Our recent article published in Politics takes a rhetorical approach to understanding the politics of Donald J. Trump’s presidency by analyzing his “rhetorical signature” as it appeared in his 2015 speech announcing his entry into the presidential race. This announcement speech foreshadowed much of the more controversial elements of his presidency. Specifically, we emphasize Trump’s use of metaphor. Classical definitions of metaphor define it in terms of argumentative strategy or by its use as example, but more broadly, metaphors structure larger national understanding of political events. The metaphors presidents use to discuss the institution itself or issues like immigration exert great definitional power. In the case of President Trump, we identify two interlinked metaphors that animate his rhetoric: the “CEO presidency” and his promise to “build a wall.”

In the first metaphor we identify, Trump puts the U.S. presidency in terms more familiar to him: running a business. We analyze various examples of how Trump simplifies complex issues into “making a deal.” Trump presents his own ability to accumulate wealth through smart business decisions and his deal-making prowess as allowing him to defeat everything from ISIS to China, all positioned as rival businesses to the United States. Trump thus inverts his political inexperience into a strength through his re-definition of the presidency as a business in need of better management.

If making good deals is the goal of the CEO president, then building a wall is Trump’s signature deal. As he promised mere minutes in to his announcement speech, Trump may actually seek to build a literal barrier on the border, but we argue that the wall is also a metaphor for both foreign policy and immigration. It represents an isolationist stance of protecting the country from foreign threats and defines immigration policy in terms of stopping a dangerous flow of apparently undesirable immigrants. Trump’s comments on the wall position it as a trade deal with Mexico, which is not sending “the right people.” Building a wall both metaphorically stops the undesirable immigrants and allows Trump to negotiate with Mexico for “better” immigrants. Through the dual metaphors of the CEO presidency and building a wall, the humanity of immigrants is lost entirely and the racial dimensions of that discourse are masked by business terminology. By taking seriously the rhetorical and material consequences of Trump’s metaphors, we draw out their implications for the ways Trump defines the U.S. presidency and its policy requirements.

When in the 2009 European Parliament election, the Swedish Pirate Party received an unprecedented 7.1 per cent of the votes, many people saw ,piracyʻ as one of the new hopes of future party politics. However, in the intervening ten-plus years, the Swedish Party was unable to repeat its election success in any other election, whilst the German Pirates lost not only their representation in the European parliament but also their representation in German Land parliaments. With the exception of the continued success of the Pirates in Iceland, and a sudden rise of the Pirates in Luxembourg, there is evident deterioration of this party family.

Compare, then, the Czech 2017 parliamentary election, where the Pirates gained 10.8 per cent of the vote and became the country’s third strongest party. Following this unprecedented success, the Czech Pirates increased their voter support in the 2019 European Parliament election (14.0 per cent). Does their success – and specifically, how they chose to mobilize their preferred type of voters, or how they identified the ideological space in which they found their voters – serve as a “model” for other pirate parties?

In my recent article published in Politics, I test the most important factors explaining variation of the Pirates’ support across the Czech Republic (among more than six thousand Czech municipalities). I ask whether the success of the Czech Pirates in some regions resulted in a transformation of geographical patterns of Czech voting behaviour (for discussion of the spatial patterns of support for the Czech parties, see here and here), and whether the Pirates were able to succeed more in traditionally leftist or  rightist regions – or, in contrast, whether their spatial support transcends the left-right model of political competition which had dominated Czech electoral competition since the 1990s.

My findings show that the determinants of the Czech Pirates’ success were not completely consistent with voting for pirate parties elsewhere in Europe. First, we confirmed the expected strong effect of the youngest population (18–24) on success of the Pirates but, at the same time, we also found a positive (although weaker) association between pirate voting and population aged 35–44. As such, the results indicate that the success of the Czech Pirates was not limited to municipalities with the youngest populations and the negative effect of age only existed for the age of 65+.

Second, higher Pirate vote shares in larger municipalities can be linked to the fact that in contrast to Western Europe, larger (and especially the largest) Czech cities comprise long-term strongholds of rightist parties and simultaneously exhibit characteristically high education and low unemployment levels. Furthermore, the negative effect of more leftist electorates on voting for the Pirates, together with higher support in municipalities with more educated populations and lower unemployment suggest an increasing influence of socio-economic indicators on the party’s success. Finally, the Pirates received much fewer votes in areas with stronger Catholic populations, which can be associated with the more liberal views of the Pirates on a number of traditional issues.

