This study examines how different forms of polarisation shape political corruption through a comparative case study of Hungary and Turkey between 2000 and 2022. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data sources, the analysis traces four theorised mechanisms linking elite and mass polarisation to political corruption. Findings indicate that elite ideological polarisation can modestly deter corruption, but mass polarisation undermines accountability and thereby facilitates corrupt practices. Crucially, these effects appear to be conditional on regime context: the anti-corruption effects of elite polarisation are only observed during relatively democratic periods, while the corruption-enhancing effects of mass polarisation intensify as democratic institutions erode.
Authoritarian diffusion theories explain cooperation among autocracies to sustain stability through resources or policy learning. Existing research centres on autocracy promotion or "authoritarian gravity centres" like China and Russia, overlooking recipient regimes' domestic contexts. This paper argues that state capacity moderates diffusion by shaping policy absorption, moving beyond policy convergence as evidence of diffusion. The argument draws on a comparative study of digital authoritarianism in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, based on secondary sources and 26 stakeholder interviews, and is tested with Feldstein's Digital Repression Index and a novel 2003-2021 dataset on global diffusion exposure. Regression results show that state capacity mediates diffusion effects: weaker regimes, even when adopting foreign legislation or technologies, often fail to implement them due to limited financial and technical resources. Thus, diffusion outcomes depend not only on external influence but also on domestic institutional capacities.
This article examines affective polarisation, in-/out-group dynamics, and hate speech in a mainstream liberal digital space during the 2025 Polish presidential campaign. Using a 31,816-comment corpus from Gazeta Wyborcza's online community, the study applies natural language processing tools to investigate how readers constructed the candidacy of Karol Nawrocki, supported by the right-wing Law and Justice. The findings reveal systematic patterns of derogation and delegitimisation directed at Nawrocki and his supporters, reinforcing a sharp "us versus them" divide. While existing research has focused on extremist online environments, this study shows that exclusionary and dehumanising rhetoric also flourishes in mainstream liberal spheres.
Almost two decades into the current wave of autocratisation, regime scholars have been turning their attention to the potential for democracies to resist mounting authoritarian pressures and for democratic norms and institution to be restored after a period of decline. This article proposes a way of putting order into this emergent, and as yet fragmented, wave of scholarship on democratic resilience and re-democratisation. It advances three key readings - normative, temporal, and geographical - that help us identify the distinguishing features of the contemporary struggle for democracy in the age of autocratisation, and open crucial avenues for future research.
This special issue examines the geopoliticisation of domestic political issues in the Baltic Sea region and Central and Eastern Europe in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine. It conceptualises geopoliticisation as a process through which domestic conflicts, preferences, and political debates are reframed in terms of geopolitical alignments and rivalries, particularly along a value-based divide between the West/EU and Russia. Bringing together contributions that analyse party strategies, public opinion, elite-driven dynamics, and electoral behaviour, the issue explores how geopolitical orientations are constructed, mobilised, and contested within national contexts.
This study investigates the evolving profile of voters supporting Poland's Law and Justice party (PiS) between 2012 ande 2023, asking: How have individual-level traits shaped electoral support for PiS across its transition between opposition and government? Using lagged instrumental variable probit models across multiple survey waves, we find that conditional on electoral participation, political trust and dissatisfaction with governance were the primary drivers of the vote in 2012, reflecting PiS's outsider status. During PiS's tenure, satisfaction with governance showed intermittent positive effects, while religiosity emerged as the most consistent predictor from 2018 onwards.
This article examines how Georgian citizens living near contested borders with Abkhazia and South Ossetia perceive the European Union (EU) and Russia. While Georgia's EU integration is often framed as a binary geopolitical choice, this study explores how such narratives are experienced in everyday life. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted between 2021 and 2024, it reveals broad support for EU integration alongside ambivalent attitudes toward the EU's role and Russia's presence. These findings highlight how borderland communities interpret and negotiate competing geopolitical influences, offering a grounded perspective that moves beyond elite-driven accounts of foreign policy and regional alignment.
The literature shows that men and women behave differently in politics. This paper studies how gender affects local politicians' efforts to secure external funding for their constituencies. Using data from a large discretionary grant programme for Slovak municipalities, we find that (1) female incumbents outperform their male counterparts by requesting grants more actively; (2) this gap widens in favour of women as mayoral tenure increases; and (3) mayors of both genders follow similar electoral-cycle patterns. Grant requests are frequent at the start of the term, then decline, but rise again in election years, probably reflecting mayors' efforts to impress voters.
Do reforms influence trust and support for government? This paper addresses the relationship between trust and reform in Ukraine as a transitional setting. We theorise that trust plays a crucial role in transitional settings and that it can be increased via public sector reforms. Using original survey and experimental data from Ukraine, we analyse how citizens' assessments of improvements in administrative services and processes affect support and trust in government. We find that positive evaluations of reforms in Ukraine's public administration are associated with higher trust in government and that there is a causal link between administrative reforms and support.
A close examination of the reparation decree-laws and laws enacted in Romania from December 1989 to December 2024 shows that successive post-communist governments had to reckon with multiple, layered recent pasts, not just one. The temporal order in which five victim groups were compensated for their past suffering introduced an implicit recognition of some victims that prioritised present political objectives over the nature of the gruesome past. A preference for corrective rather than transformative reckoning explains why the reparation programme overlooked the 500-year-long Roma slavery.
