A book review, Victor Moraru, La République de Moldova: les enjeux du passé, du présent et de l‛avenir. 2nd revised edition (Chisinau: Tipografia Sirius, 2022)
Recent developments suggest a strong relationship between social media use and political engagement and raise questions about the potential for social media to help stem or even reverse patterns of ...political inequality that have troubled scholars for years. In this paper, we articulate a model of social media and political engagement among young people, and test it using data from representative samples of young people in Australia, the USA, and the UK. Our results suggest a strong, positive relationship between social media use and political engagement among young people across all three countries, and provide additional insights regarding the role played by social media use in the processes by which young people become politically engaged. Notably, our results also provide reasons to be optimistic concerning the overall influence of this popular new form of digital media on longstanding patterns of political inequality.
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American political development (APD) is a distinctive field of research that should not be conflated with, or flattened into a caricature of, historical research that uses historical data to make ...flawed causal inferences. It is a problem-driven inquiry into the dynamics of American politics, a substantive and theoretical exploration of how American politics has changed over time. APD research uses diverse types of data from a wide range of sources and employs multiple methodologies and analytical approaches, as appropriate. Because APD is a substantive and theoretical inquiry and not a method per se, there is no a priori reason to think that design-based causal inference cannot play a valuable role in studies of America’s political development, just as advanced quantitative methods have. However, while APD research does often seek to explain outcomes and establish causal relationships, that is not its only goal, and its orientation toward causality, causes, and theory tends to differ from much of the work in the causal inference tradition. This essay endeavors to clear up some of the confusion by offering the author’s perspective on what APD does well and how it does it. It also suggests how experimental research and APD research might be brought into more fruitful intellectual exchange and concludes with some thoughts on the value of methodological and intellectual pluralism.
Game theoretic analyses of American institutions and American political development largely are disconnected enterprises, yet they share many points of contact and thus opportunities for fruitful ...exchange. In this essay I discuss the value and limits of formalization for the enterprise of institutional analysis that those fields have in common. I conceptualize two broad approaches that formal modelers have taken to study institutions—institutions as game forms, and institutions as equilibria—that have been relatively successful for understanding institutional choice and stability. At the same time, formal modelers have been less successful in addressing institutional change and development, topics about which APD has much to offer. Overall, I contend that crosstalk between the two fields can benefit them both.
Preferences over jurisdictional architecture are the product of three irreducible
logics: efficiency, distribution and identity. This article substantiates the
following claims: (a) European ...integration has become politicized in elections
and referendums; (b) as a result, the preferences of the general public and of
national political parties have become decisive for jurisdictional outcomes; (c)
identity is critical in shaping contestation on Europe.
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The 2014–2019 European Parliament (EP) contained an unprecedented number of Eurosceptic Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). These changes reflected a growing politicisation of European ...integration in which conflicts between those opposing the process and those favouring it became more pronounced. Using a unique time series of surveys of the European parliamentarians, we examine how far the policy preferences of the MEPs responded to this politicisation. MEPs' preferences over general policy questions as well as European Union (EU)‐specific issues have traditionally been described by a multi‐dimensional space: with a left‐right dimension, incorporating both economic and socio‐cultural issues, distinct from a pro‐/anti‐Europe dimension. We find that the political space in the EP evolved in the 2014–2019 parliament, with MEPs' preferences more strongly aligned along a single dimension, which captures economic, socio‐cultural, and EU integration issues.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Kelemen and McNamara (2022) have reinvigorated the debate on European state-building. Adopting a 'bellicist' perspective, they argue that the European Union is 'incomplete, uneven, and dysfunctional' ...due to the historical lack of an existential military threat. We take issue with this claim. War, in our view, is not a necessary condition for European political development, and 'transboundary crisis' acts as its modern-day functional equivalent. Whether a polity can uphold its provision of public goods in the face of such crises, and whether it does so more effectively than its competitors on the 'market for governance', decisively affects its further development. European integration, too, has progressed substantively in response to recent non-military threats. We demonstrate this on the Euro and Covid-19 crises, in which the EU has engaged in incremental and issue-specific capacity-building aimed at preserving and consolidating the regulatory state rather than approximating the Westphalian nation-state. The resulting capacity-building shores up the EU's crisis prevention and crisis management capacities, without overcoming its fundamental regulatory nature. It is misleading to dismiss the resulting political development from a bellicist perspective that takes the nation-state as its implicit point of comparison.
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The aim of the article was to determine the role of the missionary activity of the Russian Orthodox Church in the context of its historical-political development. The methodological basis of the ...study meant a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach using systemic, civilizational, historical-chronological and structural-functional methods, as well as the method of comparative analysis and institutional approach. The results obtained allow us to conclude that, in the modern world, the Russian Orthodox Church has been noted for its active participation in missionary activity, which has also set itself the goal of spreading the ideas of the ‘Slavic’ or ‘Russian world’ among the peoples of Asia and Africa. The spiritual values preached through the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church, taking into account its contribution to the Russian state and culture, are gradually becoming the basis for popularizing the Russian national idea, which is dialectically positioning itself as the main civilizational vector of the international policies of the Russian Federation. Thus, the Russian Orthodox Church has a rather strong influence on the formation of the image of the Russian Federation in the eyes of the world community, this is so, in part, due to its spiritual missions.
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