Generally, we can conclude that Pirates were more successful in more developed areas (or areas of high development potential) than in structurally disadvantaged regions. This confirms also fact that geographical support for the Pirates was relatively strongly associated with regions and municipalities with previously high support for the right-wing parties, in contrast to negative overlap of the Pirates’ support with a block of left-wing parties.

The Czech example demonstrates that it is the specific situation in a country, namely general dissatisfaction with established parties, that motivates voters to look for alternatives. However, the Pirates can only become that alternative if their programme rises above the “ghetto” of cyber parties – as also shown in the case of the Czech Pirates, who assigned only a minor role to typical “pirate” topics in their broadly conceived programme. Their focus on large cities, mostly strongholds of right-wing parties in the post-1990 Czech context, explains why they differ from most of their foreign colleagues on the right-left axis as well.

When deciding whom to support, voters can be influenced by various factors, including personal characteristics of candidates. While political behaviour scholars seem to have reached a consensus on the so-called personalization of politics, with the profiles of leaders and candidates playing an increasingly important role in citizens’ voting behaviour, little is known about which candidate characteristics voters rely on most when choosing which candidate to vote for and how different candidate characteristics compare in the strength of their effect on party choice.

Relying on Finnish election study data from 2015, in our recent article in Politics we compare which emphasis voters place on candidate sociodemographic profile, competence and experience, issue positions, and party affiliation when deciding whom to vote for. In an open-list PR system with mandatory preferential voting such as the Finnish system, voters are faced a challenging task; in order to vote they need to choose a single candidate out of many candidates, and the amount of political information is overwhelming. Under such circumstances, voters are expected to rely on simple voting cues when making their vote choice.

The analyses show that Finnish voters argue to be most influenced by candidate characteristics containing the most direct politically relevant information when deciding which candidate to support. Candidate party affiliation is the most emphasised characteristic, but candidate issue positions also play a major role. By contrast, candidate sociodemographic characteristics have, according to voters themselves, little relevance when they decide whom to support. We also find that the extent to which candidate characteristics matter differs depending on voters’ levels of political sophistication (measured by voters’ political knowledge, political interest and media exposure). Voters who are politically sophisticated are more likely to find both characteristics that are easy to ascertain and more complex candidate characteristics important when deciding whom to support compared with those who are not politically sophisticated. Sophisticated voters thus seem to consider a wider variety of candidate characteristics when deciding whom to support. When investigating the relative impact of each candidate characteristic (that is, their impact relative to the other candidate characteristics) on voting behaviour, a different pattern occurs. Political sophistication decreases the likelihood of finding sociodemographic characteristics important but increases the likelihood of saying that political competence and experience as well as policy issues matter.

In sum then, we can conclude that in a highly candidate-centred and complex political context such as Finland, it is (still) – according to the voters themselves – candidate party affiliation that matters most when they decide whom to support. As such, the current research adds to the empirical study on the personalization of politics and somewhat challenges the claim of the (growing) importance of personal qualities and characteristics, as it suggests that it is (still) parties and candidate party affiliation that play the most important role for voters – at least when they explain their own voting behaviour.

While the past few decades have seen a global expansion of democracy, more recently many academic studies have warned of democratic backsliding. In some cases, seemingly consolidated democracies have begun to resemble authoritarian regimes, while elsewhere liberal democratic institutions such as freedom of the press have been systematically undermined.

Academics, policymakers, journalists and a range of other actors often use indices to measure the quality of democracy across time and space. Some of these indices have been criticized on methodological grounds for apparent political bias and/or a lack of transparency. Due to these well-known limitations, academic studies of the quality of democracy increasingly rely on indices derived from expert assessments—that is, the judgments of other academics, journalists, and political practitioners.

How reliable are experts when it comes to assessing the quality of democracy? Although indices based on expert assessments represent an improvement over previous measures, they are based on the assumption that expert judgments are objective and accurate. However, we show that experts remain vulnerable to errors in reasoning that may impede the impartiality and reliability of their judgments. In particular, we find that expert judgments may be influenced by the very phenomenon that many index users are trying to understand: democratic crises.

