Concerns over democratic backsliding have proliferated recently, as elected politicians have sought to undermine democratic checks and balances. This study examines the underpinnings of public support for democratic backsliding, delineating five theoretical explanations: personalistic leadership, affective polarization, populism, majoritarianism, and entanglement with the legal system. We test the explanatory power of these accounts within the Israeli context, leveraging panel survey data collected before and after the government announced its plan to curtail the courts. Results indicate that support for the plan is best explained by two forces: prior attachment to the leader heading the backsliding effort and animosity toward partisan opponents. Notably, populist attitudes are not associated with support for the government's plan. The theoretical framework and longitudinal research design help explain who supports democratic backsliding.

Religious belief commonly relates to prosocial behavior, yet studies suggest that religious individuals tend to limit their prosociality to ingroup members. In this study, we conducted a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to investigate further religious prosociality and ingroup favoritism in a real-world setting. Our results support the association between religiosity and prosociality, showing that religious individuals (compared to secular individuals) were likelier to donate and display hospitality toward fundraisers. However, we also found evidence of ingroup bias by focusing on the role of religiosity level as a boundary of the religious ingroup among co-religionists. Religious people were more inclined to donate to religious fundraisers than secular fundraisers, despite a shared religious affiliation with both. Furthermore, we explored the implications of religious diversity residential context on this nuanced ingroup bias and suggest that the religious community structure alone may not be sufficient to explain the nuances of religious prosocial behavior.

A well-documented fact is that Muslim citizens tend to vote for the left in greater proportion than non-Muslim citizens. In Western Europe, this difference in the vote for left-wing parties exceeds 30%. Interestingly, the gap endures despite Muslims’ integration into the host society, which is expected to militate against group voting. Why, then, do Muslims continue to vote as a group? And what factors account for their leaning towards the left? We argue that exclusion and discrimination, to which Muslims are regularly subjected as a group, work against the effect of integration on their vote choice, as it strengthens the saliency of group interests and “linked fate” in their voting calculus. Using public opinion survey data, we show that the more Muslims feel discriminated against by their host society, the more likely they are to engage in group voting and vote for the left. We also show that political exclusion, proxied by the electoral strength of radical-right parties, has a positive association with Muslims’ support for left-wing parties. Finally, we delve into the British case and show that experiences of physical violence are also manifested in stronger group voting by non-Western immigrants. Our article sheds light on a phenomenon that has the potential to reshape the electoral landscape in Europe by rendering ethnic and religious identity a crucial dimension of party competition.

(Dis)trust is referred to in the literature as both an antecedent and/or a consequence of regulation and regulatory governance in terms of regulatory content, procedures, and (behavior of) actors, and vice versa. However, trust and regulation might be competing and eroding each other, substituting for or mutually reinforcing each other. The chapter first discusses theoretical perspectives like the regulatory trust triangle, and how choices in terms of institutional design (e.g., mono- versus polycentric regimes, independence), strategies (like command and control versus self-regulation), as well as performance might signal and determine trust in regulatory regimes and regulatory agencies. Existing empirical knowledge from an actor- and relation-oriented perspective is reviewed, discussing trust from citizens and regulatees in regulatory agencies and regulatory regimes, trust between political, administrative, regulatory, and interest group actors in regimes, and how trust and distrust affect the functioning and performance of regulatory regimes. Future research strategies are outlined.

This chapter explores the socio-political dimensions of urban sustainability. Cities play a pivotal role in sustainability, particularly in addressing climate change through mitigation and adaptation strategies and as hubs for progressive, environment-friendly policies. However, cities are also limited in their capacities for environmental governance due to institutional and political constraints and lack of authority to enforce broader changes or implement large-scale initiatives like a ‘green new deal’. Cities’ ‘non-sovereignty’, we argue, is both a strength and a weakness. Thus, while cities are crucial actors in addressing environmental challenges, their efforts must be complemented by state-level and global political system reforms. Ultimately, enhancing cities’ political autonomy is necessary but insufficient. We conceptualise this complexity as the ‘Urbanocene’, suggesting that it is analogous to human agency in this geological epoch. Like humanity, the city has transformative powers, and like human agency in the Anthropocene, these powers are ultimately circumscribed.

