This article examines the trajectory of constitutional reform under the Meloni government (2022-2026) as a case of failed institutional transformation. While much of the literature on populism in power has focused on successful cases of democratic erosion, the Italian case shows how ambitious reform projects can be progressively scaled back and ultimately defeated. The article conceptualises this dynamic as constrained constitutional ambition, a process in which populist actors seek to reshape the polity dimension but are limited by dense institutional, political, and procedural conditions. Drawing on the concepts of populist domestication and democratic resilience, the analysis highlights how reform initiatives are filtered through parliamentary procedures, coalition dynamics, and referendum politics. Particular attention is devoted to the 2026 constitutional referendum, which rejected judicial reform and illustrates the interaction between institutional limits, political polarisation, and voter behaviour. The article contributes to comparative debates by showing that reform failure is analytically as important as institutional entrenchment for understanding populism in power. It argues that democratic resilience operates not through the absence of conflict, but through the capacity of institutions to structure and contain it.
Latin America’s far right is structured around the pairing of religious conservatism and sovereigntist nationalism, rather than immigration-centered nativism. This article shows how that configuration travels transnationally through the anti-gender network linking churches, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and populist radical right parties. Focusing on the Organization of American States (OAS), it examines how the far right engages international organizations (IOs) from within, mapping the network’s actors and the coordinated strategies—performative politics, lobbying, and reactive litigation—deployed to contest sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) and reproductive rights. The article argues that such networked contestation can neutralize IOs even without far-right control over national governments, a modality of influence it conceptualizes as neutralization: the disabling of an IO as a driver of norm expansion, while prior commitments stay nominally in place. At the same time, the IO arena strengthens the anti-gender network by providing a forum for transnational coalition-building.
In March 2023, we took 14 individuals enrolled in our module, Environment and Climate Politics, to a forest in the West Midlands. The purpose of the fieldtrip was to shift our learners’ embodied experiences by placing them outside (the classroom) and away from those repeated/stylised interactions with the usual content, objects and spaces associated with Politics and International Relations learning and teaching. Indeed, environment-related teaching in Politics and International Relations tends to focus on institutional responses and multi-level policy-making. By taking the students to the forest, we sought to invite consideration of how we embody our relationship with nature and, simultaneously, trouble the ontological foundations that underpin Politics and International Relations approaches. Inspired by scholarship on queer- and eco-pedagogy, we were keen to challenge norms around how we provide environmental politics education, challenging teaching customs in our discipline and actively troubling the discipline’s very boundaries. This paper reflects on that initial fieldtrip and how the exercise has informed the design of the module and assessments. The paper considers the blurring and permeability of the roles and responsibilities of ‘student’, ‘lecturer’, ‘guide’ and ‘forest’ in this context and the implications that holds for teaching environment-related content as part of a Politics and International Relations curriculum.
As global trends of deepening inequalities, disruption of public spheres and growing polarisation seem to undermine the conditions for deliberative democracy, new approaches to assessing deliberative quality are needed. This article proposes a problem-oriented perspective that shifts the analytical focus from form to function. Rather than asking what conditions promote deliberative forms of communication, it asks what forms of reasoning or judgement formation promote deliberative goals. Taking heuristics as a paradigmatic case, the article argues that cognitive shortcuts should not be conceived as alternatives to deliberation but as potential complements. Drawing on the systemic approach, it examines the risks and the potential of heuristics with respect to the epistemic, ethical and democratic functions of deliberative systems. The article concludes with a plea for a research agenda that develops criteria for evaluating heuristics and other practices and identifies the conditions under which they can productively enhance the emancipatory power of deliberation.
Well-designed group projects have the potential to cultivate a more inclusive learning environment. While the organisational difficulties of group work are well-known, the unequally distributed emotional and psychological burdens that group work can impose are less often acknowledged. To make sense of who finds group work difficult and why, we discuss a pilot project in which we employed second-year students to facilitate group projects on a core first-year Politics module. Based on analysis of student surveys, reflective reports by students and interviews with peer-facilitators, alongside our own teaching practice as lecturers, we reflect on how peer-facilitators can help to make group work more inclusive due to their positionality as inside-outsiders within the seminar room.