In our recent article in Politics, we examine one particular form of expert bias: hindsight bias. Hindsight bias refers to the tendency to retrospectively exaggerate one’s foresight of an event—in this case, a crisis of democracy. We argue that hindsight bias is particularly insidious when applied to retrospective evaluations of democratic crises due to the difficulty of separating our evaluations of the pre-crisis period from the knowledge that a crisis occurred.

Complicating matters further, political memory is often ideologically polarized, as interpretations of past events may be embedded in current political debates that seek to (re)frame past conflicts. Although this sort of ideological bias differs from hindsight bias, the two problems are related. While we cannot alter past events, the way in which these events are (re-)interpreted in the present, and their significance in relation to events that are currently unfolding, is constantly evolving. We suggest that crises of democracy, by their very nature, are particularly vulnerable to shifting/competing interpretations in this way.

When it comes to expert assessments of democratic crises, we find evidence of considerable disagreement. In spite of the fact that their evaluations paint widely different pictures, however, experts remain highly confident in their individual judgments.

We argue that this poses a potential problem for those who use expert surveys to study democratic breakdowns. Our findings suggest that experts’ knowledge of a crisis colours their evaluations, and, more importantly, experts may not be fully aware that this is happening.

On early morning of October 26th, 2002, Russian special forces stormed Dubrovka Threater to free hundreds of civilian hostages captured by Chechen separatists. As a part of this infamous operation, Russians used a gaseous compound – an incapacitating chemical agent – that caused the death of over one hundred hostages. While there are still many unanswered questions left about this tragic incident, it seems clear that a vast majority of fatalities were indeed the result of gas poisoning.

Similar incapacitating chemical agents (ICAs) are often imprecisely grouped together with so-called riot control agents (RCAs) as “non-lethal chemical agents” that, unlike chemicals intended for warfare, should belong to the domain of law enforcement unregulated by the international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). However, tragic events such the Dubrovka hostage incident have contributed to a growing sentiment in international community that these chemicals are much more dangerous for civilians than their name suggests and that rules and norms of the CWC should change to regulate their possession and use by states.

In our new article in Politics, we draw on an adapted theory of the cycle of normative change to track the development of the “non-lethal agents” issue within the CWC. At the beginning, states intending to change the CWC rules concerning these chemicals had a little success with bringing the issue of the agenda, partly due to the general disinterest among relevant actors partly also because other CWC-related issues that sometimes resulted in “non-lethal agents” being sidetracked – such as the events in Syria that “overshadowed” the debate at the Third Review Conference.

However, we also show the factors that have, in time, led to increasing support for norm change among the state parties. The aforementioned Dubrovka incident came as a shock and provided a ground for opening the debate on the issue. An important turn in the discussion was the involvement of Australia as one of the main proponents of stricter regulations and later also the United States, which eventually reconsidered its earlier dismissive position. Nevertheless, what we found particularly intriguing was the change of the framing strategy that provided norm-promoting states with more room for maneuvering and significantly helped them to gather broader support in the CWC. The framing strategy was to newly decouple RCAs and ICAs as two different problems (rather than a single “non-lethal-agent issue”) and focus mainly on the latter of the two. In addition, the ICAs were rebranded as “central nervous system acting chemicals” with more clearly defined scope – a move that significantly increased the level of international support for norm change.

The process that would end up with formal changes of the CWC rules on these contested chemicals is, as of early 2020, far from complete, and there is certainly resistance among some states to proceed further with these changes. If the issue were to be taken forward, the next step should be to follow the recommendations of the Open-Ended Working Group on Future Priorities and launch a policy discussion on formal rule changes concerning “non-lethal agents” in the CWC.

James Scott (1985) wrote that “everyday forms of resistance make no headlines”. Yet, still there are everyday forms of resistance, all those apparently insignificant narratives and acts that stop short of collective defiance but hold sway over the political authority. While tracing contestations of religious neoliberal governmentality under the AKP in Turkey, we interviewed members of the Labor and Justice Platform (LJP), a social-justice oriented grassroots organization that brings together young activists from former Islamist and leftist networks. In a recent article in Politics, we call their actions and discourses the pious dissidence. Notwithstanding their lack of electoral strength, we aimed to show that they still matter: first, they are strong enough to voice an alternative to the AKP; second, to show neoliberalisation cost the AKP its moral claim to stand for the underdog; and third to retain Islamic consciousness amidst the increasing authoritarianism with religious references in Turkey. Hence, what matters is not their numbers, but their courage to harness counter-discourses against the AKP rule imbued with Islamic references.

