Abstract This article introduces the new module Gender in Contemporary Europe: Rethinking Equality and the Backlash developed for Round 11 of the European Social Survey (ESS). The module represents the first large-scale, cross-national effort to comprehensively map contemporary gender attitudes using both established and innovative measures. It captures five interrelated contemporary concepts that have rarely been included in prior cross-national surveys available for public use: gender identity, sexism (hostile, benevolent, and modern), perceived and experienced gender discrimination, the salience of gender equality as a social value, and support for gender equality policies. Pretesting and cognitive interviews conducted across a group of participating countries highlighted both the value and the complexity of measuring gender-related constructs, particularly in relation to translation challenges, perceived item bias, and social desirability effects. As we introduce the new data set, we highlight four critical challenges for gender research: bias, gendered translation, response bias, and cross-national measures of sexism. We also provide details on how the module development tackled each of these.
Abstract Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Trajectories of Democratic Innovations’.
Abstract The ideological fragmentation of women’s organizations is central to debates about the unity and effectiveness of global feminist activism. Existing datasets capture organizational presence and networks, but they neglect ideological orientations of women’s organizations. This article introduces the FEMPOWER dataset, covering the period 1980–2023 for around 9,000 women’s organizations active worldwide. FEMPOWER provides yearly country-level data on organizations’ size, reach, strategies, and ideological orientations, including neoliberal versus social justice, sameness versus difference, and intersectionality. Descriptive analysis illustrates regional and temporal variation in fragmentation as well as comparisons with other datasets from the same research domain. The dataset enables researchers to systematically examine how ideological fragmentation influences women’s empowerment and transnational feminist mobilization.
In today's 'crisis of democracy', critical theorists defend democratic principles as public intellectuals. Yet, they remain hesitant to 'conservatively' defend liberal democratic institutions. This article contributes to a special issue on civil society defences of liberal democracy. It asks under what conditions critical theorists can justifiably intervene to defend existing institutions. The article first discusses arguments in critical theory which suggest that defences of democracy should be based on core democratic principles. It then turns to early critical theorists, demonstrating that their defence of existing institutions does not refer to such strong principles. Subsequently, the possibility of defending existing institutions without appeal to strong normative standards is discussed in dialogue with contemporary critical theory. Finally, the article suggests that critical theorists can defend existing institutions if they avoid strong normative claims and focus instead on institutional matters. Practically, they should forge civil society alliances to defend the potential for abolishment inherent in existing institutions.
Chinese analysts have paid close attention to the concept of European strategic autonomy (ESA). This is largely motivated by China's long-held vision of a multipolar world wherein Europe is defined as one major pillar. To better reveal the Chinese understanding of ESA, this research adopts a combination of bibliometric analysis and documentary analysis of Chinese scholarly literature. Two takeaways can be drawn from this study. Firstly, China's perception or expectation of ESA in terms of goals, scope, and approaches differs considerably from Europe's practice. Secondly, China's attitude toward ESA has evolved over time and across different domains and has grown increasingly ambivalent. Although the overall China-EU relationship is unlikely to experience a sharp turn in the near future, Chinese policymakers should be more realistic and better prepared for major changes because the EU has been readjusting its China policy in its quest for ESA.
Arising from the 2024 European Political Science (EPS) annual debate, this article examines the role of expertise in transnational governance (TNG) with a focus on political science. It explores how transnational governance reconfigures the spaces and contexts for expert engagements in global policy making and transnational administration. In these evolving spaces of jurisdiction, the democratic potential, accountability, and legitimacy of expert knowledge are not only shrouded from the Global Majority but cannot be assumed to be inevitable. The article outlines some meanings attached to TNG and suggests democratic considerations cannot be conceived or operationalised in the same ways as at nation-state levels of governance. First, TNG is a series of overlapping but fragmented transnational spheres of public sector activity as well as hybrid public-private jurisdictions where democratic principles are yet to be normalised and embedded. Second, the accountability and legitimacy of sources of expertise in the policy sectors of TNG can be counter-swayed by latent features of 'epistocracy', or expert rule, in transnational policy communities.
The 2023 revision of the EU Horizontal Guidelines introduced a dedicated framework for sustainability-oriented cooperation agreements, marking the first systematic attempt to integrate environmental objectives into EU competition law. Yet, almost two years after they entered into force, DG COMP has not received a single request for informal guidance under the new provisions. This policy commentary explains this apparent policy failure by reconstructing the process through which sustainability concerns entered EU competition policy after the 2019 European elections and the European Green Deal. Drawing on historical-institutionalist process tracing, we show that the resulting adjustments were shaped by political urgency rather than gradual policy learning, and that the 2023 Guidelines reflected cautious compromise rather than transformative change. We then analyse why uptake has remained negligible: multinational firms face steep cross-border enforcement risks, particularly from jurisdictions such as the United States, where sustainability agreements can trigger antitrust liability. We conclude by assessing the EU's strategic options (retreat, international convergence, or domestic regime stabilisation) and argue that the last of these offers the most realistic path.
In an era of globalization, incumbents face strong incentives to attribute poor economic performance to external actors. While motivated reasoning explains how partisans update blame toward domestic incumbents, it remains unclear whether such blame is genuinely redirected to external actors beyond voters' political control. Moreover, externalizing blame may signal limits to democratic accountability, with potential consequences for democratic belief. This article advances an asymmetric blame-shifting argument and tests it with two pre-registered survey experiments conducted on Amazon MTurk following the 2022 US midterm elections (n = 802; n = 999). Exploiting President Joe Biden's attribution of rising inflation to Vladimir Putin, the experiments show that blame-shifting cues polarize partisan evaluations of the domestic incumbent: Democrats reduce blame toward Biden, while Republicans intensify it. In contrast, blame attribution toward the external actor remains largely unchanged across both studies. Study 2 further provides limited but suggestive evidence that exposure to external blame narratives may weaken democratic belief among opposition partisans. Together, the findings indicate that elite blame-shifting operates asymmetrically, which intensifies domestic partisan polarization without redistributing blame across borders, and such asymmetry may further erode democratic legitimacy.
This article examines the conditions under which policy learning occurs, distinguishing between instrumental learning (evidence-based, problem-solving oriented) and political learning (strategic, shaped by institutional position and incentives). Drawing on three cases presented by Claudio Radaelli - examining bureaucrats, politicians, and experts - the paper shows that much of what occurs in policy practice is best understood as political learning: actors acquire and deploy knowledge strategically, filtered through professional hierarchies, electoral pressures, and reputational concerns. While the literature has long recognised these dynamics, the paper argues that existing accounts of political learning understate its relational and contextual character. Political learning emerges through positioned interactions within institutional and epistemic communities, rather than from individual strategic calculation alone, and from alignment with shifting background political conditions that determine what knowledge becomes actionable. Recognising this relational dimension has implications for institutional design aimed at fostering democratic accountability and integrating expertise more effectively into policy making.