The main purpose of the article is to analyse the legislative activity of Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada in the context of European integration. Based on the analysis of bills considered by members of the Ukrainian Parliament from 2022 to 2024, the authors focus on explaining why political parties decided to adopt legislation necessary for meeting the EU conditionality requirements. This research focuses on the unprecedented situational consensus among Ukrainian MPs, providing a basis for examining the consolidatory role of the European integration in achieving sustainable parliamentary support for the legislative component of the accession process.
This study explores home bias in foreign direct investment (FDI) preferences through an experiment involving 12,419 participants across six Southeast European countries. Respondents evaluated hypothetical companies, varying by origin (domestic vs. foreign) and employment outcomes (gains vs. losses). Results indicate strong home bias, amplified by nationalist and socialist ideologies. However, home bias diminishes in loss scenarios resembling brownfield FDI, reflecting negative privatisation experiences with corrupt domestic actors. These findings reveal the ideological drivers of economic policy preferences and a nuanced public stance on FDI, shaped by historical context and pragmatism in Southeast Europe's post-socialist landscape.
Democratic hypocrisy - the tendency for citizens to express support for democratic norms in the abstract while tolerating violations of those norms when doing so serves their partisan interests - has been identified as a potential threat to liberal democracy in conditions of affective polarisation. Yet existing research has relied on declared preferences, leaving open the question of whether such hypocrisy manifests itself in the kinds of multidimensional choices that characterise real political decision-making. Using a conjoint experiment embedded in a three-wave panel survey spanning Poland's transition from illiberal PiS incumbency to a pro-democratic KO-led coalition government, I examine whether citizens' revealed preferences for liberal democracy change when power changes hands. Results show that Polish citizens consistently punish candidates who espouse illiberal views, and that this tendency is not significantly altered by the change of government, even among citizens who are highly affectively polarised. Contrary to expectations, citizens polarised in favour of the former incumbent party did not become more protective of liberal-democratic norms after losing power. These findings suggest that revealed preferences for liberal democracy are more stable than theories of democratic hypocrisy would predict, but also that democratic restoration cannot rely on a natural correction in public attitudes following a change of government.
Over the past decade, resilience-building has become a key objective of EU policy in its neighbourhood. Focusing on the Namakhvani hydro power project in Georgia, this article examines how resilience is shaped through interactions among grassroots activists, civil society organisations, state authorities, and external actors. Drawing on official documents, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, we argue that resilience-building is primarily a contested bottom-up process structured by domestic power relations, while also becoming, to a lesser extent, a negotiated process in which external actors act as mediators.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted concern about the country's capacity to resist a more powerful adversary. Yet today, Ukraine continues to sustain resistance to Russian aggression whilst also pursuing far-reaching domestic reforms, including those linked to European Union accession. This symposium examines this conjunction of wartime resistance and reform. Bringing together contributions that analyse the perceptions, strategies, and behaviours of diverse public and private actors, this collection investigates how Ukrainians navigate the parallel demands of fighting a war, maintaining governance, and planning for the future. This symposium contributes substantively- by advancing understanding of resistance, resilience and reform in wartime - and methodologically, by reflecting on the challenges of researching politics as war unfolds.
This article analyses how and why the geopolitical orientations of Belarusian elites diverged after 2020, comparing the trajectories of the Lukashenka regime and the Belarusian democratic forces in exile. Drawing on historical institutionalism, it identifies the post-electoral crisis of 2020 and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as critical junctures that restructured elite incentives and constraints. The regime moved from managed multi-vectorism to structurally embedded dependence on Russia, generating path-dependent lock-in. In contrast, the democratic forces shifted from initial geopolitical caution to a consolidated pro-European orientation. The analysis demonstrates that these reorientations were institutionally mediated responses to external shocks, transforming geopolitical alignment into the principal dividing line of elite politics in Belarus.
This article examines how the demographic composition of municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina shapes the strategic behaviour of co-ethnic political parties in direct mayoral elections. It argues that strategies differ between ethnically divided and homogeneous municipalities. Combining quantitative data from four electoral cycles with qualitative field research in eleven divided localities, the study finds that in demographically mixed areas, Bosniak, Croat, and Serb parties often unite behind a single candidate, whereas in homogeneous areas intra-ethnic competition prevails. The findings underscore the zero-sum nature of ethnic politics in a post-conflict society and the central role of demographics in structuring local competition.
This study examines institutional drift as a mechanism of democratic backsliding in Georgia. Using V-Dem data (2010-2024), it develops an Institutional Drift Index measuring declines in horizontal, vertical, and diagonal accountability. The analysis tests three hypotheses on the role of judicial capture, parliamentary weakness, and informal institutions - such as clientelism, corruption, and electoral manipulation - in reinforcing institutional asymmetry. Findings show that Georgia's drift reflects gradual authoritarian consolidation within democratic forms. The study highlights how informal power sustains formal decline, offering insights into hybrid regime stabilisation and the subtle dynamics of democratic erosion in transitional political economies.
