This article examines how the institutional position of a second chamber is reflected in legislators’ use of written questions as oversight instruments. While studies of bicameralism have focused on legislative processes, veto power, and policy stability, less is known about how second chambers perform oversight through written questions. Using 16,369 written questions submitted to Japan’s House of Representatives and House of Councillors between 2001 and 2025, this article classifies each question into six functions and estimates logit models for each. The most robust finding is that House of Councillors-submitted written questions are more likely to be information-requesting, a relationship that remains after adding controls and excluding ambiguously classified observations; Firth-corrected estimates also produce similar coefficient magnitudes. Interpretation-confirming questions show a positive association only in some specifications. These findings suggest that second chambers can also serve as arenas for extracting government information and recording government views.
Military coups constitute potential critical junctures enabling social forces to reshape the political arena. In the aftermaths of military coups, juntas face two options: first, they can organize multiparty elections, refrain from interfering in them, and extricate themselves from executive power, thereby creating the foundations for democratic regimes; second, they can rig elections and create praetorian-led electoral authoritarian regimes. This article draws on a global dataset encompassing all post-coup electoral outcomes since 1990 to assess the frequency and political consequences of these two trajectories. It focuses on the internal dynamics between the junta and the broader military establishment to theorize the conditions under which different post-coup transition outcomes tend to occur. Two conditions shape post-coup transition outcomes: the junta’s institutional incentives and its capacity to unite the armed forces at large behind its desired outcome. The conditions provoking military intervention—the immediate coup triggers—influence both. Consequently, post-coup transitions are not entirely contingent. They tend to follow recognizable patterns shaped by the immediate coup triggers. By offering both conceptual and empirical insights, the article lays the foundation for future actor-centric research on civil-military relations and the long-term implications of military coups in contemporary politics.
Citizens’ Assemblies and other deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) are institutions designed to foster democratic deliberation. AI systems, especially large language models (LLMs), have been suggested as tools to scale up the breadth and depth of DMPs. We distinguish six core functions within democratic deliberation – representation, perspective-giving and taking, inquiry, co-creation, integration, and decision-making – and point out some potential benefits of AI in each of these functions. Our case study presents the results of the Citizens’ Assembly on Energy, organised in Finland in 2025, in which an LLM was used in inquiry, co-creation, and integration. We found that while LLMs have some shortcomings in terms of inquiry, especially in creating questions for experts, they can ease the workload of human facilitators and deliberators in co-creation and integration. Our findings contribute to the emerging debate on the optimal division of labour in deliberative processes between human deliberators, facilitators, and generative AI.
This study examines how women and men perceive their competence to hold elected office across different levels of policymaking. While research has documented a persistent gender gap in self-perceived political competence, less is known about how this gap varies across the local, regional, national, and European Union levels. Drawing on original survey data collected in Finland in 2023, we investigate gendered patterns in self-perceived competence at each level and assess the role of family political socialisation. Our analyses reveal significant gender gaps across all levels, with women reporting lower levels of self-perceived competence than men and the largest gap occurring at the local level. These findings suggest that self-perceived political competence is context-dependent and shaped by the institutional and symbolic characteristics of political arenas. In addition, we find that family socialisation is more strongly associated with men’s self-perceived competence than women’s, particularly at the national and European Union levels.
This article develops a framework to analyse the contingent intersections between populism, anti-populism, and environmental politics. These intersections defy simple categorisation: left-wing populists champion climate justice while resisting specific green policies; right-wing populists deny climate change yet defend national landscapes; grassroots movements - from pipeline resistance to the Gilets Jaunes - deploy populism with divergent implications; anti-populist actors both defend and obstruct environmental protection. Actors hold ambiguous positions, shift stances, and form unexpected alliances. Building on scholarship that has increasingly recognised these complex interactions between (anti-)populism and environmental politics, we propose a systematic analytical framework. Drawing on discourse theory, we argue that neither populism nor anti-populism - understood as distinct modes of constructing political frontiers - predetermines environmental positions. Our framework crosses two dimensions: political logic (populism vs anti-populism) and stance towards environmentalist demands (supportive vs oppositional), yielding four articulations that synthesise existing insights into a coherent structure for empirical analysis and strategic reflection.