In order to do this, these young activists problematize the AKP government’s instrumentalization of religious idioms, such as kader (fate), kısmet (destiny), şükür (thankfulness), sabır (steadfastness) in order to shirt the responsibility to a divine being when it fails to deliver. The pious resistance contests the government’s claim over these Islamic references, knowing that this is an attempt to enhance the resilience of the pious subject from within and essentially to contain any contestation of its rule at the outset. Turning to Islamic references to explain political failure aims to prevent the pious subject from questioning AKP’s responsibility for this failure. It seeks to retain this very subject within the politico-religious narrative even when AKP fails to deliver. Eventually, retention does not succeed, but contestation succeeds.

We explain this contestation using the Foucauldian framework while emphasising contestation as an underdeveloped term in this literature. In particular, we outline three areas of dissent. First, group members express a sharp criticism of market Islam or any efforts to mix religion and neoliberal economics. In their critique, they focus on Islamic principles of equality, brotherhood, and labor rights. Second, LJP members challenge political Islam by emphasizing a multiplicity of interpretations of Islam and the need to foreground the liberatory, egalitarian, and justice-based aspects of the religion without adhering to Islam as an ideology. Finally, the group expresses dissent against state-led Islam reflected in AKP’s religious nationalist ideology and corrupt cronyism.

Jeremy Bentham states that “publicity is the very soul of justice”. Accordingly, Bentham established the legal principle of open justice within which legal processes and judiciaries should be characterised by transparency and openness. These aspects include both the transparency of internal processes within the court trials and the openness of the judiciary to communicate rulings to the public.

But, the judiciary is the least visible branch, since courts barely intervene in the public debate, as they want to preserve their neutrality and institutional integrity. So, court decisions are rather unknown to the public and sometimes misinterpreted by journalists. This causes a dilemma, as the public’s trust in courts partly depends on the public’s knowledge of their actions.

Recent scholarly work (for example here, here and here) has shown that courts possess tools which they can enhance the public’s awareness of their actions. Among others, press releases seem to be the most effective. For example, Jeffery Staton has shown that courts use press releases strategically to create public awareness and to put pressure on the political branch. Yet, albeit we know that courts use press releases to communicate their actions, we do not know for which type of ruling they are more likely published. In my recent article published in Politics, I filled this research gap by asking the following research question: Which institutional characteristics determine the publication of press releases by constitutional courts?

My analysis is based on a unique dataset on senate rulings by the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) between 1996 and 2018 (for a repository regarding the data and analysis of the paper, see here). This case selection serves two purposes. First, generalizability, since the FCC is an institutional role model for several courts worldwide and its public relations strategy is comparable to courts that share its institutional traditions. Secondly, importance and relevance, since the FCC is one of the most influential and active apex courts in the world. Methodologically, I have used a logistic regression model with year fixed-effects, because my independent variable – whether a ruling is accompanied by a press release or not – has a binary measurement. The independent variables used in my analysis are measured based on a theoretic concept, which has conceptualised the two open justice principles of transparency and openness.

My results show that the FCC is eager to publish press releases to communicate legal and political conflicts as long as the conflicts are not internal or instances of intra-judicial dissent. Hence, the FCC seems to be eager to open up its adjudication only until the FCC faces situations in which there is either internal dissent or the Court opposes lower courts. The FCC thus seems to be trying to secure the reputation of the entire judiciary on the one hand and its reputation on the other hand.

What should we do when confronted with people whose views we find bizarre and who express their opinions in ways we find wrong? The more polarized our societies become, the more urgent this question appears. While people have always confronted different opinions at workplaces and family dinners, more and more people now find it difficult or intolerable to listen to them. The question is not only how individuals should handle these situations, but how society can uphold the democratic value of inclusion without letting just anything pass.

