This book assesses the larger influences that government termination by parliaments has on executive–legislative relations, claiming that the way in which the governments may be challenged or dismissed has far greater impact than previously understood. The core feature of a parliamentary system is not that governments tend to emerge from the legislatures in some way or another, but their political responsibility to this body. While in only some parliamentary systems the government needs formal support of parliament to take office, in all parliamentary systems no government can survive against the will of parliament. The academic literature related to the rules for how governments form is vast. Strikingly, scholars have paid far less time to unpack the core institution of parliamentary systems of government – the confidence relationship and the various no confidence procedures. The chapters explore the institutions by which parliaments hold governments accountable and how they balance elected parliaments and appointed governments in parliamentary systems. Contributions move beyond the standard focus on government formation and instead analyse government termination by parliament evaluating its consequences in a detailed and comprehensive manner. This book will be of interest to students and academics in the field of political science, governance and political theory. The chapters in this book were originally published in West European Politics.

This chapter deals with the shifting Cold War alliances between Beijing, Moscow, and Washington in the Middle East. Nearly three decades after the end of the Cold War, Beijing appears to have learned an important lesson with regard to its international behavior. In the Cold War period, China's foreign policy and international behavior were “non-Chinese” in the sense that Mao's China looked at the global system through a black-and-white, friend-or-foe, prism. As the Cold War blocs disintegrated along with the Soviet Union, China's new leadership was ready to expand and improve relations with all countries, including former “foes,” as well as with the United States and Russia. This chapter aims at analyzing China's shifting roles in the Cold War and afterward, as they are reflected in the Middle East. This region is remote from China's “core interests,” in many respects, and indeed, most, if not all, China scholars and watchers treat Beijing's policies in East Asia and in West Asia as two separate issues. Nonetheless, in China's global perception, these two regions are linked, even interdependent.

David Ricci has written two books on 'political stories,' providing the foundations for Post-Truth Democracy. Yet the present book is arguably the most important yet. The author writes that we need stories to make our way in the world. But many stories, say from identity politics, are necessarily false because they are simplifications of some larger reality. However, not all stories are equally false or equally harmful. Some lead to bad outcomes, and it is the responsibility of scholars to counter harmful stories with other stories leading to better outcomes. Therefore, stories are an especially potent form of political power, deserving of scholarly and journalistic attention.

Food has been crucial to the functioning and survival of governments and regimes since the emergence of early states. Only in a few countries is the connection between food and politics as pronounced as in Russia. Virtually every significant development in Russian and Soviet history since the 1917 Revolution has been either directly driven by or closely associated with the question of food and access to it. Food shortages played a critical role in the collapse of both the Russian Empire and the USSR. Under Vladimir Putin’s watch, Russia, a major importer of grain, transformed itself into the world’s largest exporter. Bread and Autocracy focuses on this crucial yet widely overlooked transformation. The book argues that this transformation was a result of a deliberate government strategy. The Kremlin’s aim is to achieve nutritional independence and shield Putin’s Russia from dependence on food imports. Self-sufficiency in key food staples is meant to protect the regime from food shortages in case of a major confrontation with the West, for which Putin has long prepared. Russia’s focus on nutritional self-sufficiency also sets the country apart from almost all modern autocracies. While many authoritarian regimes have adopted industrial import-substitution policies, in Putin’s Russia it is the substitution of food imports with domestically produced crops that is crucial for regime survival. Bread and Autocracy presents the connection between food, politics, and security in post-Soviet Russia and shows the emergence of food self-sufficiency as key pillar of regime security, stability, and survival.

Suárez was probably the first theologian to propose a political understanding of the order of subordination among the demons. According to Aquinas, this subordination immediately reflects the natural differences in perfection between the demons. Suárez charged that a natural-based order of demonic subordination could not ground the capacity of the demons’ ruler—Lucifer—to use his power to impose civic obligations on fellow demons so as to pursue their joint evil goals. But can there be obligations ad malum? This paper explores a number of possible paths seemingly available to Suárez to defend his controversial view. I argue that the most promising interpretation of Suárez is one according to which the obligations created by Lucifer’s commands are not obligations in conscience but rather what we may call “non-moral obligations.”

