This article examines the complex interplay between domestic and foreign policy in Portugal during the early phase of its democratic transition (1974-1976). It offers a relational analysis of the ideas held by political actors during this period, along with their practices concerning various options for Portugal's post-imperial international role. By cross-referencing primary and secondary sources, this article contextualises the political and ideational culture of the Portuguese transition, identifying the diverse cultural images and foreign policy options that emerged during this experimental phase. Through an ideational approach, it highlights alternative projects to the Western and demoliberal normalisation of Portugal, establishing a correlation between domestic policy projects and foreign policy options.
The article examines the characteristics of the Eurosceptic European citizen, utilising data from rounds 8, 9 and 10 of the European Social Survey. The dependent variables employed are the responses to two questions in the survey: the direction of the vote in a hypothetical consultation on the permanence of their country in the European Union and the satisfaction with the depth of the European integration project. The independent variables are a wide range of socio-economic variables, opinions, beliefs and perceptions. The results indicate that the 'perfect' Eurosceptic would be a middle-aged male residing in a rural environment, experiencing economic hardship, lacking higher education, religious, attached to his own country, abstaining from voting and, when he does vote, casting his ballot for right-wing parties, who would exhibit low confidence in the legal system within his country, dissatisfied with the economic situation and with the functioning of domestic democratic institutions, and who looks askance at immigrants from poorer countries.
This article examines how interest groups sustain political inclusion under democratic backsliding. While existing research documents how organized interests respond to a shrinking civic space, evidence on which strategies succeed remains limited. Using original survey data from over 400 interest groups operating in Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovenia, the article evaluates three responses to democratic regression: organizational professionalization, inter-organizational cooperation, and engagement at the European level. The findings show that democratic backsliding creates a more polarized and exclusionary lobbying environment, disadvantaging ideologically non-aligned groups and reinforcing clientelistic access patterns. However, exclusion is neither automatic nor uniform. Multivariate analyses demonstrate that organizational strategies significantly shape inclusion outcomes. Professionalization consistently improves access across contexts, though its benefits are more limited for oppositional organizations where governments selectively subsidize allied actors. Inter-organizational cooperation proves the most robust strategy, enabling even regime-critical groups to reduce or eliminate inclusion gaps, including where deliberative institutions have eroded. European-level engagement does not directly enhance national inclusion but has important indirect effects by promoting learning, domestic cooperation and professionalization. The article advances research on interest groups and democratic backsliding by shifting focus from adaptation to effectiveness and highlighting the constrained yet persistent agency of organized interests under democratic erosion.
This article examines the normalization of the far right by considering the role of populism and politainment in this process. I argue that populism facilitates far-right normalization by, first, connecting antidemocratic far-right ideologemes with democratic rhetoric and principles and, second, by providing far-right messages with great compatibility with the media logic and attracting media attention. In addition, right-wing populists and far-right activists have become masters of politainment, mixing entertainment with politics. The adoption of politainment by far-right and right-wing populists represents a major innovation in far-right form and content, since it blurs the distinction between politics and entertainment, private and public, reality and fiction. It creates flexible frames for deciphering antidemocratic messages, keeping them polysemic and playful in character, facilitating the dissemination of antidemocratic ideologemes in the democratic public sphere and becoming a crucial factor for normalizing the far right. The article develops a theoretical framework informed by interdisciplinary approaches to address these innovations and dedicates special attention to their hyperreal character. Empirical cases illustrate these new dynamics and processes involved in far-right normalization.
Across contemporary democracies, authoritarian populism is increasingly operating through media systems that combine traditional and digital platforms, yet research is failing to pay sufficient attention to how control is reconfigured under digital conditions. This study asks how authoritarian populists deploy a shared authoritarian playbook - a repertoire of legal, economic, institutional and discursive strategies - to appropriate media while preserving the appearance of democratic institutions. Drawing on authoritarian populism and emphasis on its ideological core, media capture is conceptualised as both a mode of governance and a process of ideological normalisation. The analysis shows how interventions in media ownership, regulation and public broadcasting are reinforced through online harassment and coordinated practices of delegitimisation. A comparative analysis of Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary focuses on these dynamics within Central and Eastern Europe, revealing shared patterns and variation in the deployment of the authoritarian playbook. In Hungary, Orb & aacute;n centralised media under pro-government control and reinforced this through systematic online harassment; in Slovenia, Jan & scaron;a defunded critical outlets, expanded biased media and pursued digital delegitimisation; and in Croatia, media capture operates through clientelism, regulatory interference and online attacks. Together, these cases show how authoritarian populists consolidate and normalise control across hybrid media.
With shifts in the global geopolitical landscape, trade frictions have intensified, making weaponized interdependence an increasingly important concept. In the China-EU electric vehicles (EVs) dispute (September 2023-October 2024), some EU member states voted in favor of raising tariffs on Chinese EVs imports, some opposed, and others abstained. China aimed to alter the voting positions of some EU member states through weaponized interdependence. This paper analyzes which strategies and under what conditions weaponized interdependence proved to be effective. It employs a Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) within Large Language Models (LLMs) framework to simulate the responses of eight EU member states to China's countermeasures. The results indicate that on the one hand, persuasion strategies, market-based and resource-based power countermeasures by China altered the voting positions of certain EU member states. On the other hand, four key factors determine the effectiveness of weaponized interdependence: low market substitutability, the relationship between government and enterprises in the target country, the political style of the target government, and the asymmetry of interdependence in specific commodities.