One solution is to say “enough! I don’t want to hear it anymore!” There are two reasons why this is not the best solution, however. First, it is like putting your head in the sand – just because you will not see what’s bothering you anymore doesn’t mean the issue has disappeared. Second, to choose not to listen is the privilege of the powerful, those who do not depend on others and do not need to hear their views. Perhaps you are one of those, but the problem is: just because you can do something does not mean it’s right.

In a recent article in Politics, I defend a different solution: the principle of responding reflectively. This principle means asking ourselves if another person’s violation of basic norms of respect, sincerity, and public mindedness could have been justified under present circumstances, even if we would normally say it was wrong.

This principle is intuitive: when someone says or does something hurtful or wrong, reflective persons ask themselves: why did this person act this way? Was there something I had done? Had I failed to listen? Many times, there might not have been anything we did that made us deserve being treated disrespectfully. But the rule of thumb is: it takes two to tango.

Now, the question is what it would mean to apply the same principle to a whole society. In what sense can a society be reflective? When some person or group violates basic norms, a reflective society does not immediately condemn the action, even if the action appears wrong. Instead, the violation initiates a process of collective reflection. Perhaps there was no other way to make oneself heard than to break norms one would otherwise respect?

As individuals, we can imagine various situations where it seems appropriate to break basic social norms: when a person is in danger, when someone is harming another person, or when people refuse to listen to anyone outside their group. In such cases, it seems justified to act in ways that might normally seem impolite.

For society, the reflective principle demands asking whether the way things work – who gets to speak and how, who gets to decide, and who are systematically excluded from important discussions – may justify breaking the norms that they would otherwise respect. A classic example is civil disobedience. While it seems extreme under normal circumstances, it appears less so when used to protest against wars and the killing of innocent people. It is by breaking norms that civil disobedience forces society to reflect on its failure to live up to democratic and humanitarian values.

The reflective principle does not mean that all violations of basic norms are justified. Not all cases are like the civil disobedience of peace activists. Sometimes people get aggressive or refuse to listen just because others disagree. While we may have a moral obligation to listen to other members of society, we have the right, of course, to find their views wrong and shameful.

The reflective principle makes it possible to get closer to an ideal society where no one would be justified to be disrespectful, insincere, or selfish. To get closer to that ideal, we may need to change how the media works, the education system, or how political parties operate. The reflective principle helps pointing us to various societal and systemic problems and allows us to correct them. And in some cases, it gives us a more well-founded reason to say that this person here was neither right nor justified to be disrespectful.

During the ideologically heated stage of the Cold War and at the peak of the decolonisation process, UNESCO (the United Nations, Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) turned to cinema to provide a reimagining of world affairs in the post-World War II world. In 1959, UNESCO, together with the British Film Institute, published a catalogue of films produced in UNECO’s Eastern Member States titled Orient. A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture. The aim of the catalogue was to “stimulate the presentation of films which might give audiences in the West a fuller and more informed idea of the ways of life of Eastern peoples”.

Rather unexpectedly, the Orient catalogue introduced Eastern cultures to the West through an emphasis on cultural differences. The catalogue provided a seven-point list of general characteristics of Eastern cinema derived from the films in the catalogue to distinguish it from its Western counterpart. In a recent article in Politics, I examine the way that the list covered a wide array of social phenomena ranging from the way love and sex are treated to the role of music in the films and from the attributes of the standard female character to representations of violence.

The catalogue’s list of seven general characteristics of Eastern cinema thus seem like an attempt to provide ready-made interpretations of the essential characteristics of the Eastern world. However, it is impossible to determine for certain whether constructing the East as a single distinguishable cultural system was a conscious aim of the Orient project, even though that is what they ended up doing in practice. Through the act of constructing the East in this manner, the catalogue not only attempted to explain what the films tell of the East, but also to change the world through enhancing intercultural understanding. Interestingly, it created a problem in doing so: The differences were presented as obstacles to this aim.

More importantly, the catalogue positioned the alleged East-West dichotomy primarily as a question of differences articulated on cultural grounds. The catalogue’s proposed way of structuring the world, therefore, was one where the world order constructed upon the Cold War and post-colonial polarisations gave way to the primacy of the cultural aspect of world politics. The differences thus became an instrument for a cultural intervention in geopolitics through the catalogue’s reconstruction of Cold War political reality. UNESCO’s Orient catalogue therefore comes across as a radical reimagining of political realities constructed on a cultural basis and given a concrete form through cinema.