How is the electoral behavior of minorities shaped by past violence? Recent studies found that displacement increases hostility between perpetrators and displaced individuals, but there has been paltry research on members of surviving communities. We argue that the latter exhibit the opposite pattern because of their different condition. Violence will cause cross-generational vulnerability, fear and risk-aversion—leading the surviving communities to seek protection and avoid conflict by signalling loyalty and rejecting nationalist movements. In their situation as an excluded minority in the perpetrators’ state, they will be more likely to vote for out-group parties. Exploiting exogenous battlefield dynamics that created inter-regional variation in the Palestinian exodus (1947–1949), microlevel measurements that capture the damage of violence, and an original longitudinal data set, we show that Palestinian villages in Israel more severely impacted by the 1948 war have a much higher vote share to Jewish parties even 70 years later. Survey evidence further supports our theory, revealing that this pattern exists only for members of the surviving communities, and not among displaced individuals. The findings shed new light on the complex social relations that guide political decision-making in post-war settings and divided societies that suffer from protracted conflicts.

This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding the social consequences of polarization-driven behaviors by conceptualizing them as a moral threat to the self. Our argument employs systemist graphics, illustrating key connections and patterns from two distinct scientific works. First, an analysis of polarization-driven behavior, which reveals Americans’ willingness to trade democratic values for partisan goals. Second, research on moral disengagement strategies, revealing the role of resentment as a coping mechanism in armed conflicts. We offer a synthesis analysis between these two studies and uncover a twofold role of morality in polarization: as a factor in forming partisan animosity and a catalyst in its perpetuation and intensification. We further highlight the role of outgroup hate, rather than ingroup love, in driving negative actions resulting from polarization, and the challenge of reconciling morally-driven conflicts. Our framework sheds new light on the complex interplay between morality and conflicts, with implications for social cohesion, erosion of moral values, and democratic backsliding.

How does living on property taken from others affect voting behavior? Recent studies have argued that benefiting from historical violence leads to support for the far right. We extend this fledgling literature with new theoretical insights and original data from Israel, using case-specific variation in the nature of displacement to uncover heterogeneous treatment effects. Exploiting the coercion during the settlement of Jewish migrants on rural lands following the 1948 war, we show that living on lands taken from Palestinians consistently led to hawkish right-wing voting—even 70 years after the violence occurred and despite the widespread rejection of guilt over that violence. We also show that exposure to the ruins of the displaced villages increased right-wing voting and that the impact of intergroup contact is divergent: it decreased intolerant voting in most villages but increased it among Jewish communities that reside on violently taken land. Our results are robust when matching is used to account for several controls and spatiotemporal dependencies.

This symposium tackles pressing and intellectually challenging questions bringing research on affect and emotions in the examination of policy dynamics. What does it mean to have affective processes intertwined in policymaking processes? How do affective processes increase or decrease policy value, or shape chances to pursue particular policy opportunities, and to achieve policy success or failure? Where do policy-relevant emotions come from? How do we measure them? How do we utilize and manage them? What happens when we misunderstand or ignore them?

On 7 July 1550 a council of fourteen leading theologians and jurists convened by the King of Spain met in Valladolid ostensibly to discuss ‘by what manner and under what laws our Holy Catholic Faith should be preached and promulgated’. In effect, however, they met to discuss the justice of the conquest of the New World and the subjection of its inhabitants. This was the apex of a debate that had started much earlier, stirred by reports of massacres, enslavement, cruelty and pillage by Spanish soldiers and settlers in the Americas. The proximate trigger of the Valladolid meeting was, however, the controversy surrounding Sepúlveda’s provocative book, Democrates secundus, which now sees its first complete translation into English. This impressive scholarly edition includes translations of three additional texts: Sepúlveda’s Apologia, in which he defends the publication of his controversial dialogue, a text published without license by Sepúlveda’s nemesis, Bartolomé de las Casas, containing a summary of the proceedings at Valladolid; Sepúlveda’s and Las Casas’ responses to each other’s arguments; and a text titled Outrageous, Scandalous, Heretical Notions, Sepúlveda’s final counterattack, in which he tried unsuccessfully to provoke inquisitorial action against Las Casas.