This paper moves beyond the conventional view of emotions in policy settings as mere contextual constraints in cases of low-intensity affective processes by introducing the concept of emotional policy storm-a sudden surge in the intensity of collective emotions, either positive or negative, within a policy context, sustained over an extended period. The conceptualization offered here addresses cases where high-intensity collective emotions emerge following a spectacularly emotional event or issue; emotions are thereafter shared at the collective level through bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down processes; and are further sustained over time by emotionally-charged numbers, images, rhetoric, political context, and media dynamics. Emotional policy storms function as mechanisms that link agendas, spaces of policy problems and solutions, and coalitions, over an extended period, while also acting as disruptive forces that reconfigure the policymaking process, generating strong demands for urgent, radical, and large-scale policy interventions. This paper further explores the conceptual reach of emotional policy storms by examining their usefulness in addressing existing weaknesses and ambiguities in the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF), particularly regarding the autonomy of streams, the complexity of coupling and policy windows, the endogeneity of agenda-setting and alternative specification, and the role of ideas. It offers an illustrative application of this conceptual addition to the MSF by assessing its feasibility in the case of the U.S. policy response to 9/11. It concludes with a discussion of methodological issues, a series of hypotheses, and final remarks.

In an era of anxious politics, protective policies in a threatening environment can incorporate emotional support components, simultaneously acting as emotional safety nets for individuals and communities. A key question arises: which type of emotional safety net best aligns government responses with the emotional needs of target populations. Drawing on the role of emotional intensity in the processes through which emotions influence interpretation, as well as extensive research showing that individuals within groups share and shape collective emotional states-states that inform group identities and actions-this paper conceptualizes the emotional dimension of protective policy as a multidimensional phenomenon. Two dimensions that are interrelated, yet capture distinct aspects of emotional safety nets, include the intensity of the emotions targeted and the variability of emotional needs across individuals and groups. These two dimensions give rise of three distinct emotional safety nets, namely Basic Reassurance Emotional Safety Net (low intensity and low variability), Emotional Empowerment Safety Net (moderate intensity and moderate variability); and Restorative Emotional Safety Net (high intensity and high variability). These categories provide policymakers with a structured framework to assess the emotional needs of target populations and tailor their protective policies accordingly. Drawing on the Multiple Streams Framework, the paper generates numerous hypotheses. Process tracing, among others, will effectively demonstrate how emotional safety net strategies are chosen and implemented.

This book presents 13 pioneering essays on policy over- and underreaction by Moshe Maor, a leading authority on disproportionate policy responses. Maor construes disproportion in an empirical rather than normative manner to improve our understanding of when, why, and how electorally vulnerable political executives and those operating in contexts of declining trust in government and rising negativity and populism resort to disproportionate policy measures. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

This book presents 12 pioneering essays and a novel introduction on policy over- and underreaction by Moshe Maor, a leading authority on disproportionate policy responses. Maor construes disproportion in an empirical rather than normative manner to improve our understanding of when, why, and how electorally vulnerable political executives and those operating in contexts of declining trust in government and rising negativity and populism resort to disproportionate policy measures. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

This article draws from Frederick Douglass’s antebellum and wartime writings to reconstruct his approach to natural rights. Douglass admired many elements of the Enlightenment legacy. Yet in the same motion that he echoes European and American thinkers, he subtly qualifies, corrects, and revises their ideas, sometimes in radical ways. In his depictions of slavery, natural rights cease to be metaphysical abstractions and instead become embodied in our social relations. While they persist in outline, their substance is transformed to account for racialized power and structural violence. In this way, Douglass redefines a number of liberalism’s key moral and political concepts, including freedom, reason, dignity, and moral responsibility. He develops a political theory designed to reinforce the Enlightenment’s bare foundations with social insights of the oppressed: a philosophy of natural rights, told from below.