifestyle choices; increased aggression and lack of respect; and a generally greater mental load.

Proposals for large-scale technical interventions into the Earth system to mitigate global warming – or climate engineering – have sparked considerable debate about their potential implications for international security and global governance. The article furthers this debate by bringing it into dialogue with the literature on visual global politics to develop a more ‘imagistic’ concept of climate engineering imaginaries. Based on a novel visual dataset, three major visual clusters in the public discourse on climate engineering are identified: images of the human–nature relationship, of climate engineering as tangible infrastructure, and of the actors involved in climate engineering projects. The analysis shows how images and other visuals do not only shape the dominant understanding of climate engineering but also competing imaginaries of future political orders in which such approaches might be deployed. Three main results of this analysis stand out. First, dominant ways of seeing climate engineering can further reinforce already dominant discursive frames by adding ‘visual proof’ to their underlying claims. Second, climate engineering visuality can also enable the politicisation of climate engineering by rendering concrete projects visible and hence contestable. Third, climate engineering images can paradoxically limit the scope of imagination as they often revolve around powerful visual icons and symbols of the past and present.

This article provides an analytical framework for understanding why and how many authoritarian regimes have recently adopted reforms that address gender equality. I illustrate and hone the framework by tracing three policy-making processes on domestic violence in Russia, an important and least-likely case for such reforms. While recent scholarship finds the importance of international leverage, strategic actions by women’s groups, and regime interest in sidelining religious extremists, this study highlights other opportunities and agents and specifies authoritarian mechanisms such as intra-elite conflict, signaling between the autocrat and elites, and selective responsiveness. Drawing on the scholarship on authoritarian regime dynamics, policy making in Russia, and gender policy making, this study contributes to the literature on the relationship between gender and regime type by focusing on the micrologics of authoritarian policy making.

This paper undertakes a comparative study of two rural mountainous areas participating in global agricultural markets while using, as an interpretative grid, the development of the quality of the products and spaces. We draw on contemporary analysis at the interface of food and agriculture systems through the example of coffee cultivation and consumption in two neighbouring countries: China and Vietnam. The purpose is to understand why these two provinces with similar historical dynamics have two radically different productions of coffee. While China produces Arabica coffee in limited volumes, Vietnam has over the past few decades become the world's second largest producer of Robusta coffee in response to the growing appetite for coffee in Asia. This paper adopts a multidimensional analysis of the quality of coffee based on the cultivation of the plant, the collective construction of quality, and the consumption of the beverage.

In the nineteenth century, when Italy was undergoing significant institutional and socio-economic changes, the bourgeoisie affirmed its principles of ‘respectability’. In this context, the spread of prostitution among the poorest and most disadvantaged classes of the South became a real obsession for bourgeois society. Through the study of primary sources relating to various health institutions, this paper aims to assess the role of the Opere Pie in the control and management of prostitution. It furthermore highlights the hybrid function of the re-education, assistance and segregation of those women who represented a danger to bourgeois morality and order. Finally, it sheds light on the living conditions and social environment of young prostitutes.

Two concepts shaped and continue to shape the discussion on the limits of a liberal and democratic state. First, Mill's harm principle, according to which the fundamental justification for a state exercising power over individuals is to prevent harm being done to others. Second, the distinction between the public sphere, where liberal democracies can intervene, and the private sphere, where individuals are, in principle, free to do as they like. I argue that both concepts have to be revisited in the context of today's ‘ultra-processed’ world, in which sophisticated technologies and highly engineered products reach deep into the private sphere, exploiting human psychology and jeopardizing citizens’ health and welfare in the interest of maximizing profit. In this ultra-processed world, where the distinction between the public and the private spheres is blurred, systemic interventions such as regulation and taxation, often criticized as paternalistic, are necessary to minimize harm. However, they must be complemented by interventions informed by behavioural science that modify and guide individual behaviours. Beyond the soft paternalism of nudging, people can be empowered to self-nudge – a non-paternalistic approach that enables them to design and structure their own decision environments and choice architectures as they see fit.

This article examines how Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter’s Armed Career Criminal Act attempted to respond to the 1980s crisis of state prison overcrowding while also maintaining a political commitment to get tough on crime. Although commonly thought of as a straightforward punitive sentencing bill, this article shows that the Armed Career Criminal Act was also a desperate attempt to navigate a national crisis of state prison overcrowding in the 1980s that threatened to undercut racialized “get tough” politics and the burgeoning carceral state. In doing so, this article reshapes scholarship on the history of the United States carceral state by demonstrating that the United States’ decentralized political structure and federal government hostility toward funding state correctional expansion created significant gaps between a national discourse of law and order and actual anticrime policy making in the Reagan era, suggesting a far more contested development of the United States prison nation.

This article aims to map the political economy of top personal income tax rate setting. A much-discussed driving factor of top rate setting is the corporate tax rate: governments may prefer to limit the differential between both rates in order to prevent tax-friendly saving of labour incomes inside corporations. Recent studies have highlighted several other driving factors, including budgetary pressure, partisan politics, and societal fairness norms. I compare these and other potential determinants in the long run (1981–2018) by studying tax reforms of 226 cabinets in 19 advanced Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries using regression models. I find little evidence for the effects of economic, political, and institutional factors; instead, the main determinant of the top rate is the corporate tax rate. As corporate tax rates are still declining under competitive pressure, the recently set minimum rate of 15% will not stop tax competition from constraining progressive income taxation.

Borrowed capacity builds upon institutional capacity scholarship to discuss how interactions between government agencies and interest groups can increase agency resources and scope during agency formation and development. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission scholars often note the lack of capacity to implement Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during the first years of the agency. I argue that current assessments of the agency’s capacity between 1965 and 1968 are incomplete by expanding the definition of capacity to include borrowed and nontraditional forms of capacity, reviewing congressional allocations to the agency and agency budgets, and considering the active roles state and local agencies as well as interest groups played in the early implementation of Title VII. I demonstrate the agency amassed not only claims but also capacity during its early years.

The political landscape of the radical right has long been a major discussion point in the political and social sciences. By considering the variety of radical right organizations (movement parties and non-parliamentary organizations) and the particular national and transnational political and discursive opportunity structures, the paper aims at a comparative analysis of the main discursive frames present in political programs and manifestoes of radical right social movement organizations and movement parties in Poland (Konfederacja Wolność i Niepodległość and Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny) and Germany (Alternative für Deutschland and Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland). Moreover, based on approaches developed by Cas Mudde and Jens Rydgren, this article analyses how the features presumed essential to the radical right (nativism, authoritarianism and populism) are reflected and interconnected in the official discourses of the selected radical right organizations.

Scholars and policymakers agree that major powers have leverage over their more junior partners. Giving security assistance or providing arms is supposed to increase this leverage. However, major powers often hit roadblocks when trying to influence the behaviour of their junior partners. This article demonstrates that junior partners are often successful in constraining the behaviour of the major power partners, and have particular success in extracting additional resources from their major partners. This article develops the concept of loyalty coercion to explain that leverage is based on rhetorical and symbolic moves, rather than material preponderance. It then uses cases of US arms sales to show that weapons transfers did not lead to US leverage, instead opened opportunities for junior partner influence. The article contributes to scholarly and policy perspectives on alliance management and reputation, and leverage in world politics.