Dictators often rule through political parties. While they might bolster regime survival, ruling parties can also provide a means for party members to defy the ruler. This article investigates the electoral consequences of elite divisions within ruling parties. Using cross-national analyses and a battery of robustness tests, we show that major party divisions can provide a powerful signal that weakens electoral support for ruling parties, but are weakly correlated with opposition-led executive turnover. Even if the regime prevails, divisions correlate with internal changes that improve prospects for democratisation. Additional analyses explore the mechanisms and are consistent with the interpretation that larger intra-party divisions can provide an alternative narrative to the government’s propaganda, increase societal discontent, and increase the coordination costs of electoral manipulation. Our findings provide the first cross-national, systematic link between party divisions and tangible electoral costs, suggesting opportunities and limitations to generate changes within the regime and regime change.
The literature on West-European far-right gender politics often highlights the strategic ambiguities through which far-right actors claim to defend women’s and gay rights while advancing reactionary patriarchal projects. Building on accounts that locate these paradoxes in the articulation of Islamophobic femonationalist/homonationalist discourse and conservative anti-gender politics, this article adapts Mondon and Winter’s distinction between liberal and illiberal racisms to patriarchal politics, positioning the far right between illiberal and liberal patriarchalisms. It argues that the liberal mainstream sustains its post-patriarchal self-image by repudiating and externalising patriarchy through mechanisms of individualisation, marginalisation, and racialisation, which cast patriarchy as an illiberal residue associated with racialised and marginalised ‘others’. From this perspective, the far right occupies a strategic in-between space that enables it both to accommodate and radicalise post-patriarchal liberalism by normalising illiberal patriarchal politics within mainstream arenas. In doing so, the article reasserts the analytical value of patriarchy as a concept for understanding not only far-right politics but also contemporary reactionary politics more broadly.
Far-right governments and leaders worldwide ban gender-inclusive language and policies, while also deploying gender equality and sexuality flexibly to legitimise their nationalist agendas. While research on gender and the far right points to a shared antifeminist ideology, gender politics vary within and across different far-right political parties and arenas. How and why do far-right actors debate gender and sexuality differently across various social and political contexts? This article addresses this question by examining gender politics and how they are adapted across four different arenas of the German far-right network: the European Parliament, the German parliament, far-right media, and activists. The article finds that although all far-right actors consistently promote a shared antifeminist ideology, they alter their strategic frames in their messaging, ranging from civilisational protection and national sovereignty to the protection of the family, cultural decline, women’s emancipation, and public safety. This flexible ‘gender politics’ aim to maximise the resonance and legitimacy of far-right actors and their antifeminist hegemonic project.
Climate change has become an increasingly partisan issue. Yet while the focus is often placed on public attitudes and populist anti-climate movements, little research examines how political elites discuss climate change in parliaments - important arenas of formal debate where politicians transmit elite cues that influence voters. We fill this gap by combining computational analysis of 9000 parliamentary contributions with 13 interviews of parliamentarians to study the partisan character of UK parliamentary climate debate between 2017 and 2022. While parliamentary discourse remained predominantly pro-climate, this masks stark partisan and intra-party variation. Notably, divisions within the Conservative governing majority drove greater volatility in support and growing ambivalence towards climate action. The article's analysis both updates and clarifies conceptions of the UK's elite climate politics and advances the literature on the politics of climate change by demonstrating how the erosion of elite climate consensuses can proceed through the politics of 'divided conservatism' within parliament.
Despite its prominence in Labour Party communication under Keir Starmer, ‘working people’ discourse has not been subject to any sustained academic analysis. Using the lens of Critical Fantasy Studies, I examine how, between the first Labour Budget and the 2025 Spring Statement, ‘working people’ and the Labour government were constructed as a hero-guarantor of ‘fixing three foundations’ for ‘change’: ‘stable economy, secure borders, and national security’. A promise of ‘wholeness’ was contrasted against a ‘horrific’ scenario of ‘lack’ represented by a ‘black hole’ in UK finances and perceived threats to the UK’s borders. Constructing ‘working people’ as ‘patriotic and fiscally responsible’ and ‘securitised’ reinforces neoliberal common sense and risks mainstreaming the far right by framing welfare claimants and asylum seekers as burdens and defence and border security as the main sources of security, growth, and legitimacy.
How do judges in authoritarian regimes express disagreement when open dissent is risky? This article advances a broader view of individual judicial behaviour by analysing dissents, concurrences, and abstentions from hearings as strategies that vary in visibility and confrontation. Drawing on an original dataset of 732 judgments of the Russian Constitutional Court (1992-2021), I examine when judges choose to issue separate opinions or withdraw from participation. Regression analyses show that dissents are less likely in cases involving social rights and in the months surrounding presidential elections, but not parliamentary ones. Over time, dissents decline and concurring opinions become more prominent, while abstentions are more common in political rights cases. These findings suggest that judges adapt their strategies as political constraints tighten, substituting away from voice towards lower-visibility responses. The study contributes to research on judicial behaviour in nondemocracies by introducing abstentions as an indicator of strategic adaptation in authoritarian courts.
International relations (IR) scholars have recently taken a more substantial interest in using film to teach theoretical and empirical concepts. However, the use of film as a core pedagogical method often remains ad hoc, undertheorised, and fragmented. This creates significant risks because learners may default to consuming films as entertainment, suffer cognitive overload, or uncritically absorb inaccurate or distorted versions of reality. The core contribution of this article is a comprehensive framework that theorises film-based pedagogy as pedagogical scaffolding. Grounded in socio-cultural learning theory, this framework is explicitly designed to teach IR theory and provides the necessary structure to guide learners from unmediated consumption towards active and critical analysis. To build the pedagogical scaffolding framework, five existing teaching methodologies are surveyed and re-interpreted as valuable and partial scaffolds. Their individual strengths are subsequently integrated into a novel, replicable, and transferable four-phase learning design. The utility of this design is demonstrated through a detailed case study using the film Midway (2019) to teach a core IR concept of the Balance of Power.
This article develops Restorationist Re-politics (RRP) as a communicative morphology within the contemporary UK far right through a comparison of Reform UK, the Reclaim Party, and Restore Britain from 2023 to 2025. Drawing on a multimodal corpus of 180 first-party artefacts, including policy texts, press materials, social media posts, and speeches, it shows how a restoration grammar turns grievance into politically usable action. RRP combines prefix signalling, a nostalgic baseline of recoverable order, and the translation of Trumpist rhetoric into British institutional levers. Across the three cases, restoration links decline to remedy through distinct house styles: insurgent-managerial, moral-performative, and punitive-mobilisational. It therefore identifies a shared structure that travels across parties, platforms, and communicative registers. The article argues that RRP shows how far-right actors make exclusionary politics appear actionable and feasible across organisational settings and media formats.
This article examines how students understood and responded to transparency in digital assessment through a case study of Cadmus, a platform that embeds guidance within the assessment process while also making aspects of student activity visible to staff. Drawing on surveys, classroom discussion, and reflective analysis from a postgraduate politics module, the article shows that digital transparency is experienced in different ways. Some students valued the structure and guidance the platform provided. Others were uneasy about being made visible through it and felt constrained by the way it shaped their work. The article argues that these responses matter because digital assessment platforms do more than deliver instructions: they also shape how students experience authority and trust. Cadmus is therefore approached as a site where institutional values and power relations are encountered and questioned, rather than simply a neutral, technical instrument. The article concludes that educators should treat these moments of student unease and critique as opportunities for reflexive learning and should design digital assessment in ways that make platform politics discussable while foregrounding student agency and trust.
